We’re excited to announce our ninth round of speakers! If you missed any of our other speaker announcements, you can find them here: Round One, Round Two, Round Three, Round Four, Round Five, Round Six, Round Seven, and Round Eight.
And now, our ninth round of speakers:
Miina Sikk
Miina is an engineer focused on WordPress. She has been working with WordPress since 2009 and over that time she has done some freelancing, been part of a few startups and is now proudly serving at XWP.
Gary Pendergast
Gary is a WordPress, web and music geek who writes poetry with Automattic. He likes making large architectural changes to WordPress Core, completely unnoticed. He can be observed in his natural habitat at pento.net, or usually in Melbourne, Australia.
Molly Wright Steenson
Molly Wright Steenson is a designer, author, professor, and international speaker whose work focuses on the intersection of design, architecture, and artificial intelligence. She is the Senior Associate Dean for Research in the College of Fine Arts, the K&L Gates Associate Professor of Ethics and Computational Technologies at Carnegie Mellon University and an associate professor in the School of Design (with a courtesy appointment in the School of Architecture). Steenson is the author of Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape (MIT Press, 2017), which tells the radical history of AI’s impact on design and architecture, and the forthcoming book Bauhaus Futures (MIT Press, expected 2019), co-edited with Laura Forlano & Mike Ananny. A web pioneer since 1994, she’s worked at groundbreaking design studios, consultancies, and Fortune 500 companies. She holds a PhD in Architecture from Princeton University, a Master’s in Environmental Design (architectural history) from Yale School of Architecture, and a BA in German from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with honors and distinction.
From 2013–15, Molly was an assistant professor in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she taught data visualization, digital studies, and communications courses, and led Mellon-funded research projects in the digital humanities. She was a professor at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Ivrea, Italy in 2003–04, where she led the Connected Communities research group, and an adjunct professor at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in the Media Design Practices Program from 2010–12.
She has worked with companies including Reuters, Scient, Netscape, and Razorfish. She cofounded Maxi, an award-winning women’s webzine, in the 90s. As a design researcher, she examines the effect of personal technology on its users, including projects in India and China for Microsoft Research and ReD Associates/Intel Research.
Matt Mullenweg
Matt Mullenweg is the co-founder of the open-source blogging platform, WordPress, the most popular publishing platform on the web, and the founder & CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, and Jetpack. Additionally, Matt runs Audrey Capital, an investment and research company.
He has been recognized for his leadership and success by Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, Inc Magazine, TechCrunch, Fortune, Fast Company, Wired, University Philosophical Society, and Vanity Fair.
Matt is originally from Houston, Texas, where he attended the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts and studied jazz saxophone. In his spare time, Matt is an avid photographer. Matt splits time between Houston, New York, and San Francisco.
Check back soon for session listings and the full schedule! While you’re at it, purchase a ticket to WCUS if you haven’t already.
Wow. Am going to be missing a lot. Very painful that my visa appointment can’t meet up with the event. All the best. I must not miss next year sordcamp. Please keep me up to date against 2019. WordPress forever.