Rob Sheridan is a Grammy-nominated artist and creative director whose work explores thecollision of art, technology, experimentation, and visual culture. Moving between live performance, photography, video, design, and experimental media, he is known for transforming unconventional processes, technological artifacts, and creative accidents into bold, immersive visual worlds.
His recent work includes large-scale concert visuals for Pearl Jam's 2024-2025 Dark Matter World Tour and Garbage's 2026 tour, and visual design for Naughty Dog's upcoming PlayStationtitle Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. He is also completing his debut independent art book,funded by fans with more than $120,000 on Kickstarter, while developing new work inexperimental media, technology, and multidisciplinary art.Sheridan was an early pioneer of glitch art and spent 15 years as creative director for Nine Inch Nails and Trent Reznor, helping define an influential visual language across album design, digital storytelling, film, and live production.
His work from that period earned two Grammy nominationsand included the landmark Year Zero alternate reality experience. His wider body of work includes the DC/Vertigo science-fiction graphic novel High Level, fashionand design projects, and work in emerging music technology. Sheridan also presents talks and workshops exploring experimentation, creative risk, world-building, collaboration, and the possibilities that emerge when artists refuse to stay inside a single medium.
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Tara Buck is Senior Director of Publisher Partnerships at StackAdapt, leading publisher development and strategy across CTV and audio. A longtime AdTech leader, Tara has spent more than a decade navigating the industry from nearly every angle, with roles at The Trade Desk, Magnite, and SpotX spanning both the buy and sell sides. That breadth of experience gives her a unique perspective on where programmatic media has been, where it’s headed, and what it takes to build partnerships that move the industry forward.
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Maren Hamilton is a marketing strategist known for helping iconic brands build communities that actually care. She’s led social strategy and creator programs for brands like The North Face and Starbucks, developing campaigns that earn attention, spark conversation, and drive real business impact. Her work has been featured in outlets like AdAge and recognized across the industry for its blend of creativity, connection, and cultural relevance.
She’s spoken at events including eTail, Social Media Week and Creator Economy Live plus joined conversations on podcasts like Backcountry Marketing and Radical Content, where she shares insights on the future of social, influencer marketing, and brand storytelling. Today, she leads marketing at Popfly, a fast‑growing startup connecting brands with adventure creators.
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Megan Woodruff is a Design Technologist with a decade of experience across start-ups, consultancies, and large-scale tech companies. Dual-educated in software engineering and human centered design, she’s passionate about bridging the gap between user-driven strategy and technical execution, and is always game to learn a new technology or methodology in the process. She currently works at the New York Times, where she builds prototypes that influence product strategy across video, audio, and written media experiences. She lives and works in Seattle, where she enjoys knitting, playing volleyball, and hiking with her family and friends.
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Adam Constantine is the Founder and CEO of ACE Creatives, a full-service social media agency crafting digital content to maximize ROI and brand affinity. With a decade of experience, Adam has curated captivating content for creators, brands, and Fortune 500 companies, including MrBeast, Amazon, and Champion. Since founding ACE Creatives in 2017, Adam has created digital strategies, social media, and full-scale productions across the retail/e-commerce, hospitality, and automotive industries. A 3x Telly Awards recipient, with a 6’8″ frame and an ever-growing shoe collection, Adam is passionate about the art of digital storytelling and strategies for building a powerful social media presence that connects brands with audiences that matter the most.
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Torrey Podmajersky helps teams solve business and customer problems using UX and content. She has written inclusive and accessible consumer and professional experiences for Google, OfferUp, and Microsoft. She has also written two books: Strategic Writing for UX and UX Skills for Business Strategy. Torrey takes clients, speaks, teaches, and mentors UX folks worldwide.
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Dusty Henry is a writer, producer, and editor based in Seattle. He leads editorial at KEXP and co-creates stories about music and culture. His work has appeared in Stereogum, NPR Music, and Pigeons & Planes. He also writes the newsletter Another Thought. Dusty is also the author of ‘20th Century Ambient,’ a book that explores the history and influence of ambient music through writing, comics, and illustrations. The book is out now via Bloomsbury Books.
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Richa Nevatia is a marketing strategist working across growth, lifecycle marketing, brand and customer experience. She is the Founder of Strong Dori, a marketing agency that serves clients across the PNW. She works across e-commerce, customer acquisition, retention, content and brand strategy for growing consumer brands and non-profits.
Her approach to marketing combines storytelling with experimentation, segmentation and behavioral data to understand not just whether marketing performs, but why customers respond to it. She holds a Master's in Communication Leadership from the University of Washington, where her research examining consumer acceptance of generative AI in healthcare received the department's 2025 Communication Research Award. She also won the 2024 Screen Summit for the Best Strategy Project and earned an MBA from MICA in 2020.
She speaks 5 languages, has lived and worked across Eurpoe, Asia and the US, and enjoys pursuing creative hobbies. Outside of work, you can often find her reading, hiking or swimming.
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Rob Harrigan is a designer and creative director, 21 years in. He's led design at Chase, Meta, IBM Watson, Code & Theory, and Ogilvy — building design systems, AI design experiences, brand identities, and immersive environments, often on the same week.
At Chase he led a wholesale design system reinvention and built the AI governance system that carries design direction to thousands of designers. At IBM he was a design principal on the Watson Experience Centers, designing AI experiences for 290° immersive rooms. Before that, a decade in advertising and brand, including the Cabela's rebrand and campaign work for Hellmann's and American Express.
He's a generalist by conviction, not accident. The through-line across two decades is that craft and judgment can be systematized without being handed off — the discipline scales, the authorship doesn't. He has spoken at Interaction 20 in Milan and HOW Design Live.
Off the clock he builds things nobody asked for: a desktop robot companion, a self-documenting portfolio site, a pickle brand. Making beats talking.
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Carina is a Seattle based Senior UX Designer @ Wind River, where she designs experiences for complex developer tools. A UW alum with background in human-centered design and engineering, she loves understanding people and creating experiences that improve their work and lives. When she's not designing, you can find her taking photos with her film camera, searching for a good slice of pizza, or reading a mystery novel.
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Chris is the founder of DNW, a media agency working with small to medium size businesses. Originally from Detroit, he has spent over a decade in Seattle crafting media plans that help both drive awareness and action.
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Rodrigo Stockebrand is Group Director of AI Optimization at AKQA, where he helps global brands like Nike, Starbucks, Delta and others win visibility in AI-driven search. Over a 20-year career in organic search he has also led global SEO/AEO teams at Stripe, NASA, Amazon, Pfizer, and Publicis Groupe - and consulted directly with American Express, Samsung, Carnival Cruise Line, Hugo Boss, and dozens of others. His work has also helped acquire more than 10B+ new users and rank for more than 20m+ keywords. A frequent speaker and Harvard Business School guest lecturer on AI search, Rod now spends his days testing what actually moves the needle in answer engines (which can be found in his new O'Reilly book on Answer Engine Optimization).
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Leslie Grandy
University of Washington Foster School of Business, Executive Education
Lead Executive in Residence
Leslie Grandy has more than 25 years of experience leading teams to innovate and deliver game-changing products at publicly traded Fortune 500 companies, including T-Mobile, Apple, Best Buy, and Amazon. She co-authored a patent for the first video subscription service in the early 2000’s long before Netflix or Hulu, and launched the first Android phone while serving as a VP at T-Mobile. Currently, she advises startups, runs corporate workshops, and serves as the Lead Executive in Residence for the Product Management Leadership Accelerator, a program she co-created with the University of Washington Foster School of Business Executive Education team. Her book, “Creative Velocity: Propelling Breakthrough Ideas in the Age of Generative AI” was published by Wiley in May 2025. Her podcast, “What If with Leslie Grandy,” is available on all major podcast platforms.
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Bennett Nestok is a designer, educator, and creative strategist who believes the fastest path to a great idea sometimes starts with a terrible one. He teaches interaction design and creative technology and has worked across UX, digital products, creative direction, and visual communication. His work spans academia, nonprofit and civic projects, and creative experimentation, including projects exploring how humor, play, and unconventional thinking can make complex ideas more accessible. A former editorial cartoonist for The Harvard Crimson, Bennett has long been interested in the intersection of visual communication, absurdity, and human behavior. He holds a Master of Education from Harvard University and a Master of Design from the University of Cincinnati. As a teacher and practitioner, he encourages people to question assumptions, embrace experimentation, and approach creative problems with curiosity rather than fear of failure.
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While classically trained in painting and drawing , Fern (they/them) has spent the past 5 years working in various print forms, most notably Risography. As a child, they used to find bugs in their backyard, run inside with them gingerly cupped in their palms, and try to draw them in their room, a practice in placemaking and observational wonder that has informed much of their artistic journey.
They're drawn to analyzing social environments and their place in them, constructing and deconstructing reality from a lens of queerness and mental illness. Fern's work is informed by questions of normality and naturality: who and what is deemed normal or natural, and what is the impact of that arbitrary judgement?
As the co-founder of Swan Meadow, Fern runs a Risograph studio and small press publishing work by queer artists.
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Lauren Ridgley is the CEO of Left Hand Agency, a Portland-based media planning and buying agency specializing in CPG advertising built to drive measurable in-store sales. Her team runs media across the full mix for CPG brands, including paid social, CTV, programmatic, OOH, paid search, and retail media, managing the strategy behind that mix for brands navigating the shift from single-channel optimization to integrated brand and performance investment. Before founding Left Hand, Lauren was an Emmy Award-winning marketing director in TV and entertainment, a background that now shapes how she approaches brand-building within performance media. Left Hand's media buying work on behalf of CPG brands has been industry-recognized with multiple awards. She's a vocal advocate for Byron Sharp and Ehrenberg-Bass-informed marketing science, and a frequent speaker and panelist in the Pacific Northwest marketing community through NextNW. Lauren writes and publishes CPG-focused industry analysis, including her newsletter series and commentary on retail media measurement, and has spoken on panels including Indie Agency News.
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As a designer and creative director, Loren Judah works across mediums to create design-driven experiences rooted in storytelling and connection. His portfolio spans commercials, branded content, interactive work, title sequences, and graphics packages, with clients ranging from legacy brands to tentpole IP and AAA gaming studios. Drawing on a background in traditional filmmaking, Loren bridges cinematic storytelling and interactive experiences, often exploring how emerging technologies shape how we see and engage with the world. At WAR, he has led campaigns and experiences for clients including Epic Games, Meta, Riot Games, Nike, Coca-Cola, and the U.S. Air Force. Prior to joining WAR, Loren was an art director at Superfad, where he played a key creative role on campaigns for Sony, Nike, NFL on FOX, and Netflix.
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Megan Woodruff is a Design Technologist with a decade of experience across start-ups, consultancies, and large-scale tech companies. Dual-educated in software engineering and human centered design, she’s passionate about bridging the gap between user-driven strategy and technical execution, and is always game to learn a new technology or methodology in the process. She currently works at the New York Times, where she builds prototypes that influence product strategy across video, audio, and written media experiences. She lives and works in Seattle, where she enjoys knitting, playing volleyball, and hiking with her family and friends.
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Alfred "Fredo" Adarkwah is a growth and operations executive who works across two houses: a strategy, design, and brand marketing consultancy, and a digital marketing and product studio. Same operator, two very different rooms, and one operating discipline underneath both.
His work spans music, entertainment, pharma, sports, and lifestyle brands, with collaborators including SZA, Summer Walker, Kanye West, D'USSÉ, the NBA, Iyanu, Understood.org, the Obama Foundation, and Nike. He owns the full arc of a client relationship: the first conversation, the proposal that turns it into real work, and the maintenance that keeps it alive long after launch. His approach is relationship-first and value-first — win the work by being authentic and genuinely useful, then scale it with systems without ever losing the human on the other side.
As a first-generation Ghanaian-American, Fredo didn't take the atypical path, as he treats being present as the ultimate experience. Through this lens, he built and operates an internal AI agent workforce, named agents with mandatory human sign-off, so speed never costs any company its judgment or its trust. Originally from Massachusetts, based in Seattle.
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Mike Hayward is Chief Creative Officer and Partner at Copacino Fujikado, an independent creative and media agency. Mike brings a collaborative, idea-led approach to brands like REI, Ste Michelle Wine Estates, and Visit Seattle. With 20+ years of experience and a passion for mentoring, he balances emotional storytelling with strategic clarity, ensuring work connects, rather than shouts.
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Ellie Caldwell is Head of Strategy at Copacino Fujikado. She has experience bringing big creative ideas to life in partnership with multidisciplinary teams. Ellie is an expert in qualitative and quantitative research design, brand identity and positioning, product marketing, brand messaging, brand architecture and brand health management/improvement.
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Cory LeBihan is a rising integrated marketing leader with more than 12 years owning client relations and growth strategies across a wealth of B2B lead gen and D2C customer acquisition accounts spanning Pharmaceutical, Real Estate, Insurance, SaaS, and Logistics services. Currently he is GM at Seattle-based independent agency, Add3, leading cross-departmental teams and building agile, durable growth systems. He also likes to go outside.
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