Sally Gaskill

Sally Gaskill is an arts administrator with three decades of experience covering all arts disciplines. She serves as associate director and the only full-time staff member of the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project at Indiana University. SNAAP investigates the educational experiences and career paths of arts graduates nationally. SNAAP gives the findings to educators, policymakers and philanthropic organizations to improve arts training, inform cultural policy and support artists.

Gaskill is also the president of the board of the Indiana Coalition for the Arts, a nonprofit arts advocacy organization, and is a member of the State Arts Action Council of Americans for the Arts.

Mk Haley

Mk Haley is the associate executive producer of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. The ETC is a unique program that brings together students from a variety of academic backgrounds. Its graduates are among the most highly sought-after professionals in the interactive media industry.

Haley has served for 15 years at the Walt Disney Company in a variety of managerial, technical and creative roles in areas such as virtual reality, research and development, and special effects while on their Imagineering team. From Imagineering, Haley moved to the corporate new technology team to manage communication and collaboration technologies.

She has also been very active with SIGGRAPH for the past 22 years, primarily overseeing conference programs related to interactive and emerging technologies and installation.

Natalie Jeremijenko

Natalie Jeremijenko is an associate professor of visual art at New York University and directs the xdesign Environmental Health Clinic. Previously she was on the visual arts faculty at University of California, San Diego, and the faculty of engineering at Yale. Her work was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial of American Art (also in 1997) and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Triennial 2006-07. She has a permanently installed Model Urban Development on the roof of Postmasters Gallery in Chelsea, featuring seven residential housing developments, a concert hall, and other public amenities powered by human food waste where it continues to toy with new conceptions of urban futures, and re-imagine our relationship to nonhuman organisms.

Her work is described as experimental design, hence xdesign, as it explores the opportunity new technologies present for nonviolent social change. Her research centers on structures of participation in the production of knowledge and information and the political and social possibilities (and limitations) of information and emerging technologies - mostly through public experiments. In this vein, her work spans a range of media from statistical indices (such as the Despondency Index, which linked the Dow Jones to the suicide rate at San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge) to biological substrates (such as the installations of cloned trees in pairs in various urban micro-climates) to robotics (such as the development of feral robotic dog packs to investigate environmental hazards). The Environmental Health Clinic develops and prescribes locally optimized and often playful strategies to effect remediation of environmental systems, producing measurable and mediagenic evidence, and coordinates diverse projects to effective material change. Jeremijenko is also a visiting professor at Royal College of Art in London and an artist at the Institute for the Future, Palo Alto.

Dennis Keely

Dennis Keeley has worked as an artist, photographer, teacher and writer for more than 25 years. His work has been exhibited in numerous one person and group shows, and he is published internationally in books and studies concerning urban circumstance and condition. He has worked on projects for the J. Paul Getty Center's Conservation and Research Institutes and was commissioned to document the creation of the Getty's Central Garden by Robert Irwin. His photographs in the book, Looking for a City in America: Down These Mean Streets a Man Must Go by Getty Publications, won numerous awards.

In addition to being the current chair of the photography and imaging department at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, he is a former western regional co-chair of the Society for Photographic Education and sits on the boards of the Music Center of Los Angeles County and the Angels Gate Cultural Center in San Pedro, California. In 2005 Keeley spoke at the United Nations NGO Conference about using photography as a tool in peace building and nonviolent conflict resolution.

R. Keith Sawyer

R. Keith Sawyer, Ph.D., is a professor of psychology and education at Washington University in St. Louis. After earning a computer science degree from MIT in 1982, he began his career with a two-year stint designing video games for Atari. His titles included Food Fight, Neon and Magician. From 1984 to 1990, he was a principal at Denon Systems Corporation where he worked as a managing consultant on innovative technologies. His clients included Citicorp, AT&T, and W.S. West. In 1990 Sawyer began his doctoral studies in psychology where he studied creativity with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Ph.D. Since receiving his Ph.D. in 1994, he has dedicated his career to research on creativity, collaboration and learning. He has been a jazz pianist for more than 30 years playing piano with Chicago improv theater groups.

Sawyer has published 10 books and more than 60 scientific articles. His research has been featured on CNN, Fox News, and in TIME and other media outlets. He lectures to corporations, associations and universities around the world on creativity and innovation. He is a participant in the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.