Tracy Playle is a consultant content strategist primarily working in the HE sector. Before founding her company in 2007, she worked as Head of Research-TV at the University of Warwick (UK). There she was responsible for overseeing the production of over 100 videos showcasing university research to be used by television networks around the world and online. Playle is regarded as leading thinker on content strategy in HE. She speaks at conferences around the world, including events such as the CASE Europe Annual Conference, CASE Asia-Pacific Conference, HighEdWeb, PSEWeb, and Confab. In 2016 she was the opening keynote speaker at ConfabEdu. She has worked with over 170 education institutions in more than 25 countries, is a CASE Crystal Apple Teaching Award winner, and founder of the ContentEd conference, Europe’s first content strategy conference for the education sector. She is author of The Connected Campus: creating a content strategy to drive engagement with your university (2019).

Deb Aoki combines writing, drawing and design to help drive transformational end-to-end customer experiences. She has worked with companies like PayPal, Sony, eBay, Citrix Systems and Microsoft, and has taught workshops on design thinking and simple sketching for UX in Japan, India and at various companies and schools in North America, including MIT iDM and Stanford University’s Continuing Studies Program.

In her work as a graphic recorder/workshop scribe, Deb has drawn at corporate events for Google, Accenture, DirecTV/AT&T, HPE and Adobe.

Deb is also a semi-pro nerd who writes about manga (Japanese comics) for Anime News Network and Publishers Weekly.

Mike is executive director of marketing and communications at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He used to be an English professor and wrote about people like James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. Mike has worked for IUP since 1999, and started managing its main website in 2007. Since then, he has overseen IUP’s transition to a content management system and then to a responsive site, put IUP on social media, worked on IUP’s smartphone app and student portal and managed many other projects. He has been using the term content strategy to describe much of what he does since sometime in 2010.

Mike has presented at eduWeb, at the Penn State Web Conference, online for Higher Ed Experts and at several varieties of Confab. He designed the Higher Ed Experts course “Web Writing for Higher Ed,” a four-week course on web writing for higher education. He’s also a dad, a musician and a co-founder of Westsylvania Jazz and Blues Festival in Indiana, Pennsylvania.

Andy is the lead UX content strategist at Adobe, based in San Francisco. Born at an early age, he began his career in the midwest nonprofit arts world, and there he fell in love with writing for the internet. When he’s not wrangling designers to use his words correctly, he’s hosting a podcast about wooden pencils or watching Star Trek.

Amy Grace is a content strategist and UX designer with nearly 15 years of experience in higher ed, publishing and nonprofit. She holds master’s degrees in higher education and user experience design and serves as the editorial director for UX Booth.

Her experiences include leading content strategy at University of South Carolina and Texas A&M AgriLife, where she directed content strategy, information architecture and social media for the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and five state agencies. She served as an expert reviewer for “Content Strategy for WordPress,” published in 2015. Bragging rights include holding a sensei rank in karate and singing happy birthday to Muhammad Ali.