PLAYfest 2021: Two Days of Wonder 1 Speaker Schedule

Session 1: Joy

Damian Kulash DJ Kurs Damian Kulash, Jr. is an artist, musician, filmmaker, and the David “DJ” Kurs is a theatrical and video producer who frontman for the polymath rock group OK Go. He’s directed became the second Artistic Director in the thirty-year history the band’s long string of boundary-pushing music videos, of Deaf West Theatre in 2012. Prior to that, he served as an racking up more than 300 million views online. They’ve associate producer and ASL master on Deaf West danced in zero gravity and on treadmills, they’ve built a productions. He has since produced numerous shows for warehouse-sized machine to run in sync with Deaf West Theatre, including "Spring Awakening" which a song, and they’ve choreographed hundreds of explosions enjoyed a highly acclaimed twenty-week run (NY Times filmed in just a few seconds. Damian has received the Critic's Pick) on Broadway and earned three Tony Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award for Visual Art, a nominations. Grammy, three MTV VMA’s, twenty-one Cannes Lions, three A recognized leader on the push for inclusion in the arts, he Webby Awards, and has had his work presented at The has spoken at the Berkeley Forum and has served as a Guggenheim, MoCA, LACMA, The Hirschhorn, The Hammer featured panelist and speaker at countless conferences and Museum, and Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture. events around the world. He has been recognized by Damian graduated magna cum laude from Brown University numerous organizations such as the California Association of in 1998. He’s written for The New York Times, The Wall Street the Deaf and served as a lead committee member of NEA's Journal, The Washington Post, and Rolling Stone, and National Roundtable on Creating Opportunities for Deaf testified before the US Congress in support of Net Neutrality. Theater Artists and the Deaf Theater Action Project in He serenaded Barack Obama at his 50th birthday party, collaboration with Emerson College. appeared on the Simpsons, and Animal from The Muppets once played the drums in his garage. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Helen Leigh Jess Turgeon Helen Leigh is a creative technologist who specializes in Jess Turgeon is the director of experience at Minnesota music technologies, craft-based electronics and education. Children’s Museum. With more than 20 years of museum Leigh designs and makes musical instruments, from experience and an MBA from Carlson School of Management, interactive art installations to mainstream commercial Jess has spent her career focused on serving the visitors and products. Helen also writes things, including the books Music creating excellent visitor experiences. Responsible for the Tech Hacking and The Crafty Kid’s Guide to DIY Electronics, as “fun” part of the museum, Jess oversees the creation and well as a regular column for Make Magazine. She has lectured implementation of exhibits and programs at the museum. in London and Berlin at the graduate and postgraduate level She is passionate about providing delightful, educational on physical computing, electronics, music technology and experiences for children and families. play.

John Goodwin Sarah Fornace John Goodwin joined the LEGO Foundation as CEO in April Sarah Fornace (Co-Artistic Director) is a director, puppeteer, 2017 to pursue a career where he could combine his business choreographer, and narrative designer based in Chicago. She skills with his passion for philanthropy and driving positive is a co-Artistic Director of Manual Cinema. Outside of Manual social impact. Cinema, Sarah has worked as a performer or choreographer with Redmoon Theatre, Lookingglass Theatre Company, The LEGO Foundation is dedicated to influencing parents, Court Theatre, Steppenwolf Garage, and Blair Thomas and Co. teachers and policy makers to adopt learning through play as the most powerful means for children to acquire the broad Recently, Sarah wrote the story mode for the video game suite of skills needed to thrive in today’s world – and to Rivals of Aether. In 2017, she directed and edited the first provide the evidence and advocacy to support it. episode of the web series, The Doula is IN. In 2016, she directed and devised an "animotion" production of Mr Goodwin holds a 1St class degree in Mathematical Shakespeare's Hamlet with Rokoko Studiosfor HamletScen at Engineering from the University of Loughborough and is a Kromborg Castle in Elsinore, Denmark. Fellow of the Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. (www.manualcinema.com) He resides in York, England and is married to Elizabeth Goodwin, a former primary school teacher, with whom he has three grown children. PLAYfest 2021: Two Days of Wonder 2 Speaker Schedule

