Chris Beatty

founding partner, and co-creative director

Cultivator Advertising and Design

Chris Beatty is a founding partner, and co-creative director, of Cultivator Advertising and Design in Denver, Colorado. His agency experience over two decades has encompassed everything from consumer advertising to dimensional sculpture, and he is as capable with a MIG welder as he is with an Adobe-filled G5. He attended Herron School of Art in Indianapolis, Indiana, and, after ten plus years as an art director with Young & Laramore, Beatty headed West, coming to an abrupt halt at the foot of the Rockies due to a fear of heights, where he helped found Cultivator in 2000.

Jennifer Poggi

deputy director of photography

U.S. News & World Report

Jennifer Poggi is the deputy director of photography at U.S. News & World Report in Washington, DC. She began her career as a photo assistant with the Associated Press in New York. From 1994 to 1998 she worked as a picture editor for the Associated Press covering national, international and sports news. In 1998 she joined U.S. News as an assistant picture editor working in the magazine’s Nation section. In 2005, Poggi was a visiting pro-fessor at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications where she worked with a picture editing class. Her work has been recognized by Communication Arts, National Press Photographers Association and White House News Photographers Association.

Lars Topelmann

Photographer

Lars Topelmann is a Portland, Oregon-based photographer. Born into an artistic family in Chicago, Illinois, his painter parents moved the family to Northern Wisconsin where they opened an art gallery. Lars earned spending money framing paintings when he was twelve (a buck a painting). He got a camera for his birthday and began spending his free time taking photos of his friends jumping bicycles and faking wipeout scenes. Lars’s three favorite things are his family, photography and windsurfing—not necessarily in that order. His two boys have inherited his sense of goofy humor and the art of high jinx. This zest for life is the basis of his photographic style. He tries to include some of the energy and fun that he learned when he was a kid into every photograph.

J. Phillips Williams

Founder

design:mw

J. Phillips Williams, known as JP, was born in Alabama and educated at Rhode Island School of Design and Yale School of Art. Prior to forming design:mw in New York City in 1993, he was the senior art director of Bergdorf Goodman. As partner with his wife Allison, a classmate at RISD, JP works with clients ranging from Target to Büttenpapierfabrik Gmund. The design firm specializes in establishing the identities of retail brands. Its work has been recog-nized by Communication Arts and Graphis. He has taught at Parsons School of Design and the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and on occasion has written for CA in the Design Issues column. He loves all things designed and is an avid book collector.

Zana Woods

photo editor

Wired magazine

Zana Woods is the photo editor of Wired magazine in San Francisco, California, where she started in 1999. Her focus at Wired is on environmental portraiture, photojournalism and pro-duct photography. She was previously an art buyer at Foote, Cone & Belding and her accounts included AT&T, MTV and Dockers. Formerly studio/account manager for Thomas Heinser, a San Francisco commercial photographer, her work has been recognized by the Society of Publication Designers and Photo District News. An amateur photographer, avid photo book collector and a very active softball player, Zana frequently talks with students at the Academy of Art University and California College of the Arts about photography, developing portfolios and creating new work. Originally from Arkansas, she attended Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas.