Mary Baum

This spring Mary Baum is launching RacquetPress a builder of Genesis child themes, full sites and bespoke branding solutions for the tennis industry.Current clients include several tennis pros, two clubs, a regional retailer and a national distributor of ball machines, stringing machines and other court technology. A veteran creative and degreed designer years before the web was born, she’s also built solutions for clients in industries from automotive to technology and ranging in size from the Fortune 500 to the guy who still cuts her husband’s hair.

When the web came along, Mary fell in love. She got a deal on GoLive, started laying out pages and never thought she’d be writing code to build sites. Then came 2007. That year Adobe pulled GoLive from the Creative Suite and shipped Dreamweaver instead. And while lots of folks still think of Dreamweaver as a wysiwyg package, it in fact had become a full-bore IDE. For Mary, it was a wakeup call – time to start learning to write real CSS and html. At the tender age of 47. In 2010, it became equally obvious that it was time to learn WordPress. So she did, and found the WordPress community.

Mary has been on the organizing team for WordCamp St. Louis since they started in 2011. She speaks several times a year on design and development at WordCamps around the country. She’s also launching the Antelope Valley (California) WordPress Meetup. Mary’s husband, Dick Moomaw, works with fighter planes for Boeing. They have two grown children and a variable number of cats.

Sarah Benoit

Living in the mountains of North Carolina for 16 years, Sarah Benoit is Director of Training at JB Media Group, LLC and the Founder and Lead Instructor of the JB Media Institute, an Internet marketing school based in Asheville. She is owner of a small business web design firm – Creative Original, Inc. and she teaches continuing education classes at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College. Since 2006 Sarah has been teaching classes, leading workshops, and speaking at conferences about SEO, social media marketing, public relations, online advertising, WordPress, personal branding, usability, Internet marketing strategy, website tracking, and more. In addition to her entrepreneurial pursuits, Sarah’s passions include latin dancing, astrology, film, history, and environmentalism.

Nile Flores

Nile Flores is a long time WordPress designer and Developer. While she grew up a military brat, she’s settled in the St. Louis metro east region. Nile blogs at Blondish.net, where she covers topics on WordPress, Blogging, SEO, Social Media, and Web Design.

She also loves contributing to WordPress, and that includes speaking at WordCamps across the United States. She loves helping people and supporting Open Source projects.

In other news, Nile is a proud support member at Team Yoast. She also runs a 8,000 member Facebook Group dedicated to helping WordPressers, called All About WordPress. Nile is also the 2014 and 2015 Community Choice Winner at the Small Business Influencer Awards, hosted by Small Business Trends. When Nile isn’t knee deep in coding and design, or traditional Okinawan karate, she’s spending time with her son, who is also a WordPress user.

Lisa Ghisolf

Lisa Ghisolf is Gizmo Creative Factory, with 18+ years in print, web & email design, and 13 years in business. She’s worked with big and small agencies alike, creating print work and websites for Kraft, Clear Channel, Allstate & many corporations & organizations. Instead of just putting out fires, she’s now building robust WordPress sites and training clients on website management.

Kevin Koehler

Kevin is a Community Guardian for Automattic. He helps defend WordPress.com bloggers from bogus legal threats, and works to make the web safer, freer, and open for all. In past lives, he could be found at the Sunlight Foundation or as one cofounder of CoPress. He currently resides in Washington, DC, and would like to hear your best BBQ recipe.

Deena Mayne

Deena Mayne grew up in a small surf beach town along San Diego’s north coast. She began her art career at the rip ‘ole age of 10, as a layout artist for her father who was an advertising executive. By 17, she was creating t-shirt designs for local surf shops. Shortly after, Deena began creating logos and other branding items local businesses. She has worked as an editorial illustrator, creative concept developer, patent illustrator, and all around graphic designer. In the mid-90’s Deena began designing websites. In 2005, she created her first WordPress site. She immediately feel in love with WP, migrated all her clients to WP sites, and created Freebird Media which designs, develops and maintains WordPress content management based websites. Deena attended her first WordCamp in San Francisco in 2007 with just a small handful of other WordPress enthusiasts from around the world. “It has been an amazing 12 years! I have enjoyed watching both the WordPress community and the software develop over the years.”

Adam Silver

Adam teaches a WP101 course at the local adult school, presents a monthly WordPress seminar at SBDC, runs the SouthBay WordPress Meetup and produces a weekly podcast over at kitchensinkwp.com. In spare time he hangs out with his wickedly cool 3 kids & wife, and makes some really bad puns, since someone has to.

Mark Uraine

Mark works at Automattic as a designer on core and WordPress.org. He enjoys researching the philosophical and cultural differences between eastern and western thought and how it drives people’s decisions in life, and then applying that to his own decisions in design. When he’s not building solutions, he’s exploring life with his wife and three kids. He loves anything related to health and nutrition, and created an iOS app called Eat Your Greens encouraging healthier food choices. You can find him on Twitter @mapk.