Featured Speakers

Mindy Abovitz Monk Founder|,Tom Tom Mag

Mindy Abovitz Monk is an award-winning entrepreneur and social activist, committed to diversifying the music industry. Through her media company Tom Tom, Mindy inspires a global audience of musicians to play with power, pride and to be seen. This year, she was recognized by the Grammys as a Change Agent.

Grace Bonney Founder & Editor In Chief, Design*Sponge & Good Company

Grace Bonney is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Design*Sponge. She is also the founder of our new print magazine, Good Company and its weekly podcast of the same name. She authored the New York Times best-selling book, In the Company of Women, in 2016.

Grace was named one of The Frederick Douglass 200 by The Guardian in 2018. She has been called a “Martha Stewart for Millennials” by The New York Times and was named a Top Home Influencer of 2017 by Forbes Magazine. Grace lives in the Hudson Valley with her wife and their three pets.

Melissa Falkowski Faculty Adviser & Teacher, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School

Melissa Falkowski is the faculty adviser of The Eagle Eye newsmagazine, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, which she has been advising for the last four years. She has been teaching for 15 years at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Melissa advised the MSD Aerie yearbook for nine years, and currently advises the school literary magazine, Artifex.

In addition to newspaper, she teaches English and creative writing courses. She holds a Bachelor’s in English Education from Florida Atlantic University and a Master’s in Journalism from Kent State University.

Journalism has long been a passion of Melissa’s. She began as a student journalist on her middle school yearbook staff and continued to pursue that passion throughout high school. She became a teacher to empower students and help them find their voices through student journalism.

She credits her high school journalism teacher, Jeanette Johnson, for inspiring her to become a journalism and English teacher. When Melissa is not working, she enjoys spending time with her family - her husband of 14 years, John; her 7-year-old son, John Thomas; and her 1-year-old daughter, Evangeline. Her other interests include trips to Disney World and reading.

Lauren Alexis Fisher Editor, Harper’s BAZAAR

Lauren Alexis Fisher is a digital editor at Harper’s BAZAAR where she covers fashion news, trends, shopping, and more for BAZAAR.com. In addition to writing for BAZAAR, she also oversees the site’s e-commerce and SEO initiatives. Before landing at BAZAAR.com, Lauren studied fashion and business at LIM College in New York where she gained industry experience while interning at Diane von Furstenberg, Donna Karan, College Fashionista, and Harper’s BAZAAR.

Tavi Gevinson Founder, Rookie Magazine

Tavi Gevinson is a writer, actor, and founder of the online teen magazine Rookie. Gevinson launched Rookie in 2011 at age 15, and has edited its five print anthologies, the Rookie Yearbooks and Rookie On Love, published by Penguin Random House. Dazed called Rookie “one of the best things to happen to the internet. The cultural impact has never felt like something that merely happened on the internet.” Gevinson has appeared in Broadway productions of This Is Our Youth, The Crucible, and The Cherry Orchard, and in the films Enough Said and Person to Person.

Nora Gomez-Strauss Director of Digital Strategies, Public Art Fund

Nora Gomez-Strauss is an arts administrator and freelance writer, currently serving as Public Art Fund’s Director of Digital Strategies. Her freelance writing mainly focuses on sharing the stories of women making an impact in the creative field. In an effort to represent her local community, she recently ran for and a won seat in the Queens Democratic County Committee. Nora holds a BS in Art Education with a concentration in Photography from SUNY New Paltz and a Master’s degree from Pratt Institute in Arts & Cultural Management. She currently lives in her native borough with her husband and two children, where they can be found going for long walks and listening to records.

Joe Hyrkin CEO, Issuu

Joe is the CEO of Issuu, the world’s leading digital publishing and discovery platform connecting people to the content they love most. He has more than 20 years of experience in startup and growth technology leadership from early stage through to IPO. He served as CEO of Reverb during two rounds of financing; in addition, as head of SingleFeed, Joe oversaw that firm’s acquisition by Alibaba. Before that, Joe held sales and leadership positions at Gaia Interactive, Yahoo, Flickr, and Virage. He directed the Economist Group’s business in China and has extensive board and tech-advisor experience. Joe was educated at the State University of New York at Albany and as a foreign student at Beijing Normal University in China.

