Speakers

Woo-hoo!! Ready for the rounds of rides?! Everyone on the Organizing Team is super thrilled to announce our lineup of speakers who will be participating in WordCamp Santa Clarita 2021! From accessibility to neurosciences, these speakers have graciously volunteered their time to share their knowledge with the WordPress Community and the world. 

• Aida Correa – Jackson

  

  Aida Correa-Jackson is the owner of LoveBuilt Life LLC, a Creative Arts and Lifestyle company that empowers women to reach for their dreams and build a life they genuinely love! She is a modern-day renaissance woman and an internationally recognized speaker, teacher, artist. She has a special place in her heart for WordCamps, speaking and volunteering whenever she can, especially at KidsCamps!

  As an Afro-Latina and seasoned professional she works to cultivate diversity, equity, and inclusivity in areas where art and technology meet. She teaches equitable content creation strategies at Lenoir -Rhyne University’s LREDI Program and she regularly uses art to expand her clients’ life experiences.

  Although she is happily married to a fellow WordCamper, she still carries on her love for Wapuu!

• Alicia St Rose

  

  Alicia St Rose began her adventure with WordPress when a UX friend offhandedly suggested using the CMS for a mutual friend’s website. That was over 15 years ago and the adventure has turned into a torrid love affair. Now she is a freelance developer, exclusively powered by WordPress, and has yet to find a limitation in this magical piece of software.

  She is the owner, principal designer and developer and WordPress Coach at WP with Heart, a small agency that employs one — so far. In addition to creating for WordPress, she provides an online one on one DIY website coaching for heart inspired entrepreneurs and content creators. She is also a Creativity and Mindshift Mentor, empowering people to kick their limitations to the curb and express themselves with unapologetic authenticity.

  She has spoken at several So Cal WordCamps including WC Orange County and WCLAX. She was also co-organizer of the one and one time only WordCamp Ventura County. She currently organizes the only WordPress Meetup between Santa Cruz and Thousand Oaks called The South Central Coast WordPress Adventure Group.

  Outside the WordPress realm, you can find Alicia hosting rooms in her club, Wow with Alicia, on Clubhouse and bringing virtual immersive Burning Man experiences to the Altspace platform as a member of team BRCvr.

  Alicia currently lives in Santa Barbara, California with her two rambunctious cats, Oscar and Milo. She divides her time between that seaside town and Black Rock City, Nevada.

• Amber Hinds

  

  Amber Hinds is the CEO of Equalize Digital, a Certified B Corporation, and website accessibility consulting firm striving to create a world where all people have equal access to information and tools on the internet, regardless of ability.

  Since 2010, Amber has led teams building websites and web applications for nonprofits, K-12 and higher education institutions, government agencies, and businesses of all sizes.

  Equalize Digital is also the maker of Accessibility Checker, a plugin that scans WordPress sites for accessibility problems and makes it easier for content managers and developers to create accessible websites. Equalize Digital is a corporate member of the International Association of Accessibility Professionals and a WordPress VIP agency.

• Amy Hall

  

  For over 11 years, Amy has been taking email marketing out of the hands of business owners who are already juggling too many tasks. She is a certified Mailchimp Pro Partner & Expert.

  When it comes to speaking, Amy is a natural. After all, she started the Carlsbad WordPress Meetup. Amy is in her element when showing WordPress users how to optimize their forms, perfect their lead generation, and make their email marketing perform.

  In her free time, Amy spends time with her husband, a minister in Carlsbad, watches Mandalorian and Loki with her grandkids, and tends her straw bale garden.

  Say hi to Amy on Twitter at @GenuineAmyHall and check out her bio at amyhall.biz.

• AmyJune Hineline

  

  AmyJune Hineline is the Open Source Community Ambassador and QA Engineer at Kanopi Studios. With a dual focus on both open-source community development and inclusivity, she is uniquely positioned to help individuals become more comfortable and confident as they contribute to their communities. She co-organized various open-source camps and conventions throughout North America, empowering individuals to forge deep community connections that benefit the whole. As a self-described non-coder, AmyJune helps communities discover how they can contribute and belong in more ways than coding.

  Her ongoing experience as a hospice nurse keeps her in touch with the challenges faced by many end-users. In her continued efforts to make a difference, she helps organize A11yTalks, an online meetup where they invite folks on every month to talk about all things accessibility – one of the core components of building an inclusive web.

