2009 Conference Recap
Speakers
We invite the world's leading creative visionaries to share pragmatic, real-world insights on how you can put your ideas into action.!
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Michael Bierut
Partner
Pentagram
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Speaker Bio Michael Bierut
Partner
Pentagram
Michael Bierut was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1957, and studied graphic design at the University of Cincinnati's College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning, graduating summa cum laude in 1980. Prior to joining Pentagram in 1990 as a partner in the firm's New York office, he worked for ten years at Vignelli Associates, ultimately as vice president of graphic design.
His clients at Pentagram have included The New York Times, Saks Fifth Avenue, The Council of Fashion Designers of America, Harley-Davidson, The Minnesota Children's Museum, The William Jefferson Clinton Foundation, Mohawk Paper Mills, the New York Jets, Princeton University, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the Morgan Library and Museum.
He has won hundreds of design awards and his work is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Montreal. He has served as president of the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) from 1988 to 1990 and is president emeritus of AIGA National. He also serves as on the boards of the Architectural League of New York and New Yorkers for Parks. Michael was elected to the Alliance Graphique Internationale in 1989, to the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 2003, and was awarded the profession's highest honor, the AIGA Medal, in 2006. This year, he was named winner in the Design Mind category of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards.
Michael is a Senior Critic in Graphic Design at the Yale School of Art, and a Senior Faculty Fellow at the Yale School of Management. He writes frequently about design and is the co-editor of the five-volume series Looking Closer: Critical Writings on Graphic published by Allworth Press. His commentaries about graphic design in everyday life have been heard nationally on the Public Radio International program Studio 360 and his appearance in Helvetica: A Documentary Film is considered by many that movie's funniest moment. Michael is a co-founder of the weblog DesignObserver.com, and his book 79 Short Essays on Design was published in 2007 by Princeton Architectural Press.
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Jill Greenberg
President
Jill Greenberg Studio
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Speaker Bio Jill Greenberg
President
Jill Greenberg Studio
Born in July of 1967 in Montreal, Canada, and grew up in a suburb of Detroit. Jill was based in NYC until 2000 and now resides in Los Angeles with her husband and 2 young children.
Since the age of 10, Greenberg has staged photographs and created characters using the mediums of drawing, painting, sculpture, film, and photography. Greenberg's notable success with gallery and museum shows, book, publishing, commercial and editorial photography displays her unique perspective with a clear voice, which is apparent through her distinctive lighting and personally executed postproduction. Greenberg is known worldwide for her uniquely human animal portraits. Her second monograph Bear Portraits is due out in the fall of '09 with Little, Brown and Company.
Her series, End Times, combines beautiful, poignant imagery, impeccable executed, with both political and personal relevance. Greenberg's subject is taboo: children in pain. She utilizes the uncomfortable images to break through the pop mainstream and participate in a growing national dialogue of the real dangers facing this country and world. Greenberg's images are sharp, saturated, stunning, and quirky, her work is soaked with realism and imagination, which hits a national nerve.
For the series, Monkey Portraits, Greenberg created a series of monkey portraits and asks us to consider our history in evolution. We look into her monkey's expressions and see ourselves in their peculiar physiognomy. She mischievously holds up a mirror where we confront an ancient and distorted reflection, a startling spectacle leaving us feeling disorientated, but exhilarated. By intentionally anthropomorphizing her monkeys, we can't help but identity with their gaze; we are minded of people and expressions that we have seen before.
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Robert Hammond
Co-Founder & President
Friends of the High Line
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Speaker Bio Robert Hammond
Co-Founder & President
Friends of the High Line
Robert Hammond is a Co-Founder and President of Friends of the High Line. His organization bought the High Line, a 1.5-mile-long disused elevated rail structure on Manhattan's West Side, from the brink of demolition, in 1999, to the start of construction, in 2006, on its conversion to a public park. The organization has raised over $150 million, and the first phase of the park is scheduled to open in 2008.
Mr. Hammond has worked as a consultant for a variety of entrepreneurial endeavors and non-profits, including the Times Square Alliance, Alliance for the Arts and National Cooperative Bank (NCB).
