UCDA Design Conference

Ellen’s lifelong fascination with people and the amazing outcomes created by teams led her to work on five different continents. Her experience ranges from mediating public policy meetings to promoting international peace and friendship through cultural exchanges. She has designed and taught skill-based courses in canoeing and kayaking as well as developed and facilitated multi-year leadership programs for international teams. For 10 years, Ellen concentrated on developing high-performance management teams for the Summer and Winter Olympic Games. She is a master event planner and happiest when concocting a new experience that involves lots of people.

Originally from Louisiana, Ellen now calls Durango, Colorado home, with her husband Michael and son Nathaniel. Ellen is an avid runner and whitewater paddler, and has been known to cook a righteous jambalaya.

FUN FACT: Ellen practices cartwheels several times a year so she will still be able to do them when she is ninety.

Dr. Ishani Banerji joined Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado in 2020 as an assistant professor of marketing. She focuses on understanding how consumers influence one another, particularly through interpersonal communication. Her research has been published in journals such as Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes and the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research. Prior to coming to Fort Lewis, she worked at the University of Texas San Antonio and Georgetown University. She earned her Ph.D. from Indiana University in 2013.

FUN FACT: Ishani is a bit of a nomad and has never lived in a place for more than five years.

Keith is a design consultant, developer, educator, speaker, and author. His work has taken him throughout North America, Africa, Europe, and Asia. During his 37-year career, his clients have included Adobe, Apple, Target, Oracle, and the United Nations. He is the author of several popular titles for LinkedIn Learning, Adobe Press, and CreativePro. Find him at gilbertconsulting.com and on Twitter @gilbertconsult.

Celine is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Albuquerque, New Mexico focused primarily on drawing and printmaking. Her work draws influence from ecology, processed-based drawing, and performance art. She is a 17th-generation New Mexican and is deeply inspired by the rhythms, patterns, and connections found in the surrounding landscape.

Celine also works as a graphic designer and illustrator and runs her own practice: Off Grid Studio. Her work as an artist is always in conversation with her design work and she enjoys being able to cross-pollinate those skillsets.

FUN FACT: Celine does tarot readings and illustrated her own tarot deck

Photographer and filmmaker, Evan is a freelancer based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His work is focused on commercial and editorial content for the outdoor industry. He is an avid cyclist, climber, backpacker, and snowboarder who combines his passions with creativity to craft authentic stories in the mountains.

FUN FACT: Evan has a cat named Fuji after the camera and film company.

Brandi Sea Heft-Kniffin is a native New Mexican with 20+ years of experience as a graphic designer, art and creative director, and design and brand strategist. She helps creatives “discover uncommon inspiration” and produce more captivating design concepts. She believes that every designer deserves a process that will get them past a creative block. Through her podcast, Design Speaks, online course, YouTube channel, and blog, she works to empower designers with the tools they need to stay inspired and create work that gets noticed. She is currently serving as the vice president of the New Mexico chapter for AIGA. In her free time, you will likely find her traveling, collecting inspiration, reading classic literature, discovering new music, or spending time with her husband Kenny, a video producer, and her two kiddos Jasmine and Kaden.

FUN FACT: Brandi loves to rock climb and watch documentaries.

Christiana has spent 19 years designing for hospitals, the US Army, nonprofits, and ski resorts, including 13 years developing the branding for Sipapu Ski Resort and Pajarito Mountain. About three years ago, she made the switch from art direction and design to the account side, where she’s attempting to lighten things up. With a master’s in marketing that has fueled her design career, she’s using her creativity to provide innovation in marketing the ski industry. You’ll often find her outside hiking or reading, or cooking up something delicious both literally and figuratively.

FUN FACT: Christiana once won a two-minute shopping spree through the Montgomery Ward toy department. Have a guess at the best thing she captured in two minutes...