  Outside of her mission in the technology community space, she has a deep love for mycology, geocaching, and air-cooled Volkswagens.

• Anne McCarthy

  

  Anne McCarthy is a developer relations wrangler for Automattic, focused on building positive relationships with developers in the WordPress community and currently spearheading the FSE Outreach Program.

• Ben Pines

  

  Ben Pines has been in the digital marketing space for the past 15 years. Ben is currently the evangelist and head of web creator program at Elementor. Back in 2016, Ben was the second employee of Elementor. He was part of the small team that got it all started, and grew Elementor to become the most popular design tool for WordPress, powering over 8 million sites.

  Back in the early stages, Ben was the one-man marketing operation for Elementor, handling all of the marketing efforts, including feature release videos, blog posts, social media, community, PPC and more.

  Today, Ben utilizes the knowledge and experience he accumulated over the years to teach freelance web creators to grow their business and develop an impactful online presence.

• Cami Kaos

  

  Cami lives in the rainy city of Portland, Oregon. She has had a love of WordPress and WordCamps since the last century when she happened to stumble upon the first WordCamp Portland.

  Since 2013, she has worked at Automattic, as a community organizer for the WordPress open source project. In that role, she gets to work with WordCamps, Meetups, and their organizers from around the world, every day. She is a fierce advocate for the WordPress community and the WordPress Community team.

  She continues to write on an irregular basis at camikaos.com where she explores concepts from the plight of modern parents to mental health to marveling at the seemingly mundane.

• Carol Stambaugh

  

  A seasoned professional with over 10 years of experience working with WordPress, Carol has tenaciously embraced the technology sector. In 2010, Carol created Tech Tools, LLC, next she joined forces to found FreeUp Web Studio in 2013, and then took over the operation of RadiateWP in 2016. With her team, Carol hosts and manages over 100 WordPress websites.

  Carol is active in the Arizona WordPress Community leading the Tempe meetup and has organized over a half-dozen WordCamps. Carol loves WordPress, the community, and helping clients solve their problems through technology. Carol’s superpower is quickly learning and understanding new tools and finding processes to make everyday tasks repeatable and scalable. She loves a good Asana template with a video tutorial so that anyone on the team can perform critical tasks when needed.

• Christina Workman

  

  Christina has over 10 years working with WordPress, most recently building and maintaining websites at WedDevStudios / Maintainn. She is passionate about web accessibility and contributing to the WordPress community. A self-proclaimed purple-ophile, she also enjoys a nice mug of tea while watching British murder mysteries.

• Craig West

  

  Craig is a freelance trainer and architect that focuses on bringing together the WP and non-WP worlds by advocating WP-HTML, ‘where there is HTML, there is WP’.
  He is based in Brighton and attends the local WordUp meetings. With a previous career in business and accounting, as well as having run his own non-IT business, Craig can speak both technical and business. He believes that technology serves the user, not the other way around, so the user experience is paramount.
  He has started to speak at WP and non-WP events and is interested in Web Components, Progressive Web Apps, RxJS, and WP REST API with a developing interest in pages that are ‘instant’ and/or offline capable.

• Daisy Olsen

  

  Daisy has worked in and around the WordPress community since 2007. She has spoken at WordCamps around the world. She also helped to organize the first WordCamp Boston in 2010. Currently, Daisy works for Automattic as a Developer Advocate with a special focus on helping WordPress extenders do more with the Block Editor. In her spare time, you’ll often find Daisy listening to audio books while knitting. She loves to travel with her family and has often spent many weeks throughout the year visiting different places.

• David Zimmerman

  

  David Zimmerman has been consulting with companies on their SEO strategies and tactics for over 12 years. He’s helped everyone from publicly-traded companies to mom-and-pop businesses. 6 years ago, David started his own SEO company in Charlotte, NC- Reliable Acorn, LLC. Recently he launched CuriousAnts.com, to share what he’s learned about SEO best-practices with others.

• Hari Shanker R

  

  Hari is a Community Wrangler at Automattic, where he is a full-time contributor to the WordPress Community team. WordPress is one of his biggest passions, and he enjoys working on projects that support and empower the global WordPress community.