As a founding team member and then as a board member, Mr. Hammond helped to launch thebody.com, the largest online HIV/AIDS information resource in 1996. Thebody.com achieved profitability three years after its launch and remains one of the few consistently profitable health-related Web sites. In 1994 he helped launch and subsequently sell an in-hotel catalog company.
Mr. Hammond is also a self-taught artist. With work in private and corporate collections, his work can be seen publicly in the lobby of the Ritz Carlton Battery Park, CraftSteak New York and Craft Dallas. From 2002 to 2005 he served as an Ex-Officio Trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Mr. Hammond holds a graduated with Honors in History from Princeton University. Born and raised in San Antonio, TX he has lived in the West Village since 1994.
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Scott Thomas
Design Director of New Media
Obama for America
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Speaker Bio Scott Thomas
Design Director of New Media
Obama for America
Scott Thomas is constantly seeking the simplest answer to complex problems. Scott began his design pursuits studying architecture before bouncing to graphic design and web development.
Prior to moving to Chicago, where he set his sights on user-experience design, Scott called London's Shoreditch home. From products to websites, Scott works to simplify the experience of use.
In 2006, he and five other creative types began a design collective, lovingly known as The Post Family. The group is devoted to supporting "family" member's design habits-from silkscreen to letterpress, from illustration to blogging-in an effort to "get back to the hand."
In 2007, Scott's career took a dramatic leap when he was invited to join the New Media team at Obama for America. The chance encounter led Scott to becoming the Design Director of the historic Obama Presidential campaign. He is currently writing a book that explains how an obscure senator rose to the highest office in the land and celebrity status with the aid of branding and design.
Scott plans to continue designing for social causes that might just someday change the world.
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Seth Godin
Author & Entrepreneur
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Speaker Bio Seth Godin
Author & Entrepreneur
Seth Godin is the author of 17 books that have been bestsellers around the world and have been translated into more than 35 languages. He writes about the post-industrial revolution, the way ideas spread, marketing, quitting, leadership and most of all, changing everything. You might be familiar with his books Linchpin, Tribes, The Dip, and Purple Cow. In addition to his writing and speaking, Seth is founder of squidoo.com, a fast growing, easy to use website. His blog (which you can find by typing "seth" into Google) is one of the most popular in the world. Before his work as a writer and blogger, Godin was Vice President of Direct Marketing at Yahoo!, a job he got after selling them his pioneering 1990s online startup, Yoyodyne. In 2013, Godin was inducted into the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame, one of three chosen for this honor.
Watch the 99U talk
Innovation
Seth Godin: Quieting the Lizard Brain
Bestselling author Seth Godin argues that we must quiet our fearful “lizard brains” to avoid sabotaging projects just before we finally finish them.
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Ji Lee
Creative Director
Google Creative Lab
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Speaker Bio Ji Lee
Creative Director
Google Creative Lab
Born in Seoul, Korea, and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, Ji Lee studied design at Parsons School of Design. He currently works as the Creative Director at Google Creative Lab in New York and teaches design at School of Visual Arts. In the past, Lee has worked as the branding director at Droga5 and art director at Saatchi & Saatchi.
Ji Lee is the founder of the widely publicized Bubble Project and the author of two books: Talk Back: The Bubble Project and Univers Revolved: a 3-Dimensional Alphabet.
Lee has given numerous lectures including Harvard University, MIT and MoMA. Lee's work has appeared in ABC World News, The New York Times, Newsweek, The Guardian, Wired among others.
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Jeffrey Kalmikoff
Chief Creative Officer
Threadless
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Speaker Bio Jeffrey Kalmikoff
Chief Creative Officer
Threadless
I'm your average 29-year-old tattooed metal-head with an eye for design and nose for tomfoolery. The focus of my work as partner and chief creative officer for the Chicago-based, community-business-centric skinnyCorp is design and strategy for their numerous community-based web projects. These projects range in scale from Threadless, a multi-million dollar tee shirt business and ongoing open-call for tee shirt design submissions which sells more than 100,000 tees per month and has over 900,000 registered users, to YayHooray, an invite-only, just-for-fun design and technology community site with only a few thousand members. My work has been published numerous times, and I've had the pleasure of speaking all over the world from MIT to the University of Copenhagen to CNN and NPR.
