WordCamp Miami is happy to announce the next wave of approved and confirmed speakers for WordCamp Miami 2015.
Shawn Hooper
Shawn is a partner at Fivesense Technologies in Ottawa, Canada. A lifelong computer geek, Shawn wrote his first database application at the age of 12, and ran a bulletin board system while in high school. He has been a web developer since 1995, and a WordPress developer since 2011. He has experience building applications for clients in government, non-profit and the private sector in both Canada and the United States. This is the 6th city in which he has attended a WordCamp, and his 3rd as a speaker. Outside of the office, Shawn can be found on the ski hills, at a campground, or occasionally packing a dance floor as a DJ.
Shanta Nathwani
Shanta R. Nathwani is a Web Design and Information Architecture Consultant as well as an Instructor in Web Design and CCIT Capstone at Sheridan College, located in Oakville, Ontario, Canada which includes teaching WordPress. The ICCIT program is a joint program with the University of Toronto at Mississauga. She teaches students and small businesses how to use their websites and social media to increase their online presence leading to increased revenues and improved customer service. She has assisted companies to incorporate social media in the real estate, financial, non-profit, education and technical fields to name a few. She is from Toronto, Ontario, but now lives in Hamilton, Ontario.
James Tryon
James Tryon is the Creative Director of WP Valet, founder of Easily Amused, Inc, and a father of 2. He is also one of the co-organizers of WordCamp Orlando and the WordPress Orlando meetup group. He has been in the creative industry for more than 16 years and have an eye for design and usability. He also possess the know-how to plan, design, and code it all if needed.
Lisa Melegari
Lisa Melegari was born and raised in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida before moving to Orlando to attend the University of Central Florida where she majored in Digital Media and Interactive Entertainment. Her studies landed her in a career in web content development and social media management at We Do Web Content, Inc. based in Plantation, Florida. During college, Lisa became friends with fellow Internet enthusiast, David Laietta, who would go on to introduce her to the wonderful world of WordPress. Lisa is now a co-organizer of the WordPress Orlando meetup group and the Happiness Coordinator for WordCamp Orlando for three years running. Her passion is for web content development and promotion with a side of SEO and in past years she has spoken at WordCamp Orlando and Tampa. She currently lives in Deltona, Florida, helping her father take care of their combined 10 cats (only 4 are technically all hers). When she’s not content-ing or WordPress-ing, she’s cooking, playing video games with David, getting sushi with friends, or meeting with the Alpha Phi Omega co-ed fraternity as an advisor of the UCF chapter.
Jonathan Brinley
Jonathan has been building WordPress websites and plugins for eight years, taking the plunge into full-time freelancing shortly thereafter. He works with his wife Stephanie at Flightless, and spends much of his time with the distributed team at Modern Tribe. When he’s not coding, Jonathan is busy homeschooling his two children and enjoying the beautiful weather of Northeast Florida.
Jason Coleman
Jason is co-author of Building Web Apps with WordPress and Lead Developer of Paid Memberships Pro, the 100% open source membership plugin for WordPress. He has been pushing WordPress to its limits for many years and is an advocate for using WordPress as an application framework to build web sites and apps that go above and beyond the typical blog of CMS site. Jason works out of his home in Reading, Pennsylvania where he lives with his business partner and wife Kimberly Coleman and their two small children.
Chrissie Scelsi is the principal of Scelsi Entertainment and New Media Law with offices in Orlando and Port Charlotte, Florida, where she focuses her practice on entertainment, intellectual property, internet, technology, and business law. Ms. Scelsi has been named as one of the top eight Central Florida attorneys with Twitterati status by the Orlando Business Journal based on number of followers for her @punklawyer handle. Ms. Scelsi received her B.B.A. in marketing from Loyola University New Orleans, a J.D. from Saint Louis University School of Law, and a LL.M. in entertainment and media law from Southwestern School of Law.
Taylor Lovett is the Director of Engineering at 
Dan, hailing from Minneapolis, MN, has been a WordPress developer since 2009, focusing on front-end responsive code and clean admin interfaces. Prior to joining 
Ibis is an out-of-the-box thinker with more than two decades of software development experience, with an emphasis in eCommerce and web development. As the Miami Chapter Leader for the nationwide non-profit, 
David is part of the team at 
“I’m from England, but met a lady from New Jersey in Thailand, lived with her in Japan and Australia, got married in north Georgia and now love in Florida. I can confirm that it’s definitely sunnier here than where I came from”. Steve is the CEO of 
Josh is the owner of and a developer for 
Pascal Depuhl was born in Tampa, FL and is the Chief Visual Content Creator at Photography by Depuhl based in Miami. He produces mind changing photography and cinematography for his clients. You can watch him give a TEDx talk about the art of changing minds. Pascal writes a blog about his adventures as a photographer, filmmaker and marketer. He also teaches photographers how to transition from still photography into shooting video. You can see his work at 
Michele is the lead WordPress Specialist at WP Security Lock cleaning hacked websites and teaching the masses how to stay secure in the WordPress world. She is also the head geek at 
Roy was born and raised in San Francisco. He traveled down to Los Angeles for college, and never really left. Even though Roy left college in marketing and did 6 years as a lead SEO and Internet Marketing guy, he was always a passionate developer. He became a full time developer and have a lot of experience as both a full time consultant, working at an agency, and working at a corporate type office. He currently works at Disney Corporate in Burbank, California doing WordPress and other development.