  He is a big fan of open-source tech and the open web. He has had a diverse career with experience in the domains of project management, technical support, professional blogging, event management, and print journalism.

  Hari is based out of Kochi, India, where he lives with his wife and their cats.

• Joe Casabona

  

  Don’t let Joe Casabona’s Master’s Degree in Computer Science intimidate you; he is not only an approachable guy, but a born teacher.

  Joe started his career almost 20 years ago as a freelance web developer before realizing his true passion, which is sharing his years of knowledge about website development, podcasting and course creation with other business owners, freelancers and entrepreneurs in need. Joe has a gift for breaking down concepts that scare people into bite-sized, approachable pieces of information they can implement in a matter of days.

  Joe’s career trajectory includes 20+ years experience building websites, 16+ years using WordPress, 11+ years teaching at the college level, 7+ years podcasting, plus he is the author of four books, including his latest: HTML and CSS: Visual QuickStart Guide

  When he’s not creating courses for LinkedIn Learning, you can find Joe spending time with his family, enjoying baseball, or talking too much about Star Wars.

  Say hi at @jcasabona and find more information at casabona.org.

• Joe Dolson

  

  Joe is a WordPress plug-in developer and a web accessibility consultant. He’s part of the Make WordPress Accessible team, the team dedicated to improving accessibility in the WordPress ecosystem.

  He has been building websites & providing consulting services since 2004 and started using WordPress in 2006, converting his own blog from BlogSpot to WordPress. By 2008, he built his first plug-in (WP to Twitter), which is still going strong today!

  Joe was one of the Lead Organizers for the first-ever WordPress Accessibility Day, a 24-hour event dedicated to addressing website accessibility in WordPress with presenters from around the world. The event helped our Community learn how to make our WordPress site accessible and included tips on addressing the areas where WordPress can fall short.

• Joe Simpson Jr

  

  During endless, sun-soaked days Joe A Simpson Jr works at Metro LA, one of the largest transit agencies in the World, fighting the good fight to ease gridlock around Los Angeles County. Faced with a life-altering heart event in 2017, Joe A Simpson Jr pivoted, focusing FIRST on rediscovering the things he truly loved — WordPress, creative passions, teaching tech, and truly giving back. 

  He twilights by actively contributing to the WordPress Community — founding two WordPress-based Meetups (WordPress, Elementor), speaking or volunteering at WordCamps, is currently on the Organizing team for WordCamp Santa Clarita 2021, part of a WordPress initiative at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU), and is a SiteGround Ambassador. 

  Joe is a fledgling Front-End Web Developer, User-Experience Designer, a11y advocate specializing in WordPress solutions, and the host of the Back Down Memory Lane Podcast. 

• Joseph Dickson

  

  Joseph Dickson is a web developer in higher education and an advocate of using WordPress core features to create flexible and manageable websites.

• Josh Pollock

  

  Josh is a JavaScript and PHP developer from Pittsburgh, PA. He is a Lead Web Engineer at 10up, and formerly was a plugin developer at Saturday Drive, CalderaWP and Pods. He is a super nerd for ecology, dogs, growing plants, sci-fi, outdoor exercise and trustless computing systems.

• Jv Libunao

  

  Jv specializes in design strategies for websites and apps. He’s been particularly successful for companies in the SaaS, cryptocurrency, transportation, and retail industries who needed visual advancement to reach out to their target audience profitably.

• Maciek Palmowski

  

  

  Maciek is a WordPress Ambassador at Buddy passionate about all things related to web development. He is a speaker & organizer of CMS-related events in Poland. After hours, apart from cycling, which he loves – he spends most of his time looking for cutting-edge (well, ‘interesting’ is enough) news from the CMS world to share with the community of his followers.

• Maestro Stevens

  

  Maestro Stevens loves helping minority-owned brands connect with their audience utilizing marketing strategy and automation. He is the founder of The Iconic Expressions marketing consultancy specializing in content marketing strategy based in Ohio.

  Fun facts about Maestro: he is a life-hacking martech nerd who loves Marvel movies and engineering with WordPress plugins.

