Mark Auerbach
Mark G. Auerbach is Principal of Mark G. Auerbach Public Relations, which has provided strategic planning and hands-on campaign management for a variety of marketing, advertising, public relations, special events and development projects since 1987. Mark’s clients have included broadcast media programs and outlets, performing arts organizations, travel organizations and programs, authors, musicians, and educational institutions. Some of his current clients include: Dramatic Health’s Game Changers in Medicine podcast series; The Musicians of the Springfield Symphony Orchestra (MOSSO); Berkshire Film and Media Collaborative; The Jazz Ensembles at Mount Holyoke College’s The Big Broadcast!, and Gaslight Entertainment’s Westfield Concerts Series. Some of his previous clients include: The Capitol Steps, the national political musical satire group; New England Public Radio; Says You!, the public radio quiz show; Cross-Culture Travel; and The Rouse Company’s Arts in the MarketPlace. He has also worked with musicians Kevin Rhodes, Mike Thornton, and Steven Schoenberg, and authors Victor Acquista, Harriet Scott Chessman, Jeanne Yocum, and Jeannie and Mark Gionfriddo. Mark learned his craft on-the-job in a progressive series of positions at nationally known cultural organizations such as Wolf Trap (Washington, DC); Houston Grand Opera and Houston Ballet; Connecticut Ballet; Springfield (MA) Symphony Orchestra; Greater Miami Opera, and StageWest (MA). He is also a working journalist, as “Arts Beat” columnist and theatre reporter for The Westfield News, producer of Athenaeum Spotlight and producer and host of On The Mark and ArtsBeat Radio/TV on 89.5fm/WSKB and WCPC15; and Pioneer Valley Radio. He is a columnist for the award-winning Succeeding in Small Business. A native of Longmeadow, MA, Mark studied at Northfield Mount Hermon School, American University, and the Yale School of Drama For links to Mark’s print articles, radio broadcasts, and client activities, visit Random Notes From A P.R. Guy: http://mgauerbach.blogspot.com/ 

Mark can be found on social media:
Facebook: Mark G. Auerbach Public Relations
LinkedIn: Mark G. Auerbach
Twitter and Instagram: @mgauerbach

Jeffrey Dreisbach
Jeffrey Dreisbach received his BFA degree from Wayne State University in Michigan. He studied Theatre Performance in London and subsequently moved to New York where he accumulated theatre, film and television acting credits for over 20 years. Notable performances include film roles in Splash, Die Hard 3, The Thomas Crown Affair. For TV, Jeffrey was Norman Van Buren in the soap opera, Another World and appeared in many television commercials and voice over's. His last Broadway appearance was as Lt. Kendrick in Aaron Sorkin's A FEW GOOD MEN which he performed over 500 times. Jeffrey joined McCorkle Casting as a casting partner 10 years ago and has contributed to Broadway, Off-Broadway, Film and Television casting. McCorkle casting has cast over 50 Broadway and 60 Off Broadway productions, 65 feature films and countless television projects. His book on Voice-overs, Conversation Pieces Out of the Studio, is currently being used in several BFA and MFA training programs for actors. Jeffrey is the podcast host of "Casting Actors Cast" the podcast for actors to learn more about the business. It is heard weekly around the world with over 60,000 downloads and can be found on any podcast provider.

Daniel Elihu Kramer
Daniel Elihu Kramer became Producing Artistic Director of Chester Theatre Company in fall of 2015, after four years as Associate Artistic Director, and produced his first season in 2016. At CTC, he has directed ten plays, including Tiny Beautiful Things, and the Berkshire Theatre Award winners The Aliens and Every Brilliant Thing. In 2011, CTC produced his play Pride@Prejudice, and in 2016 CTC premiered his play My Jane. (CTC’s production of Pride@Prejudice transferred to Capital Rep in 2012.) He works nationally as a theatre director and playwright, and as a film director. He is Professor of Theatre and a member of the Film and Media Studies program at Smith College. Daniel’s CTC productions of The Turn of the Screw and The Amish Project were named by the Berkshire Eagle as among the Best Plays of their respective years, and he was named one of each season’s Notable Directors. He received the Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Production for A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Boston Theatre Works, and his production of The Pillowman at the Contemporary American Theatre Company received awards for Best Production and Best Direction. His first feature film, Kitchen Hamlet, a contemporary setting of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, won multiple awards as an official selection at film festivals throughout the U.S. His short film Recently, Long Ago premiered in 2015 at the Palm Springs International Short Film Festival. 

