We are thrilled to present the WordCamp Long Beach 2019 lineup of speakers.
Steve Zehngut
Steve founded Zeek Interactive in 1995 and he has been the creative technologist behind the Huntington Beach based company since its inception.
Steve is the organizer of the OC WordPress Meetup and has helped build the community to over 2,100 members. He is a two-time lead organizer of WordCamp Orange County, and has served on the organizing committee for WordCamp US and on the organizing team for WordCamp Los Angeles.
Steve is a frequent panelist and speaker at industry trade shows, including SXSW, the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) and various WordCamps. He is a member of the Producer’s Guild, a past Adobe Advisory Board Member, and a past Advisory Board member at the Art Institute. In addition, Steve has participated as a mentor in the American Film Institute eTV Workshop. He has also taught interactive development courses at University of California Irvine, University of Southern California, and California State University Long Beach. Steve has a BA in Film from Cal State Northridge.
Gabriel Mays
Using WordPress for 10 years, currently Head of WordPress at GoDaddy. Prior to GoDaddy founded two WordPress startups. Prior to that was a Captain in the Marine Corps, spending two years between Iraq and Afghanistan operating on small teams.
Brett Dunst
A passionate communications strategist and fierce branding advocate, Brett Dunst believes that a brand’s unique voice and tone can often be its most valuable differentiator in a crowded marketplace. Having managed marketing, corporate communications, press/analyst relations, and more at DreamHost for nearly two decades, Brett is passionate about brand storytelling.
Brett currently serves as Vice President of Corporate Communications at DreamHost where he oversees communication strategy and public policy.
Jonathan Wold
Jonathan Wold has been living and breathing WordPress for 14 years. He’s been building websites himself since he was 12 and began doing so professionally at 17. He started working with WordPress back in 2005 and has been full-time in WordPress ever since. After a wide range of experiences in a wide range of companies over the past decade he’s back to where it all started – a company of one.
He has a strong personal mission, to help make WordPress the best it can be as an operating system for the Open Web.
Natalie MacLees
Natalie MacLees is a web developer and UI designer. She is founder + principal of Digita11y, an accessibility-focused interactive agency. She is the author of jQuery for Designers, now in its second edition. She was the lead organizer for WordCamp Los Angeles 2013 and 2014. She founded Website Weekend LA, a 48-hour hackathon matching web professionals with nonprofits in need to websites. Along with Nathan Tyler, she’s a founder of N Squared – a tiny software company that has made Draw Attention, Simply Schedule Appointments, Plugin Detective, and other awesome WordPress plugins. She makes her online home at nataliemac.com.
Andrea Middleton
Andrea supports WordPress community organizers, helping them plan community events (meetups, WordCamps, and more!) that inspire people to do more with WordPress, connect the WordPress community, and contribute to the WordPress project. She cooks great food, loves to talk about wine, and knits a mean scarf.
Evan Volgas
Evan is a Licensed Caffeine Therapist & Data Geek who builds data teams and leaders.
Mike Demo
Former MousePlanet MouseStation Podcast co-host, Mike “Demo” Demopoulos is a lover of open source first, specific tools later. Before coming to BoldGrid as a community evangelist, Mike spent years building a strong client base in the financial and insurance industries. He believes in sharing his business acumen and marketing insight and has spoken on various open source topics including WordPress and Joomla! (where he was a board member) in addition to marketing related talks which include A/B testing content. Be sure to say hi to Mike on Twitter at @MPMike.
Roy Sivan
Roy has been using WordPress since the early days. Nowadays he is a senior software engineer that specializes in front end technologies at The Walt Disney Company. He loves seeing how far he can take development and think outside of the box to build new and crazy things, or combine bleeding edge tech with WordPress. He’s also socially awkward, but apparently people say hi to him all the time anyway.
Diana Thompson
Diana began using WordPress while working as a nonprofit arts administrator over 10 years ago, beginning her transition to WordPress developer. She works with businesses, nonprofits, and agencies through her company, Like the Goddess. When she’s not behind the computer screen, you’ll find her organizing her Tiny Free Farm Stand or hiking in the redwoods. Her online abode is diana.fyi.