• Meryl Evans

  

  A solo marketing and accessibility consultant for over 20 years, Meryl is an author and contributor to books on business and technology. She helps accessibility companies rock their content marketing initiatives. Prior to striking out on her own, she worked for two Fortune 500 companies and the FAA. A highly sought-after speaker who happens to be deaf, Meryl is renowned for sharing her personal experiences and passion for accessibility and high-quality captioning. Her marketing and education backgrounds come in handy in educating audiences on why accessibility is for everyone and everyone’s job.

• Michelle Frechette

  

  Michelle Frechette is the Director of Customer Success at GiveWP, the premier WordPress donations plugin.

  In addition to her work at GiveWP, Michelle is the Podcast Barista at WPCoffeeTalk.com, co-founder of underrepresentedintech.com, creator of wpcareerpages.com, a board member and volunteer for BigOrangeHeart.org, author, business coach, and a frequent speaker at WordPress events.

  You can find out more at her website WorksByMichelle.com.

• Mike Demo

  

  Mike “Demo” Demopoulos is a lover of open source first, specific tools later. Because of this, he speaks at Ignite! Conferences, Meetups, WordCamps, Joomla! Events, and more.

  As a helpful person, he gladly contributes to Open Source projects in any capacity necessary. Believing there are too many Mikes globally, he prefers to go by Demo. Demo spent years building a solid client base in the financial and insurance industries.

  He uses that background to speak on various topics, including WordPress, Joomla!, A/B testing content, streamlining your workflow, and depositing your profit. We all like profit. Aligned with his mission to empower WordPress experts, Mike is now the Expert Community Development Lead at Codeable.

  When he’s not spending time with his wife Kayla, you may find Demo at a Disney Theme park, collecting artwork, hanging out with his dog B’Elanna, or inviting groups to Tiki Bars. Ask Demo what his favorite Tiki bar is on Twitter at @MPMike

• Rene Morozowich

  

  Based in Pittsburgh, Rene is a digital strategist and website magician who loves helping creative, service-based businesses develop their online presence. She’s also passionate about business books, goal setting and finances.

• Rian Rietveld

  

  Rian is a web accessibility specialist from the Netherlands. She works in Rotterdam for the digital agency Level Level as an accessibility consultant and is a trainer for the online learning platform about web accessibility: The A11Y Collective.
  She is part of web projects from start to finish training both the Level Level team and their clients in web accessibility. Besides that, she does accessibility reviews and audits, in-house training, workshops, courses, and consultancy for major web agencies.
  She loves to share her knowledge at conferences worldwide.
  When not coding, reviewing, or teaching, you can find her working in her garden.

• Ron Amick

  

  Ron Amick is a creature with two heads – he can write code and content, edit film and ad copy, and speak both digital and analog. With an engineer father and painter mother, Ron Amick always had an affinity for both technology and art. His misspent youth was dedicated to making short films which, through no fault of his own, landed him at USC film school.

  After stints working as a producer and editor at several studios and post-production houses, he landed at Disney New Technology and New Media, which ignited a love for web development.

  Moving from entertainment to tech was less of a pivot than a way to combine his interest in computers with his passion for storytelling. Since then Ron has learned (and forgotten) more software than is reasonable (Flash, anyone?) and worked with many creative agencies, tech companies, and entertainment clients to create websites, mobile apps, games, books, ecommerce stores and more. “It’s hard being both a geek and a nerd,” says Ron, “but who are you if you don’t even try?”

  Pronunciation Guide: ā – mick — with a long “a” as in “acorn”

• Ronald Gijsel

  

  I work for YITH as the partnership and business manager, and also the host of the WooCommerce Roundtable from Do the Woo, and co-host the weekly London Woo Meetup. With years of experience and helping 100s of merchants finding solutions, it is great to be helping the community create their e-commerce dreams.

• Sally Thoun

  

  Several years ago, Sally moved into digital marketing after a long career in broadcast entertainment in Sales & Marketing. She currently runs Savvy Gurl Digital Marketing and has worked with several WordPress developers over the years.

  Now she is learning to build her Accessible WordPress website by herself. Over the past year, she has been studying Accessibility, which has been on her heart for a few years. Sally feels privileged to help make the web more inclusive and is grateful to all the Accessibility advocates leading the way.

  Born and raised in Montréal, Québec, Canada, Sally has lived in Ottawa & Toronto, Ontario, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, and White Rock, British Columbia, before moving to Los Angeles. She loves to cook, volunteer, do puzzles, and spoil her dog, Cleo (& Patra RIP), when not a digital and Accessibility sponge.

