Patrick Piuma

Patrick Piuma is the Director of the Urban Design Studio and Associate Director of the City Solutions Center, both at the University of Louisville. Patrick has a Master of Urban Planning degree from the University of Louisville. His main concentration is on issues of sustainability and how the design of the built environment can improve the quality of life for its inhabitants.

Steven Ward

Steven and his family live on a pedestrian court in the Highlands, a great safe place for his two little girls to run around and play while still being in the middle of the Bardstown Road commercial corridor. He taught for a while at the University of Kentucky College of Design, was faculty at the Governor's School for the Arts Architecture Studio for several years, and is now a partner at Studio Kremer Architects, a firm whose office is entirely too far from downtown.

Gill Holland

Gill Holland and his wife Augusta have been instrumental in turning east downtown Louisville into a thriving arts/design and sustainable district, now known as “NuLu” - Louisville’s East Market District. Two years ago, Holland opened NuLu's flagship arts center "The Green Building", a renovated 120 year old building which is now certified LEED "Platinum" and the greenest commercial building in Kentucky.

An independent film producer Gill Holland moved to Louisville in 2006 from New York City. A Spirit Award nominee for producer of the year (the Oscars for independent films), Gill is a former lawyer, has produced over 70 films and runs sonaBLAST! Records, Holland Brown Books which does fundraising childrens’ arts books. He is involved on many cultural boards and holds a JD and BA from UNC.

Michelle Jones

Michelle Jones lives in and loves Louisville. She publishes the popular blog Consuming Louisville and is the organizer of "Let Them Tweet Cake", a series of events for women interesting technology. She is a writer and all around media geek who works as the Community Manager for ParkVu, a software company that builds very cool tools to help manage music collections across multiple devices and platforms. Michelle loves books, movies, photography and ideas. She thinks a lot about goodness, kindness and ethics.

John Faulkner

John Faulkner is the Community Relations Manager at the Muhammad Ali Center. He is responsible for outreach programming with a focus on the performing and visual arts, as well as instituting initiatives that improve the quality of life in Louisville. Currently John also serves as a member of the Board of Directors for the West Louisville Performing Arts Academy, the Greater Louisville Inc’s Capital Projects and Civic Amenities Issue Advisory Committee as well as the JCPS Communications, Media & Arts Curriculum Design Team.

Keith Stone

I spent more than 20 years working in newspapers around the country as a reporter and editor. Increasingly my passion for working with my hands began to eclipse my passion for words. Three years ago I quit The Courier-Journal to pursue a master’s degree in architecture at the University of Kentucky. Now  having graduated, I am looking for work in architecture, making metal sculpture and asking questions that likely cannot be answered.

Aron Conaway

Aron Conaway is a curator, fine artist, and community arts enabler. Working in a variety of media, Aron’s creative spirit is activated by history, current events, and critique of power structures in the political and social strata. A founding artist in the Louisville Assembly of Vanguard Art (LAVA House), he owns and runs Nelligan Hall art studios in the Portland neighborhood and driven to purchase a 90,000 sf warehouse to pioneer another alt.Space in Louisville.

Bruce Ucán

Growing up in a village in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, Chef Bruce Ucán knew only of a food culture deeply embedded in fresh, locally-grown foods. Coming to the United States at age 20, he soon learned this farm to table connection was a rarity for most Americans. This urged him to create the concept for his current restaurant, the Mayan Café. Here, he fuses ancient Mayan recipes and indigenous ingredients with locally sourced meat, produce, cheese & coffee.

Valerie Sullivan Fuchs

Valerie Sullivan Fuchs is a new media artist who works with time-based media like video, & video installation in order to recognize the industrial and electric forms which mediate our direct relationship with nature and the landscape.  Current exhibits include: Transparency and Trans-formations, US Embassy, Stockholm, Sweden & in 2009   H2O; Film on Water, Great Rivers Arts,  Bellows Falls, Vermont, (Aug-Oct) Stripped, Sun Valley Center for the Arts,  Sun Valley,  Idaho (Oct-Dec.) Kentucky Short Film and Video Festival, 21c Museum, Louisville, KY (Sept. 15) She has a M.F.A. in the Time Arts area at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1998 and a  B.Arch from the University of Kentucky.

William Benton

William has lived in the Louisville area for nearly 14 years, a transplant from rural Oklahoma. A founding member of the local band Lucky Pineapple, he is also an addition to national favorites The Phantom Family Halo. William spends the remainder of his time writing, reading, caring for his cat, traveling, and successfully avoiding...well, success. William also collects coffee cups and hides in dark bars.

Maria Koetter

Ms. Koetter has a BS in biology and over eighteen years of environmental experience working with government and Fortune 500 private sector clients. She has worked within a wide array of environmental programs, including the Clean Air Act, RCRA and Superfund. Ms. Koetter is President of Bgreen2 which is a sustainability consulting firm that develops and implements business sustainability and corporate social responsibility programs, provides Green Team support, performs greenhouse gas inventories and coordinates green building projects.