Anastassia Zukova
Anastassia practices design research, UX, UI, and traditional Graphic Design as part of her position of a Creative Director at a company she founded, GRIDDL. She has taught IxD at Cal State Pomona last year and has since been invited to teach at other Cal State Universities. She is currently in her second term serving as a Content Director on the Board of AIGA, the professional organization for design. In her spare time, she advances her skills, learns new ones, and educates herself on the new trends and happenings in the industry.
Linda Gunn
Linda began her company in her living room in the 1980s. She was just a single mother who needed to find a way to take care of her children. And now, her WordPress agency has 35 full-time employees working out of a beautiful two-story office in North Long Beach. And one of her children works with her.
Gunn | Jerkens specializes in websites and marketing for real estate and architecture firms in North America. They build all their sites using WordPress. They host the Long Beach Chapter of Los Angeles WordPress Meetup every other Tuesday evening and have hosted Uncoded Meetup events in the past.
Besides supporting the local open source community, Linda is an enthusiastic advocate for the arts. Her office is a museum of installations and sculpture. Come to the Long Beach Chapter of Los Angeles WordPress Meetup to tour her collection!
Chris Reynolds
Chris is a Senior Engineer at Human Made. Before joining Human Made, Chris has been a Developer Lead for WebDevStudios, an author of online training videos for Pluralsight, a developer, project manager and support technician at Event Espresso, a freelancer, and a Specialty Team member at Whole Foods. Though vegan, he can still be snobby about cheese and chocolate. Chris maintains a number of open source plugins on GitHub and WordPress.org and has been involved in WordCamp Salt Lake City since 2011.
When not coding, he may be found cheering for his hometown National Women’s Soccer League team, Utah Royals FC.
Ramuel Gall
Ram is currently a QA Engineer at Wordfence, leveraging his ability to break things (usually by accident) to help ensure that they work correctly for others. He’s also a GIAC certified Web Application Penetration Tester, and has spent a lot of time cleaning infected WordPress sites and helping site owners recover from compromises. In his spare time he likes reading (mostly fiction), building odd electronic projects, tinkering with his car, and even going outside during the half of the year when Arizona is habitable.
Sabrina Zeidan
WordPress scaling fan, entrepreneur, swimmer, and proud WordCamp Kyiv co-organizer, Sabrina helps development teams in implementing WordPress Multisite and getting the most out of its functionality. She is fond of performance optimization and loves fast loading websites. Some of her experience is shared in her blog sabrinazeidan.com.
Justice Anderson
Justice is a former college professor who was tasked with selecting and teaching a content management system which brought him to WordPress. Justice has been working with WordPress on and off since 2009. After a brief time away Justice is reigniting his love affair with WordPress and plans to launch several new websites this summer and fall – stay tuned! Outside of technology Justice enjoys being the number one fan at his kids sporting events and learning about nutrition and fitness.
Christina Hills
Christina Hills, the creator of the Website Creation Workshop™, has been passionately teaching WordPress non-techie small business owners, authors, experts, coaches and consultants. She puts the fun into teaching technology and empowers business owners to be in full control of their marketing and online presence. She has been running her online WordPress training program to an international audience for the past 12 years, and is often seen at events as an expert speaker teaching on a variety of topics such as email marketing, membership sites, and marketing, all with a focus on WordPress. Before becoming an entrepreneur, Christina Hills worked as a digital artist for the network promotions division of NBC-TV, and then as a senior technical director in the Feature Film Division at George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic with film credits for Star Wars, Jurassic Park, and ET the re-release.
Joe A Simpson Jr.
During sun-soaked days he works at Metro LA, one of the largest transit agencies in the country, fighting the good fight to ease gridlock around Los Angeles County. When their lead developer and CSS specialist both left to pursue other opportunities, Joe inherited a Headway-themed design (sans child theme) and the rest is history. Over ten years later, he manages a WordPress blog network consisting of dozen project-specific or transit news sites and growing.
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