Kramer’s play play Pride@Prejudice is published by Playscripts. His adaptations of Babar and of James Thurber’s Many Moons were commissioned and produced by Phoenix Theatre Company. His play Love Suicide was workshopped in a residency at Cleveland Public Theatre and at Boston Theatre Works. He was a visiting artist at the Wexner Center for the Arts, which supported the editing of Kitchen Hamlet.

Kramer holds an MFA in Directing from Yale School of Drama and a BA from Haverford College, and is a member of the Society for Stage Directors and Choreographers (SDC) and the Dramatists Guild. He was a Founding Artistic Director of Salt Lake Shakespeare, Associate Artistic Director of Spiral Stage, and assistant to the Artistic Director of Circle Repertory Theatre. Kramer was also drama editor for the Kenyon Review. As a director, dramaturg, and musician, he has worked with playwrights including Bekah Brunstetter, Bill Cain, Julia Cho, Wendy MacLeod, Eric Henry Sanders, Julian Sheppard, and Elizabeth Wong. Previous teaching includes Kenyon College (where he was chair of Dance and Theatre), Bowdoin College, and Fordham University at Lincoln Center.

http://chestertheatre.org/daniel-elihu-kramer/

Janine Fondan
Janine Fondon, Assistant Professor and Chair of Undergraduate Communications at Bay Path University, brings experiences in corporations -- ABC-TV, CBS-TV, Digital Equipment Corporation, BankBoston (now Bank of America)-- and a range of nonprofits from the American Heart Association to the Springfield Museums. With dozens of awards and mentions in the press, Fondon is noted for bringing the realities of the intersectional world into the classroom, boardroom, and living room. She prepares educators, business leaders, and students for life in a changing world through her national program, the On the Move Forum to Advance Women, and a range of DEI experiences. 

Fondon also leads by 'DEI' example with her front-page public relations counsel and journalistic contributions to news outlets. She recently curated a museum exhibit at the Springfield Museums (MA), Voices of Resilience: the Intersection of Women on the Move, that now travels regionally and nationally to inspire and inform audiences about the intersection of our collective diverse history. 

As entrepreneurs, she and her husband Tom Fondon co-founded a direct email service and website -- UnityFirst.com, which focuses on diversity-related, inclusion-inspired, and equity-minded local, regional, and national news. With a 25-year legacy, UnityFirst.com has become one of the longest-running, independent, Black-owned, women-led DEI news sites serving an inclusive audience. 

Born and raised in New York City, Janine earned her undergraduate degree in Sociology and Anthropology at Colgate University. She received her master’s degree in Communications and Business/Media Ecology from New York University. 

Portfolio site: www.janinefondon.com
Twitter: @janine fondon
Facebook/LinkedIn: Janine Fondon
Website: www.UnityFirst.com

Andrae Green
Andrae Green is a painter whose work explores the nuances of the collective consciousness that has been shaped by time, mythology and memory. Green was born in Kingston, Jamaica where he attended the Edna Manley School for the Visual and Performing Arts. Soon after in 2006, Green was awarded a full scholarship grant sponsored by the Jamaican government and the Chase Fund to obtain his MFA in Painting at the New York Academy of Art. In 2011, he was awarded a residency at the CAC Troy, New York. Andrae Green’s paintings have been shown internationally in the US, Jamaica, Canada, China, and France. In 2012 he was one of the first two artists chosen to represent Jamaica in the Beijing Biennale. In 2013, Green was selected as a part of the American delegation that represented the US at the Salon de Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, at the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris, France. In 2019 he was an artist in residence at Experience Jamaique in Geneva Switzerland. Green’s paintings are included in many private collections around the world. In 2017 his piece “Acquiescence I” was acquired by the National Museum of China. He currently lives and works in Western Massachusetts.

Nayana LaFond
Nayana LaFond is a full time artist and artivist (Art-Activist) working in a variety of media including but not limited to painting, photography and sculpture. Her work can be seen in museum and private collections around the world. Nayana has been curating for over 15 years including as Chief Curator for The Whitney Center for the arts and Liberal Arts Gallery. Nayana is on the board of directors for Artist Organized Art, Be The Change and several councils for Indigenous Arts in Massachusetts. She has written several published articles on art and culture. Her current work "Portraits in RED" has reached wide audiences and has 2 touring shows starting in 2022, 4 solo shows in galleries and museums for 2022 and 2 planned for 2023 so far. More information about Nayana can be found on her website Nayanaarts.com or by googling her.

Ruby Maddox
Ruby Maddox is a Purpose Coach, consultant, and facilitator, dedicated to helping individuals cultivate their potential for meaningful contributions to society. She's spent more than 15 years working in the field of nonprofit management and philanthropy and she is the co-founder of two nonprofit organizations focused on social justice, leadership, and equity. Ruby has received numerous awards and recognition for her work, including a 40 Under 40 Business and Community Leader's award and as a 2018 TEDx speaker. She has served as a mentor for Valley Venture Mentors; a business incubator and accelerator program in Springfield, MA and is also a Startingbloc Social Innovation Fellow.