Session 2: Whimsy

George Matsumoto Jer Thorp As the senior education and research specialist at the Jer Thorp is an artist, writer and teacher living in New York Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, my role involves City. He is best known for designing the algorithm to place several different projects: seminar coordinator, summer the nearly 3,000 names on the 9/11 Memorial in . internship coordinator, distance education, links between the Jer was the New York Times' first Data Artist in Residence, is a research institute and other partners, and other projects that I National Geographic Explorer, and in 2017 and 2018 served as haven’t begun yet. Please see our educational resources page the Innovator in Residence at the Library of Congress. Jer is for links. one of the world's foremost data artists, and is a leading voice for the ethical use of big data. Jer’s book 'Living in Data’ will I am interested in the open ocean and deep sea communities be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the spring of with particular emphasis on invertebrates. Specific areas of 2021. interest include: Ecology and biogeography of open ocean and deep sea organisms; Functional morphology, natural You can find Jer online at jerthorp.com. history, and behavior of pelagic and benthic organisms; Systematics and evolution of ctenophores and cnidarians (molecular phylogeny). I am also very committed towards education.

Katie Mack Kristen Lomasney Dr. Katie Mack is a theoretical astrophysicist exploring a range Kristen Lomasney is very much a "well, sure, why not" sort of of questions in cosmology, the study of the universe from person, which is how she has a master's degree in beginning to end. She is currently an assistant professor of international relations and economics but works in media, physics at North Carolina State University, where she is also a specifically as general manager of Adam Savage's Tested. member of the Leadership in Public Science Cluster. She is Kristen started her career in 1994 as a program assistant at the author of the book "The End of Everything the Council on Foreign Relations (a New York think tank), (Astrophysically Speaking)" and has written for a number of moved to research fellow at The Century Foundation (another popular publications, such as Scientific American, Slate, Sky & think tank), then pivoted to ... part-time copyeditor at Telescope, Time, and Cosmos Magazine, where she is a Discovery.com. Once at , she moved columnist. She can be found on Twitter as @AstroKatie. quickly from copyeditor to executive producer on the digital side, producing the online extensions for such shows as MythBusters, , Man vs. Wild, Monster Garage, and . After more than 15 years at Discovery, she quit and moved from Washington, DC, to , CA, where Adam Savage, former co-host of MythBusters, hired her to manage his own digital media presence, which turned into her current position as general manager of his YouTube channel, Tested

You can find her on Instagram at @krystynlo.

Nadya Peek Shawna Young Nadya Peek develops unconventional digital fabrication tools, Shawna Young is a passionate educator who joined Scratch, small scale automation, networked controls, and advanced the world’s largest and most diverse coding community for manufacturing systems. Spanning electronics, firmware, kids, as executive director in 2020 after serving as the software, and mechanics, her research focuses on harnessing executive director of the Duke University Talent Identification the precision of machines for the creativity of individuals. Program (Duke TIP). At Duke TIP, she directed one of the Nadya directs the Machine Agency at the University of largest academic talent searches, with over 450,000 K-12 Washington where she is an assistant professor in Human- students and over 3 million alumni. During COVID-19, Young Centered Design and Engineering. She is on the board of the transitioned the $35M+ non-profit organization, anchored in Open Source Hardware Association, half of the design studio providing academically rigorous summer residential James and the Giant Peek, plays drum machines and synths programs, to primarily serving its students and families online in the band Construction, and got her PhD at MIT in the and developing new outreach methods to increase the Center for Bits and Atoms. diversity of students in its talent search. Prior to Duke TIP, Young spearheaded the expansion the Office of Engineering Outreach Programs (OEOP) at MIT, serving as the executive director for eight years. PLAYfest 2021: Two Days of Wonder 3 Speaker Schedule

