Cara Courage is a placemaking, arts, activism, and museums academic-practitioner, and Head of Tate Exchange, Tate. Cara is author of Arts in Place: The Arts, the Urban and Social Practice (Routledge, 2017), and the co-editor of Creative Placemaking and Beyond (Routledge, 2018).
Tom Borrup is an international consultant and author of The Power of Culture in City Planning and The Creative Community Builders’ Handbook. He is Senior Lecturer and Director of Graduate Studies for the University of Minnesota’s Master of Professional Studies in Arts and Cultural Leadership.
Maria Rosario Jackson’s expertise is comprehensive community revitalization, systems change, dynamics of race and ethnicity, and roles of arts and culture in communities. She is Institute Professor at Arizona State University and also has a long career in strategic planning, research and evaluation with philanthropy, government and nonprofit organizations.
Kylie Legge is the CEO and founder of place data analytics company Place Score and placemaking consultancy Place Partners. Kylie is a passionate advocate for human-centred design in cities and is the author of Doing it Differently and Future City Solutions.
Anita McKeown is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, scholar, and educator with research interests in Sustainable Creative Placemaking and Open Source Culture and Technology. She is the Co-Director of SMARTlab Skelligs, research lab in South Kerry and SMARTlab’s NAISC Skellig Kerry Diaspora Network Fellow.
Louise Platt is a senior lecturer in Festival and Events at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research interests predominantly lie in the role of festivity in places. She is on the executive committee of the Leisure Studies Association and the editorial board of Leisure Studies journal.
Jason Schupbach is a nerd, the Dean of the Westphal College of Media Arts and Design at Drexel University and a nationally recognized expert in the role that arts and design play in improving communities. He was the federal liaison to the design community in his role as Director of Design and Creative Placemaking Programs for the National Endowment for the Arts.