Website: https://www.directyourpurpose.com/
Facebook: @directyourpurpose https://www.facebook.com/directyourpurpose
Instagram: @directyourpurpose https://www.instagram.com/directyourpurpose/

Burns Maxey
Burns Maxey is an artist, designer, and creative services and organization facilitator. In addition to her work as an illustrator, Burns also provides digital/print promotional and identity assets, marketing audits, and grantwriting for nonprofits, businesses, and individuals. Since 2017, as president of CitySpace, a non-profit arts organization in Easthampton, MA, Burns has been dedicated to restoring the historic Old Town Hall into an accessible, affordable, and inclusive center for the arts for the western Massachusetts region. As an educator, she teaches marketing for the arts at UMass Amherst. Previously, Burns was the Director of Creative and Digital Marketing at New England Public Media and she worked for the city of Easthampton’s planning department as the Arts Coordinator for Easthampton City Arts (ECA). At ECA, Burns spearheaded citywide cultural programming and placemaking and community engagement initiatives. As an artist, Burns’ work focuses on place, people, and animals through visual storytelling by merging new and old technologies. Burns attended Bard College and holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.  

Sean Moloney
For over two decades, Sean Moloney, CEO and co-founder of Dramatic Health, has mastered the art and science of developing compelling and engaging narratives through video. The company Dramatic Health was named after the “Dramatic Arc”. If the brilliance is in the simplicity, the “Dramatic Arc” is the embodiment of the simple bell curve that starts with developing a powerful context leading up to climax and ending with resolution. In an age of social media, and within the attention economy, it is critical as artists that we become the master of our own story. The impact and reach of our own stories is not measured in length, and even format, it is the result of being able to frame our own context, climax and resolution in ways that are most compelling, engaging and memorable among the audiences that are most important to us.

In this seminar, Sean Moloney will reveal the art and science of plotting our stories along the “Dramatic Arc” and the methodologies such as self-interviewing, self-capture and leveraging the power of short form, multi-channel video effectively. With emphasis on the critical stages of the pre-production process, he will take us through the sequence of documentation and steps that will best enable you to tell your story in the arts in the most powerful way. He will anchor all of these learnings in his most recent Cannes World Festival award for the Best Short Form Documentary entitled “Long Haul”. The production of this documentary over the course of 14 months was made possible by helping over 24 physicians and COVID-19 patients capture their personal story from diagnosis through recovery and into what we now know is the “long haul”. Most importantly, Sean guided them to tell their own narrative with emotion and confidence through self-capture, every step along the way of their journey. And while this is rooted in health and wellness, the learnings and model are the same in the art world.

Dee Schneidman
As NEFA’s Senior Program Director for Research and Creative Economy, Dee oversees data collection, documentation, and creative economy activities at NEFA. These include the New England Creative Economy Reports on the creative sector and its nonprofit subset; CreativeGround: New England’s online directory and research database of creative enterprises and artists; regional events such as the Creative Communities Exchange (CCX); knowledge-sharing projects and NEFA program evaluation. 

Before coming to work at NEFA in January of 2006, Dee worked in a variety of non-profit and business settings, utilizing her background in the performing arts to develop trainings and workshops geared toward the personal growth and creative learning of both children and adults. She holds a Masters Degree in Educational Psychology from the University of Virginia where she focused on empirical research in the fields of creativity, human development and assessment.

Dawn Spears
Dawn Spears (Narragansett) is the Director of the Northeast Indigenous Arts Alliance (NIAA). For more than twenty-five years Dawn has worked to support Indigenous arts as an artist, educator, demonstrator, and organizer. Most recently Dawn produced two of the largest and most significant markets in New England, including the Indigenous Fine Arts Market East in 2016 and the inaugural Abbe Museum Indian Market in 2018. She is a 2020 Assets for Artists grantee, a 2015 RI State Council for the Arts (RISCA) Master Apprenticeship grantee, and was the Community Artist in Residence at the New Bedford Art Museum in 2021. Dawn has exhibited at the most prestigious Indian art markets across the country including the American Indian Arts Marketplace at the Autry Museum in Glendale, CA, Heard Museum Indian Fair & Market in Phoenix, AZ, and the SWAIA Santa Fe Indian Market in Santa Fe, NM. Dawn has served on the board of the Tomaquag Indian Memorial Museum and Native Americans in Philanthropy and continues to work consulting regionally and nationally supporting arts programming and business training for artists.  