Session 3: Surprise

Arthur Benjamin Eva Galperin Dr. Arthur Benjamin is the Smallwood Family Professor of Eva Galperin is EFF's Director of Cybersecurity. Prior to 2007, Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College. He has been when she came to work for EFF, Eva worked in security and IT repeatedly honored by the Mathematical Association of in Silicon Valley and earned degrees in Political Science and America for his teaching and writing, and was recently International Relations from SFSU. Her work is primarily selected by Princeton Review as one of The Best 300 focused on providing privacy and security for vulnerable Professors in America. He is also a professional magician and populations around the world. To that end, she has applied one of the world's fastest mental calculators. the combination of her political science and technical background to everything from organizing EFF's Tor Relay Dr. Benjamin has given 3 TED talks which have been viewed Challenge, to writing privacy and security training materials over 20 million times. He has demonstrated and explained his (including Surveillance Self Defense and the Digital First Aid calculating talents to audiences all over the world and has Kit), and publishing research on malware in Syria, Vietnam, appeared on numerous television programs, including The Kazakhstan. When she is not collecting new and exotic Today Show, CNN, and The Colbert Report. He has been malware, she practices aerial circus arts and learning new featured in Scientific American, Omni, Discover, People, languages. Esquire, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Reader's Digest. Reader's Digest calls him "America's Best Math Whiz."

Janella Watson Jason Webley Janella Watson is a children's media, edtech and museum Jason Webley is a troubadour based in Everett, Washington. consultant, with expertise in creativity, play and experiential Beginning as a street performer in the late 90s, Webley built learning. Drawing on more than 20 years of work as a an international cult following for his songs and stories. researcher and practitioner in children’s museums and Armed with an accordion, a guitar, a porkpie hat, and a plastic science centers, she creates curriculum, media content, vodka bottle full of pennies, he has performed in over forty programs, exhibits and experiences that center equity and countries and released a pile of records. Some of Webley's spark joy, learning and whole family engagement. Her current recent projects have focused on the local history of Webley’s clients and partners include Nickelodeon, Brown University’s hometown of Everett. He is also captain of a floating river Causality and Mind Lab, Nucleus Education, Sesame circus project called "FLOTSAM!" Workshop, and WGBH Education. Janella lives, works and plays in Providence, RI with her husband and her curious and kind seven-year old.

Roxanne Prichard Shawna Young J. Roxanne Prichard, PhD (University of Wisconsin-Madison, Zoleka is appointed as an Offshore Benthic Ecologist with the Neuroscience, 2004) is a Professor of Psychology at the Department of Environment, Forestry and Fisheries and University of St. Thomas. Dr. Prichard has spent the last concurrently pursuing a part-time PhD with Nelson Mandela fifteen years studying how students sleep. Her TEDx talk University. Her research interests focus on echinoid / deep- “Addressing our Children’s Sleep Debt” was featured in the water coral taxonomy, canyon ecology, and conservation lecture series: Transforming Education. Her research has been planning. Her work to date has contributed to South Africa’s summarized in a variety of national media outlets including biodiversity assessments, ecosystem classification maps, and The New York Times, TIME, US News and World Report, PBS the establishment of a network of offshore marine protected News Hour, Huffington Post. areas. She was one of the first black women to be lead scientist on a research field campaign and has spent many months at sea discovering more about South Africa’s uncharted oceans. Apart from this, she has been profiled as (i) one of the top 200 outstanding young South Africans (by the Mail and Guardian), (ii) one of the 100 young “Young Mandela’s of the Future” (by News24), (iii) one of the top 40 outstanding South African women (by Destiny), (iv) as a Young Innovator (by her employer), and one of the 100 most influential young South Africans (by Avance Media). Through her work, Zoleka aspires to change perceptions and contribute to young South Africans re-establishing their connection with the ocean environment.