Rolf Leer founder & Editor-inChief, Quoted

Rolf Arne Leer is an entrepreneur and journalist from Norway with a passion for storytelling and meeting new people. He immediately fell in love with New York through his encounters with locals, each of whom shared unique insights into what the city meant to them and why they called it home. Rolf started visiting New Yorkers in their homes to conduct interviews and to gather their perspectives. First featured in the Huffington Post, Rolf began to gain followers from around the world with his innovative, unfiltered portraits. He decided to share these insights through his own publication and Quoted was born.

Quoted is a love letter to New York from the people who live here. It is an unfiltered take on the city through the eyes of locals. Every issue of Quoted features 10 New Yorkers from their home, sharing intimate stories from their lives and perspectives on New York.

Four issues in, Quoted in New York is distributed at 41 boutique hotels, 5 airlines and more than 150 local coffee shops.

Neha Madhira Student & Editor-in-Chief, Prosper High School

Neha Madhira is a senior at Prosper High School in Texas. Two years ago, after registering into a Journalism I class, she started to compete in UIL Academic competitions because she was inspired by the passion her former adviser, Lori Oglesbee, displayed for writing. Madhira has won 19 journalism awards over two years, including the achievement of the All-State Journalism Award and a National Quill & Scroll Gold Key Award.

Currently, Madhira is Editor-in-Chief of her high school’s paper, Eagle Nation Online. After her prior principal censored the paper, banned editorials, and fired her adviser, Ms. Oglesbee, last year; Madhira spoke out, along with Haley Stack. Their story received coverage from over 30 media publications, including The New York Times. The duo was nominated for the National Courage in Journalism Award. Madhira continues on the journey to student press freedom as a student leader of the New Voices movement in Texas and speaks about the importance of student & teacher rights across the country. By communicating with legislators and First Amendment advocates such as Mary Beth Tinker, as well as educating others on their student press rights, she is fighting to make Texas the next state with the free press law. Eventually, Madhira hopes to have the other 35 states without New Voices, pass it as well.

Ghen Maynard Senior Executive Vice President, CBS Studios

Ghen Maynard was named by TV Guide as “one of the bold ones.” Convinced he had a way to draw young viewers to CBS without alienating its then older core, Ghen developed and championed what would become the first broadcast-TV reality show, the mega-hit Survivor. Survivor not only brought unprecedented mass young viewers to CBS but also changed the face and economics of all of TV, inspiring less costly yet highly successful reality TV programming. Subsequently, he developed and oversaw the Emmy Award-winning The Amazing Race, the U.S. version of Big Brother, and CW’s America’s Next Top Model (now on VH1). As Executive Vice President, Primetime Development, at NBC, Ghen and his team developed My Name Is Earl and Heroes, both the highest-rated new TV series in their respective debut seasons. As Vice President, Drama Development, at CBS he co-developed such hits as Judging Amy, The District, and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, the highest-rated new drama in its first season. In November 2016, Ghen was asked to return for his third stint at CBS to launch a new alternative programming studio as Senior Executive Vice President, where he is currently building a new business and assembling several projects for networks both in and outside the CBS universe. Ghen is a graduate of Harvard College, where he concentrated in social psychology while working fulltime as a publisher of the best-selling Let’s Go travel guides. Subsequently, he worked as a Business Analyst at Houghton Mifflin Company in Boston.

Lori Oglesbee Educator and Advocate

Lori Oglesbee taught high school journalism to more than 4,000 students over 35 years. Those students won awards at the regional, state, and national levels making their programs one of the top in the country year after year. Oglesbee was Texas Journalism Teacher of the Year in 2005 and the Journalism Education Association National Yearbook Adviser of the Year in 2009. In her last year in the classroom, she and her students battled administrative censorship of their work. The policy was overturned in favor of her students. However, the principal refused to renew her contract. She lives in McKinney, Texas, works as an educational consultant, and continues to advocate for students’ rights to a free press.

Antonia Sutter Founder Carry-On Publishing

Antonia Sutter studied Business Administration with a focus on Finance and Strategic Management at HHL - Leipzig Graduate School of Management. After graduation she started her career at YOC AG, the German pioneer in mobile marketing, mobile Internet and mobile advertising. She was responsible for Business Development at YOC Group before taking over the management of the subsidiary YOC Ltd. in London in 2011. In January 2013, Antonia Sutter founded, together with Theresa Neubauer and Alex Sutter, the digital media company, Carry-On Publishing. The company currently publishes two digital-only magazines, sisterMAG and CVmag, which are both internationally oriented.