Becky is an independent front-end developer specializing in custom WordPress themes and project management. She is Chicago native and is very active in the WordPress community there, including helping with WordCamp Chicago and running one of its most active meetups. http://www.meetup.com/Chicago-WordPress-Meetup/ Becky loves training and teaching WordPress as well as gardening, movies and biking. She is especially fond of bars with couches and good whiskey.
Chase Livingston is from Greenville, SC and is a Happiness Engineer at Automattic and loves everything customer-support related. He’s heavily involved with Support Ops and is a guest on their weekly hangout. When he’s not making customers happy you can probably find him with his wife, their adorable dog Abbey, or maybe even behind a sound board.
Topher is a husband and father from Grand Rapids MI. He’s been a WordPress developer for 5 years, and general web developer for 20 years. Topher has been a long-time supporter of WordCamp Miami and we’re glad to have him down to speak for the first time at our humble conference.
Hristo is a WordPress enthusiast who’s done it all: supported WordPress clients, built websites, designed WordPress themes, wrote tutorials, dug deeper into SEO and developed his own WordPress SEO plugin. He’s been fortunate to have his passion for all things WordPress and his job overlap at 
Adam Soucie is a WordPress-focused developer at Orlando creative agency 
We are honored to have back 
Ryan Fugate is a BuddyPress enthusiast and mobile WordPress fanatic. Previously working in social media marketing using WordPress as a secret weapon where Ryan built sites for many major brands. His current status: BuddyPress trac and forums, creating fun plugins, WordPress as a mobile framework and coffee. When he’s not breaking WordPress he rides his fixie around Los Angeles and frequently indulges in churro consumption at Disneyland.
Brian, a former Marine Corps software developer is the Co-Founder of 
Morten Rand-Hendriksen built his first website in 1997 and has used the web to further communication between people ever since. He’s a staff author at lynda.com where he has published 50+ courses on WordPress and front-end development and also teaches web design and development at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. In his spare time he co-organizes the Vancouver WordPress Meetup Group, contributes to WordPress core, and wears out his shoes on a ballroom dance floor.
Jesse Petersen is a theme and plugin developer and the founder of Petersen Media Group, an exclusive Genesis framework agency in Tampa, FL. He is the face of the Genesis framework at the e-learning site, Treehouse, with two courses released and one in production. Since 2010 when Genesis was released, Jesse has been on the StudioPress Recommended Developer List. Jesse is a veteran WordCamp speaker of several business topics and is launching a Genesis theme shop called Genesis The.me. He and his wife have been the foster parents of 22 (and counting) children since 2012 and live a very crazy life as a result.
Sze Liu is the CEO and Founder of 
Andrea started out as a volunteer in the WordPress.org forums, and now works for Copyblogger Media in customer support for all products.
Rami Abraham is a WordPress developer and ‘gif savant’ at WebDevStudios. He’s been building with WordPress since version 2.8, with a heavy focus in JavaScript and CSS. Prior to that, he worked in a few lead roles at web agencies, with a focus on JavaScript application development. He enjoys working with an unending variety of frameworks, SVG animation, and is part of the AffiliateWP support team after hours.
Tim loves WordPress and enjoys leveraging it to meet businesses needs. He leads the Customer Community Team at InMotion Hosting where they write content and act as subject matter experts for software like WordPress.
Sarrah Vesselov hails from Tampa, FL. She is the Creative Director for NRS and freelances in the areas of web design, PPC Marketing, SEO, and media project management. She teaches classes in WordPress, HTML5, CSS3, and internet marketing at several Tampa colleges. Sarrah has served as Mentoring Lead for SIGGRAPH, Production coordinator for Evolve CG, and is currently the Director for the Women Who Code Tampa chapter. She holds a B.F.A in Computer Animation, a M.B.A in Marketing and has just completed a Front End Engineering program.
For twenty one years Chris has been managing high performers and overseeing new product development. He is currently the CTO & Chief Strategist for 
Michelle is an independent graphic designer based in Chicagoland. She was formally schooled in many aspects of design including print, branding, packaging, etc., with additional education in Psychology and Sociology, all tying together in a love of How To Solve Problems. Lately she has been specializing in WordPress websites, infographics, and high-end presentations for her clients. She is a lover of WordCamps and the WordPress community, a Meetup junkie, @3themes contributor, and WordCamp Chicago 2014 lead organizer. Check her out at 
Aaron has had more than fourteen years of web development experience, have been a regular contributor to WordPress for the last eight years, and even co-lead the WordPress 3.6 release. He’s worked with clients ranging from small local businesses to Google, Yahoo, Disney, and Harvard. He’s been called both a coffee snob and a beer snob, but he considers both to be strong complements. When not buried in code, he enjoys spending time with his wife and son, attending or hosting beer tastings, and reading sci-fi/fantasy books.
Adam is a South Florida PHP developer, certified engineer, and part of the Zend Certification Advisory Board. He currently works as a Senior Professional Services Consultant with Zend Technologies. Adam is very active in global and local PHP communities, and organize the South Florida PHP Users Group (SoFloPHP) as well as the SunshinePHP Developer Conference in Miami. Check him out at 
Chris is a Senior Web Engineer for 10up and has been working on WordPress since 2008. Before joining 10up Chris built one of the largest security plugins in the WordPress community as well as numerous other plugins and solutions. When not coding Chris loves to teach and has presented at numerous WordCamps and other conferences as well as taught computer security for St. Edward’s University and other University courses ranging from computers to aviation. Check him out at