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Jake Nickell
Chief Strategy Officer
Threadless
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Speaker Bio Jake Nickell
Chief Strategy Officer
Threadless
Jake Nickell is a young, entrepreneurial mad man that programs community websites non-stop. He is the founder and CSO of skinnyCorp and Threadless.com, along with countless other side projects.
Jake dreamed up the Threadless concept in 2000 after winning a tee shirt design contest on a short-lived online design forum. The idea of sharing designs and opening them up for fellow artists' critiques appealed to him; he thought Threadless would be a way to give back to the community by creating actual goods out of the submitted designs.
He lead the growth of Threadless, which has culminated in more than 900,000 online users and two physical retail stores in Chicago, and has a number of other projects in the works.
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Jason Randal
Theorist on Developing Expertise
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Speaker Bio Jason Randal
Theorist on Developing Expertise
Jason Randal is a renowned entertainer and speaker to Fortune 500 companies who has developed strategies to accomplish extraordinary results in shockingly record time.
Randal holds a PhD in social psychology, is a member of MENSA (the high IQ society), plays and writes for five musical instruments, and has recorded six original CDs. He works in three languages, has published numerous magazine articles and three books including Magic For Professionals and The Psychology of Deception. Randal is a board certified master hypnotherapist, a licensed locksmith, a NAUI master scuba instructor, a licensed special effects technician, and a master certified flight instructor for both airplanes and helicopters. He flies his own turbo twin Aerostar and Enstrom helicopter.
Randal, a seventh degree black belt master in karate instructed six years for the Chuck Norris karate schools, and 3 years as a drill sergeant and hand to hand combat instructor for the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department. For ten years Jason was a technical advisor and stuntman in Hollywood working on projects such as the CHiPS television series, and in 11 films including Officer and a Gentleman, Tequila Sunrise, and Pretty Woman. He extensively trained such stars as Richard Gere, Lou Gossette, Tom Cruise, William Shatner and Mel Gibson.
A licensed general contractor, Randal designed and built his own unique granite home. He lives on a 200-acre ranch outside of Yosemite National Park in California.
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Cheryl Dorsey
President
Echoing Green
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Speaker Bio Cheryl Dorsey
President
Echoing Green
An accomplished social entrepreneur with expertise in health care, labor issues, and public policy, Cheryl Dorsey was named President of Echoing Green in May 2002. She is the first Echoing Green Fellow to lead this global nonprofit, which has awarded more than $27 million in start-up capital to over 450 social entrepreneurs worldwide since 1987.
Dorsey received her education at Harvard-Radcliffe Colleges where she earned a degree in history and science in 1985. In 1992, while training to be a pediatrician at Harvard Medical School, she received an Echoing Green Fellowship. With it, she launched the Family Van, a community-based mobile health unit that provides basic health care and outreach services to at-risk residents of inner-city Boston neighborhoods.
As a public policy innovator, Cheryl served as a White House Fellow from 1997-1998, serving as Special Assistant to the U.S. Secretary of Labor, advising the Clinton Administration on health care and other issues. She was later named Special Assistant to the Director of the Women's Bureau of the U.S. Labor Department, where she helped develop family-friendly workplace policies and spearheaded the labor secretary's pay equity initiative.
Cheryl serves on the board of the Coro New York Leadership Center, City Year (national), DonorsChoose.org, and Freelancers Insurance Company, Inc., a for-profit insurance company and subsidiary of Working Today. She also serves as an advisory board member of the Action Tank for Social Entrepreneurs, America Forward, and the Lex Mundi Pro Bono Foundation. Dorsey is a 2006 Henry Crown Fellow through the Aspen Institute, a 2007 Prime Mover Fellow through the Hunt Alternatives Fund, and a member of the John F. Kennedy School of Government's Visiting Committee.
Cheryl has received numerous awards and honors for her commitment to public service, including the Pfizer Roerig History of Medicine Award, the Robert Kennedy Distinguished Public Service Award and the Manuel C. Carballo Memorial Prize. She holds a B.A. in History and Science from Harvard-Radcliffe Colleges, an M.D. from the Harvard Medical School and an M.P.P. from the John F. Kennedy School of Government. She writes and speaks widely on minority affairs, social justice, social entrepreneurship, and maternal and child health issues.