Rebecca Schneid Student & Co-Editor-in-Chief, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School

Rebecca Schneid is a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Class of 2019. She is a third year staff member of their high school newspaper, The Eagle Eye and is now serving as Co-Editor-in-Chief for the 2018-2019 school year. Through her work as a journalist at The Eagle Eye, she has found her true calling in journalism, communications, and political science. Schneid often chooses to write about hard-hitting feature topics she is passionate about, such as activism, rape culture, diversity in entertainment, and politics. She chose to join the newspaper because of her interest and skills in writing, but continues to devote her time to it because of the creativity, growth, design, friendships, and love she has come to find at The Eagle Eye. After the incident of gun violence at her school on February 14th, 2018, Schneid not only advocated for policy change, but reported on her school, the activism that rose out of it, and possible solutions to the issue.

Jen Tolentino Director of Policy and Civic Tech, Rock the Vote

Jen Tolentino is Rock the Vote’s Director of Policy and Civic Tech. She leads the organization’s engagement in election administration, voting rights, and technology policy by identifying opportunities to increase access for young voters across the country through policy, innovation, and partnerships. She also spearheads the continued development and distribution of Rock the Vote’s online civic tech resources, including its online voter registration platform that is utilized by hundreds of national, state, and local partners across the country.

Jen directs the organization’s work to protect and expand the voting rights of young people, through grassroots organizing, legislation, and participation in litigation efforts. To ensure young people not only have equal opportunities to participate in our democracy, but also understand the importance of voting, Jen also oversees the development of strategic partnerships with brands, such as HBO, Twitter, and TOMS, and nonprofits partners, to reach young people with targeted and authentic messaging and resources.

Prior to joining Rock the Vote, Jen led the national government outreach for the Voting Information Project at the Pew Charitable Trusts, an open data partnership of Pew and Google, to make voting information more accessible through partnerships with organizations such as the Internet Association and Rock the Vote. During that time, Jen oversaw the development of several open source projects and coordinated the national voting data standardization efforts for the 2014 midterm elections. She has also spent time engaging advocates across the country and lobbying the Administration and Congress on behalf of preservation, public lands, and green building issues at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Jen is based in Los Angeles and a native Californian, receiving her BA in English from UC Riverside, and her MPP from UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs. While obtaining her MPP, Jen was a graduate student researcher to former Gov. Michael Dukakis and served as a legislative fellow to Congresswoman Linda Sanchez. She is part of the Future of California Election Advisory Board.

Carl Van Arsdall Software Engineer & Render Technical Director, Pixar Animation Studios

Carl Van Arsdall began at Pixar Animation Studios in September 2008. As a member of the Studio Tools team, Van Arsdall has contributed to every Pixar film since the Academy Award®-winning feature film UP in 2009 to Incredibles 2 which released earlier this year in 2018. As a software engineer, Van Arsdall works on the platform team at Pixar. He is responsible for various aspects of the studio infrastructure with a focus on the development infrastructure. Van Arsdall worked on “Cicada,” a tool that automatically builds and tests changes, logging results, and providing applications for the inspection of those results used by various teams at the studio. Van Arsdall is also responsible for the system that produces Presto each day to the Pixar animators and technical directors. He is currently working on rotation as a render technical director on Toy Story 4 which opens in theaters June 2019.

Raised in Livermore, California, Van Arsdall received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2003. He received his M.S. in Computer Engineering from San Jose State University in 2006, and also received an A.A. in Music Technology from Foothill College in 2009. Prior to Pixar, Van Arsdall worked at MontaVista Software, an embedded Linux distribution where he ran their build infrastructure.

E ven outside of his professional career, Van Arsdall is deeply committed to creative expression. He started “vt100”, a personal project that he has been working on for ten years. With “vt100”, Van Arsdall composes, engineers, and releases electronic music that is made exclusively on hardware synthesizers and sequencers. The project’s third full length LP is about to be released. More recently in late 2017, Van Arsdall founded an art collective in his local community to explore how technology empowers discovery, immersion, and interaction. Through interactive LED sculptures, interactive audio & video walls, and even modified vintage technology, FILMA blends the relationship between the artists, and those who love art. Van Arsdall currently resides in Berkeley, California