• Samuel Proulx

  

  Samuel Proulx is the Accessibility Evangelist at Fable, a leading accessibility platform powered by people with disabilities. As a blind individual, Sam knows and values the importance of accessibility in all aspects of life and is a strong advocate for the inclusion of people with disabilities in the digital world. Sam brings his previous experience as Fable’s community manager, plus life-long advocacy for himself and others, to his role as Evangelist.

• Scott Buscemi

  

  Scott Buscemi is an eCommerce consultant and developer based in LA. Since version 2.9 of WordPress in 2010, Scott has been helping clients bring their ideas to reality through product management consulting and WordPress+WooCommerce programming.

• Shanta R. Nathwani

  

  Equipped with a Bachelor of Commerce in Information Technology Management and a Black Belt in Karate, there’s nothing Shanta Nathwani can’t do. She is a full-stack developer who specializes in WordPress, Node and React with a love for life and learning.

  A natural teacher, Shanta spent six years teaching WordPress courses at Sheridan College as well as at having given more than 40 WordCamp talks. Her topics include data architecture, custom post types and ACF, as well as beginner topics like posts versus pages and how to create a website in 30 minutes. She served as a QA Supervisor at a software company for 2 years before starting her own company, Namara Technologies Inc., where she serves as the President & CEO.

  When she’s not working, she can be found volunteering as a Co-organizer for the Hamilton WordPress Meetup Group, taking stunning photographs, sinking karaoke, and, of course, practicing martial arts.

• Sharon M Yates

  

  Sharon Yates has been working with the web since 1996. She’s worked in small businesses, large corporations, and even with a few entrepreneurs. She has traveled nationally to train corporate employees on the ins and outs of the Internet and how to build websites. Her last corporate gig brought on the desire to retire from the corporate arena and go out on her own. She turned her expert HTML/CSS/JavaScript talents towards the WordPress ecosystem and then on to WooCommerce where she excelled in building professional dynamic e-commerce stores. Since 2005 she has helped small businesses and companies with their WordPress websites and WooCommerce online stores.

  Now she focuses on building elite professional WooCommerce and Multivendor stores. She is also an Elementor Community Leader hosting the Elementor Dallas Meetup, a registered Elementor Expert, and a guest speaker. When she’s not on a computer, Sharon loves to travel to far-off locations and scuba dive with her diving buddies. She’s a Dallas native who recently relocated to Galveston, Texas, to start her “second” life living the island lifestyle.

  WordPress became her desired website platform in 2008 as she began helping small business clients as a side hustle during her corporate employee years. Early in 2018, Sharon finally called it quits in the corporate world to focus on building her own freelance business with the clients she accumulated over the years.

  Now she focuses on building elite professional WooCommerce and Multivendor stores. Sharon contributes to the WordPress Community by leading the Elementor Dallas Meetup group, is a registered Elementor Expert, and a guest speaker around the Elementor Community. Sharon also dedicates her time in anything WooCommerce, always striving to learn more and educating herself with this plugin.

  When Sharon shuts off the computer, she travels the world to explore awesome scuba diving locations with her Scuba group. A Dallas native recently located to Galveston, Texas, with her cat Crystal. After settling in Galveston, she and Crystal adopted a second cat named Lucy into their island family. Sharon loves the island lifestyle and is dedicated to enjoying her work and island life.

• Simon Houghton

  

  

  Born deaf, Simon is an organisational and behaviour change consultant, who started a campaign during the pandemic to help organisations and staff better communicate with the deaf, after experiencing personal difficulty due to mask-wearing and a lack of understanding of deaf awareness.

• Stefano Minoia

  

  Stefano is a self-employed, all-around website manager for small local businesses. He describes himself as a front-end developer and an accessibility specialist, but he is curious about all aspects of website building.

  He joined the WordPress Community in early 2018; since then, he tried his best to give back by speaking at and co-organizing WordPress events, and by contributing to the WordPress Accessibility Team. He’s been one of the Accessibility Team Reps for the past year and he was one of the co-organizers of the first WordPress Accessibility Day.