Ellen is the Betty Cooke and William O. Steinmetz Design Chair at MICA. Ellen has authored numerous books on design processes, including Thinking with Type, Graphic Design Thinking, Graphic Design: The New Basics (with Jennifer Cole Phillips), and Extra Bold (with Farah Kafei, Jennifer Tobias, Josh Halstead, Kaleena Sales, Leslie Xia, and Valentina Vergara.) She is Senior Curator of Contemporary Design at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City. Recent exhibitions include The Senses: Design Beyond Vision, Beauty—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial, How Posters Work, and Beautiful Users. Her books Design Is Storytelling and Health Design Thinking (with Dr. Bon Ku) are published by Cooper Hewitt. She received the AIGA Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Jenny left the corporate world where she worked with some of the world’s biggest brands including Dolly Parton, Family Guy, Harley Davidson, Phantom of the Opera, and The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and joined the world of higher ed marketing almost a decade ago. As the Chief Marketing Communications Officer at the University of Montana, Jenny is passionate about raising the profile of the marketing function within higher ed and modernizing the way we market to prospective students—she can talk about inbound marketing all day long. She was honored to be the winner of the 2021 eduweb Summit Award for Industry Excellence. With a strong background and passion for branding, she was a key, the driving force behind The World Needs More Cowboys campaign at the University of Wyoming and the Montana Made. Montana Making. campaign at the University of Montana. Her expertise in branding, marketing strategy, and strategic communications are frequently called upon within the higher ed marketing industry. She finds joy in building teams and helping others grow, as well as flexing her creative muscles whenever she can. Jenny is a graduate of the Reynolds School of Journalism and the University of Nevada and has a Master’s degree in Organizational Leadership from Gonzaga University where her studies focused on the intersection of Servant Leadership and the marketing profession. She’s the host of “The Servant Marketer,” a weekly podcast featuring marketing leaders, marketers, creatives, academics, and entrepreneurs, and shares thoughts on how marketers and leaders can serve first at servantmarketer.co.

FUN FACT: Jenny is a Cruzan.

Mike has contributed creative to over 50 college and university brands. His higher ed capital campaign work alone has helped raise over $7 billion. Prior to joining a higher ed agency—first Ologie, then SimpsonScarborough—he worked in-house at both the Da Camera Society of Mount Saint Mary’s University and at Agency ND in the Office of Public Affairs and Communications at the University of Notre Dame. Higher education clients include Cornell, William & Mary, Cal Poly, Northwestern, the University of Montana, Springfield College, the Wake Forest School of Business, Saint Mary’s College of California, Stanislaus State, the University of Tulsa, Ball State, Seattle University, and Butler University.

In 2017, Mike was SimpsonScarborough’s first creative hire and its first creative director, eventually being promoted to vice president, executive creative director. Since being brought in, the creative department has grown into a full-service agency, its creative division offering brand concepts, tactical executions, media campaigns, video, and digital.

Prior to higher ed, Mike lived and worked in Los Angeles, where he wrote over 10,000 taglines, as well as provided concepts and copy for hundreds of movies, TV shows, and interactive games, including Disney, The Simpsons, Twentieth Century Fox, HBO, and Katie Couric. Mike holds a BBA in marketing from the University of Notre Dame.

Ted Slampyak is a freelance illustrator with over twenty years of professional experience in storyboards, comic strips, and books, and spot illustrations for magazines, posters, and events. His storyboard experience includes work on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, Hello or High Water, and Terminator Salvation.

Ted lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his wife, one of their kids, and some pets. Samples of his work can be found at http://www.storytellersworkshop.com.

FUN FACT: Ted’s comics work includes six years on the long-running newspaper strip (Little Orphan) Annie! Leapin’ lizards!

Dr. Chip Thomas, aka jetsonorama, is a photographer, public artist, and physician who has been working in a small clinic on the Navajo Nation since 1987. There he coordinates the Painted Desert Project which he describes as a community-building dialog that manifests as a constellation of murals painted by artists from the Navajo Nation as well as from around the world.

Chip’s own public artwork consists of enlarged black and white photographs pasted onto structures along the roadside primarily on the Navajo Nation. His motivation is to reflect back to the community the love they’ve shared with him over the years.

Chip was a 2018 Kindle Project gift recipient and in 2020 he was one of a handful of artists chosen by the UN to recognize the 75th anniversary of the UN’s founding. Selected artists are to generate work that contributes to the envisioning and shaping of a more resilient and sustainable future. The UN writes “...right now we are facing the greatest health challenge to the human race in a century. COVID-19 has revealed that a virus can affect not only our physical health but also our ability to cope with the psychological impact in its wake.” Thomas spent 2021 working collaboratively to create art that is a community-based response to the pandemic. He is the 2022 recipient of the UCDA Foundation Krider Prize for Creativity.

Chad “Lil Coyote” Yellowjohn is affiliated with the Shoshone-Bannock and Spokane Tribes. Yellowjohn is a self-taught artist from the age of five and began his digital craft, after graduating from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2019. His art has been featured in art shows internationally, which revolve around Indigenous issues. His artwork would not only be seen on his mom’s fridge, but can be seen throughout the Indigenous country, and has created art for supporters, leaders, musicians, groups, icons, and other creative artists like himself.

FUN FACT: Chad’s favorite Disney character is Goofy, the ultimate loving father.