You can contact Zoleka at [email protected] and find her online on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. PLAYfest 2021: Two Days of Wonder 4 Speaker Schedule

Session 4: New People

Alexandra Lange Dessa Alexandra Lange is a design critic. Her essays, reviews, and Singer, rapper, and writer Dessa has made a career of bucking profiles have appeared in numerous design publications genres and defying expectations—her résumé as a musician including Architect, Harvard Design Magazine, Metropolis, includes performances at Lollapalooza and Glastonbury, co- and T Magazine, as well as in The Atlantic, New York compositions for 100-voice choir, performances with the Magazine, the New Yorker, and the New York Times. Her Minnesota Orchestra, and top-200 entries on the Billboard latest book, The Design of Childhood: How the Material World charts. She contributed to the #1 album The Hamilton Shapes Independent Kids was published by Bloomsbury USA Mixtape: her track, “Congratulations,” has notched over 16 in June 2018. She is currently at work on a new book about million streams. As a writer, she’s been published by The New the history and future of the American shopping mall. York Times and National Geographic Traveler, broadcast by Minnesota Public Radio, and published a memoir-in-essays (My Own Devices, 2018) in addition to two literary collections. As a speaker, Dessa has delivered keynote speeches and presentations on art, science, and entrepreneurship; guest lectures at universities and colleges across the US; and a TED Talk about her science experiment on how to fall out of love. She’s been covered by Pitchfork, Forbes, and The Wall Street Journal amongst others. The LA Times says Dessa “sounds like no one else.” The Utne Reader calls her a “one-woman powerhouse.” On the stage and on the page, her style is defined by ferocity, wit, tenderness, and candor.

You can find Dessa online at @dessadarling on Twitter and Facebook, @dessa on Instagram, and at dessawander.com.

Don Weinkauf Sara Winge Since 2008, Dr. Don Weinkauf has served as the Dean of Sara Winge spent nearly 25 years at O'Reilly Media, where she Engineering at the University of St Thomas in St. Paul. helped discover, explain, and amplify the stories of emerging Minnesota. During his interview for the position, he used technologies and the people who created them. She was co- elements from Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods as a creator (with Tim O'Reilly) and producer of the company's basis for his vision for the future of engineering education. infamous unconference, Foo Camp, as well as steward of the From 1996-2008, Dr. Weinkauf was Professor of Chemical O'Reilly brand, and the marketing and communications Engineering at New Mexico Tech in Socorro, New Mexico. He strategist for corporate and new initiatives. Her previous jobs, has been honored nationally for his teaching and research as which include furniture refinishing, firefighting, and a Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar. Prior to his career in employment counseling, prepared her for working in tech in academia, Dr. Weinkauf worked for Shell Oil Company as a non-obvious but crucial ways. Research Engineer in the development of new plastics materials. For part of that time, he worked at the CONACYT Centro de Investigacion en Quimica Aplicada (CIQA) in Saltillo, Mexico. He holds a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin and a BS from Iowa State University both in Chemical Engineering.

Sarah Pinsker Susan Lane-Outlaw Sarah Pinsker is the author of Nebula Award-winning novel A Dr. Susan Lane-Outlaw is the Executive Director at Metro Deaf Song For A New Day, the Philip K Dick Award-winning School in Saint Paul, MN. Previously, she was a fun loving collection, Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea, and child, student, skateboarder, athlete, and Assistant Professor the upcoming We Are Satellites, to be published by Berkley in at the Rochester Institute of Technology in the graduate Deaf May 2021. She is also a singer/songwriter who has toured Education program. She has over 25 years in the field of deaf behind three albums on various independent labels. She lives education as a teacher, administrator, and in teacher in Baltimore, Maryland, with her wife and dog. preparation. She earned her doctorate from Gallaudet University in Deaf Education with a focus on language and You can find Sarah online at @sarahpinsker on Twitter and at literacy development and curriculum. These days, she enjoys sarahpinsker.com. participating with students and staff in purposeful fun and games. PLAYfest 2021: Two Days of Wonder 5 Speaker Schedule