An active member of her tribal community, Dawn served as the Narragansett Indian Tribe’s Tribal Secretary for two terms and currently serves on the Narragansett Indian Tribal Election Committee and Economic Development Commission. In 2014 Dawn and her husband of thirty-six years formed the Narragansett Food Sovereignty Initiative, a farm-based organization devoted to reclaiming food and cultural ways for Narragansett people. Dawn also enjoys her role as mother and grandmother to her three children and seven grandchildren. Dawn's work within her family, community, and in the arts is driven by her belief in the preservation and education of culture and traditions.

Website: dmspears.artspan.com
CreativeGround: https://www.pinterest.com/dspears85/dawn-spears-portfolio/
Facebook: https://https://www.facebook.com/Dawn-Spears-374706685911275/?fref=ts
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/dspears85/dawn-spears-portfolio/

Kristen van Ginhoven
Kristen is a leader, director, educator, change-maker and social entrepreneur who works at the intersection of arts and activism. As Producing Artistic Director of WAM in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts, her selected directing credits include Ann (Co-pro with Dorset Theatre Festival), The Bakelite Masterpiece (with Berkshire Theatre Group), In Darfur (New England Premiere) and Emilie (New England Premiere). Kristen has also directed Ann at Arena Stage and Dallas Theatre Center, Disgraced and I and You at Chester Theatre, The Whale at Adirondack Theatre Festival, and the 10 Minute Play Festival at Barrington Stage Company. She has been an assistant director at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival of Canada and the Huntington Theatre in Boston. 

Kristen trained at Dalhousie University (BA), Queen’s University (B,Ed ACE) and Emerson College (MA). She is a member of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, a theatre artist for the International Schools Theatre Association and a member of the Lincoln Center Director’s Lab. 

Growing WAM Theatre and receiving the Berkshire Theatre Critics Association prestigious Larry Murray Award, presented to a person or theatre project that advances social, political, or community issues are two of Kristen’s proudest achievements.

Her guiding quote is “I may be one person, but I can be one person who makes a difference.”

Nancy Wheeler
Nancy Wheeler is a hands-on senior executive and consultant who has built her reputation on the power of relationships and helping organizations realize their potential. Having earned the solid trust of business leaders, nonprofit organizations, and academic institutions in the Hartford, CT; Springfield, MA and New York City areas over three decades, Nancy creates opportunity through connection and positions organizations and individuals to build upon and realize goals for growth. She launched WheelerConnect in 2019. 

Nancy previously served as Senior Vice President, Executive Director of Investor Relations, and Corporate Secretary at MetroHartford Alliance, a 700-member, $5.5 million organization with the economic development mission to recruit and retain jobs, capital, and diverse talent for the Hartford region. During her 16-year tenure, Nancy also led the organization as Interim President and Chief Executive Officer during a period of transition, overseeing a full-time staff of 24. 

Prior to joining the Alliance, Nancy had her own business for 15 years and provided strategic planning and fund and board development expertise to nonprofit organizations and family foundations. She worked for various stations within the Public Broadcasting Network , serving as Director of Program Marketing for WGBY in Springfield and later for Connecticut Public Radio and Television as head of Marketing and Underwriting. Nancy also worked as with various arts organizations throughout the Hartford market and was out by area philanthropists and business leaders to establish Dance Connecticut, a Hartford-based residential professional dance company. 

Nancy's history of board service and volunteerism spans community, arts, women's leadership, and economic empowerment initiatives. She resides on the Advisory Board of Forge City Works, a mission related investment of the Melville Charitable Trust, having previously served as Chair. She is founder of the donor-advised fund, WW ArtAlways, at the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts, and also serves on the Board of Directors for Connecticut Women's Hall of Fame, and as an advisor for Music and Poetry Synchronized (MAPS). She was recognized in 2012 by Hartford Business Journal as a “Remarkable Woman in Business." 

Wheeler holds a BA in French from Lake Erie College and has completed partial graduate work in cultural anthropology at Smith College. She speaks fluent French, owns a home in southwestern France, and holds a strong belief that education, good nutrition, and working collaboratively is a recipe for a healthy and prosperous life.

Blair Winans
Blair grew up in western Massachusetts, and aside from a brief stint in Boston working for various design and advertising agencies, has lived there his entire life. He has run his own agency in western Massachusetts since 2005, focused primarily on delivering digital marketing and website campaigns. His small team of developers, designers, and social media/advertising specialists have helped deliver results for numerous clients across a wide variety of industries, including tourism, education, manufacturing, restaurants/hospitality, publishing, and the arts.

Blair and Rhyme are currently responsible for the development of the ArtsHub website, bringing to life an idea that has been years in the making.

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