  When he isn’t busy bothering his friends by talking about WordPress, he sings in a choir and goes ballroom dancing (at least, he used to before the pandemic). A few months ago he also rediscovered his passion for playing chess.

• Sumner M Davenport

  

  Sumner Davenport had been designing websites for over 12 years using Microsoft and Adobe products before she was introduced to WordPress in 2008. WordPress quickly became her go-to website platform.

  She is a member of the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP) and an active supporter of various disability organizations. Her passion is to educate web designers using WordPress on the value and ease of inclusive design. Through her long-standing organization, she and her team have built, maintained, evaluated and remediated dozens of WordPress websites to WCAG 2.1 Success Criterion.

  She is active in accessibility and legal conferences and educational venues, regularly speaking on topics related to compliance issues for WordPress websites. She has been invited to present at TechAccessOK and John Slatin AccessU, WordPress Accessibility Day, local WordPress MeetUp groups, and WordCamps. As Founder of wA11yWP, she and her team conduct ongoing educational events. Recently, with two colleagues they started a local MeetUp group to discuss WordPress and Accessibility and have invited renowned speakers on Accessibility topics to be the guest presenters. Sumner was the Speaker Wrangler for WordCamp SantaClarita 2020 and for WordCamp LAX 2020. She is the lead organizer for WordCamp SantaClarita 2021. In 2020, she recruited an exciting team and participated in the Knowbility Accessibility Internet Rally (AIR) 2020.

  She is known for her engaging presentations: “Compliance, Traps & Trolls”, “The Ease of Accessibility and WordPress”, “Remediating a WordPress Site” and “Building a Remediation Team”.

  She is owned by a rescue dog named Tigger, his rescue cat, Merlin and their new yet-to-be-named kitty rescued from a busy highway.

• Taylor Arndt

  

  

  My name is Taylor Arndt and I am the owner of Taylors Accessibility Services LLC where I help companies get online and become more inclusive. Being blind since birth, I understand the importance of accessibility for all.

  II started this company in the height of the pandemic after getting let go from my university job where I helped students with technical support.

• Topher DeRosia

  

  

  Topher DeRosia is Senior WordPress Architect at Camber Creative. He brings more than 25 years of experience as a web developer, over a decade of which has been spent building out WordPress sites. In addition, Topher curates http://HeroPress.com. Fun fact: Topher was building web pages before CSS and Javascript were invented.

  He currently lives in Grand Rapids, MI with his wife Cate and two daughters, Ema and Sophia. You can find Topher on Twitter (@topher1kenobe) talking about e-commerce, web development, general technology, and culture. He’s also a regular on the Make WordPress and Post Status Slack channels.

• Toren Ajk

  

  I’m the founder of TAC Marketing Group – a digital marketing agency specializing in SEO, CRO, and paid media. Over the years we’ve worked with a variety of clients, including Lexus, Lending Club, and Backblaze. Formerly I was CMO of Line2 where I drove over 1.5 million downloads of the app and grew annual revenue from 0- $10 million. In 2016 we started developing a native AMP framework for WordPress and have since developed a number of themes and plugins available at https://ampwptools.com/

• Trevor Calabro

  

  

  Trevor is a Nielson Norman Group master certified UX professional with more than 15 years of experience. He has worked as the lead UX strategist for multi-billion dollar tech conglomerates, mid-sized software companies, and startups alike.

  Trevor has the unique combination of being an analytical thinker with a data science background that loves psychology and is a self-proclaimed people person.

  Trevor currently works at Aten Design Group. Outside of work, he helps Penn State University’s pedagogy advisory board create the next generation of user experience curriculum and conducts pro bono user research for local nonprofits. Trevor lives at Penn State University with his spouse and two children.

• William Jackson

  

  William has participated in the WordPress community since 2010. He has spoken at multiple WordCamps in the United States, Canada, and Central America about sharing ‘your’ voice on the WordPress platform.

  Using WordPress to increase ‘your’ digital presence with blogging, how to increase ‘your’ influence with your content. William is an advocate for volunteering in your local community to share the wonderful community of WordCamp and KidsCamp conferences.

  Teaching with his wife Aida Correa-Jackson STEAM education in KidsCamp in the United States and Globally.

  William is a proud graduate of the historic HBCU South Carolina State University with a Bachelors in Education and a graduate of Webster University with a Masters’s in Educational Technology.