Also Presenting at PLAYfest

AnnMarie Thomas Dan Konopka AnnMarie is a Professor in the School of Engineering and the I'm a principal member, drummer, producer and remixer for Opus College of Business at the University of St. Thomas. She Grammy Award winning group OK Go. I’ve been playing is the founder and director of the Playful Learning Lab, which drums for over 30 years, having developed a passion for music explores ways to encourage children, of all ages, to embrace and art as early back as kindergarten. OK Go began recording playful learning. She and her students created Squishy and touring in 1998, and we haven’t stopped yet. The band Circuits. She is the author of “Making Makers: Kids, Tools, and was signed to Capitol Records in 2001, and won the Grammy the Future of Innovation.” Award for Best Music Video by 2006. Nominated for two more Grammy Awards since, OK Go continue to receive a multitude You can find her at annmarie-thomas.com. of other honors and awards from two MTV Music Video Awards to two YouTube Music Video awards and, notably, the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award. In 2009, Dan decided to branch out from the band to also become a more involved writer and collaborator. He graduated Icon Collective in 2011, focusing on music production and mixing. Since that time, I have released numerous full album productions, as well as dozens of mixes and remixes for various artists from around the world.

Carly Ciarrocchi Susan Lane-Outlaw Carly Ciarrocchi is a performer, writer/creator and morning Dr. Vanessa Cornett has directed the piano and keyboard enthusiast. She works primarily in kids' media and began her programs at the University of St. Thomas since 2007. She is a journey as a host/writer on Sprout's live preschool TV show certified meditation instructor, author of the book The Sunny Side Up. Other preschool TV credits include Snug’s Mindful Musician: Mental Skills for Peak Performance (Oxford House and The Big Fun Crafty Show on Universal Kids. All University Press, 2019), and co-founder of the Project for three shows earned Daytime Emmy nominations. As a Mindfulness and Contemplation at St. Thomas. She has given musician, she's written tunes for Sprout/Universal Kids and is masterclasses and workshops on topics related to peak a vocalist/songwriter on Tim Kubart's Grammy Award- performance, creativity, and collaborative improvisation in 23 winning children’s album HOME. In March, she hosted the of the United States and in South Africa, Taiwan, Turkey, 2020 LEGO Idea Conference in Denmark, helping the team Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Greece, Serbia, Croatia, pivot to a livestream experience due to COVID-19. As a Finland, Ireland, Ukraine, Canada, and the U.K. Her research is personal offering to families during these difficult times, she published in the Journal of Transformative Education, Journal spent 22 consecutive Saturday mornings live-streaming a of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education, Music and crafting and improv show called Tube Town straight out of Politics, College Music Symposium, the MTNA eJournal, and in her apartment. As a performer and content creator, the textbook Creative Piano Teaching. She earned a DMA in she meets her audience where they are and keeps things just piano performance and literature from the University of North the right amount of weird. Her work combines authenticity, Carolina at Greensboro. She recently earned a graduate resilience, curriculum and comedy. She’s currently the co- certificate in sport psychology and three additional host of the newest season of Weird But True, from National professional certifications in various aspects of wine snobbery. Geographic, which launched on Disney+ in August.

Manuela Hill-Muñoz Twin Cities Trapeze Center Manuela Hill-Muñoz, a native of Medellin Colombia learned at Twin Cities Trapeze Center is a circus school and performance an early age that making, playing and crafting formed the group based in St. Paul, MN. Our mission is to make circus perfect triangle to learning and forming connections. Hill- fun and accessible to all ages and abilities. Join us for a class Muñoz serves as the Director of Innovation and and experience the joy, whimsy, and surprise for yourself! Changemaking at the University of St. Thomas. In her everyday Hill-Muñoz engages college students in the create[space] and connect students to resources to reach their goals.