Our Amazing Advisory Board
The Wabash Lights Advisory Board is a stellar crew of multidisciplinary artists and professionals. Board members work closely with the entire Wabash Lights team to provide direction, facilitate promotion, and ensure project success
Charles Adler is a Kickstarter co-founder, founder of the online arts journal Subsystence and Source-ID, an independent interaction design studio. Kickstarter has seen tens of thousands of projects raise over $1B since launching on April 28th, 2009. His work as a designer and entrepreneur is driven by a simple desire – to produce work that connects people to their ambitions and passions in life.
In 2013 Charles was named as one of Forbes Magazine’s Top 12 Most Disruptive Figures in Business and was invited to judge the 2013 National Design Awards, and Architizer’s A+ Awards for Architecture. Charles is an Executive Board member of the Chicago Design Museum.
Nick Brown is the founder of Glappitnova, a publication and festival mixing entrepreneurship, culture, and entertainment highlighting millennials around the world.
Nick believes in smashing diverse perspectives to a central point to spark something unimaginable, and has taken over the Apple store, involved in production management at the Nike World Basketball festival, judged at Techweek, mentored for CODE2040, and is heavily involved in Chicago.
Nick earned a BS Arch and MS Arch while being a 2-Time All American Track and Field Athlete, and Big Ten runner up from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Go ILLINI!
Hailing from Cincinnati, Jenni Button is a curator, project manager, marketing specialist and all-around conduit of creativity. After Graduating from Ohio University with a Bachelors of Fine Arts, Jenni has worked in design and creative agencies, galleries and public arts programs throughout the midwest. She currently resides in Chicago where she works and plays as co-founder and experience curator at Fête Esthète + The Art Party.
Eric Gannon is an architect and has worked with Gensler for the last 10 years as a Project Manager and Studio Director. A New York transplant, he has quickly become immersed within the Chicago design scene and leads a studio in Gensler's Chicago office focusing on corporate interiors and campus work. Eric's career has taken him globally around the world with project work in North America, China and Brazil to name a few.
Eric supports and enables and participated in design at all scales from large commercial projects to fledgling side collaborations with friends. He fuels his creative passions through music, maintaining an extensive vinyl collection housed within his own custom furniture and playing in as many bands as time affords.
Eric holds a masters degree from New Jersey Institute of Technology and a BS Arch from The Catholic University of America. He is a registered architect in NY and NJ.
Jordan Ho is a product focused entrepreneur who has founded and led multiple startups. With a broad set of abilities ranging from team management to product vision & delivery, Jordan has spent his career starting companies so that he could avoid ever actually having a real job. He is currently VP of Product at Label Insight, a data company focused on the transparency of information in the food industry, where he is responsible for vision, product design, and customer experience.
His perspective on the intersection of technology & art is influenced by his art background and time spent as an apprentice to renowned artist Ed Paschke. He has now spent the majority of his life in Chicago, but cannot shake his loyalty to those unfortunate Minnesota sports teams.
Professor Bruce Sheridan has been Chair of Cinema Art + Science since 2001, and is currently Chair of the North American region of CILECT, the world organization of film schools, and Industry Relations Vice President for UFVF/UFVA. He is a musician, writer and filmmaker with 30 years experience directing and producing documentary and drama for the screen.
In 1999 Professor Sheridan won the New Zealand Best Drama Award for the tele-feature Lawless, and in 2012 produced the highly acclaimed documentary on sports concussion, Head Games. He is currently directing Children First, a project on children of divorce that includes dramatic and documentary elements, producing a feature documentary on the renaissance of winemaking in the Republic of Georgia, and writing The Infinity of Ghosts, a multi-media meditation on fathers and sons.
Rebecca Ussai Henderson is a Principal Interaction Designer at IA Collaborative, a global design and innovation consultancy, where she is responsible for user driven research, strategy, and design. She was previously an Experience Design Director at R/GA, where she worked with brands such as L'Oreal Paris, Tiffany & Co., Victoria's Secret, Novartis, UFC, and Verizon. Her range of work includes a number of platform redesigns, digital campaigns, omni-channel commerce, service design, and personalized experiences, all of which aim to develop meaningful and relevant connections between brands and users.
Rebecca is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University’s Communication Design program. After starting a career in UX, she is finding ways to combine the techniques of motion design into the most relevant areas of user experience in order to craft more intuitive, engaging, and delightful experiences. Over the past few yeas, she collaborated together with Disney Legend, Glen Keane, on what she calls “The Principles of UX Choreography” and has given talks SXSW Interactive, Google HQ, UX London, and CreativeMornings.
Angel Ysaguirre has been the Executive Director of Illinois Humanities since 2014. From 1999 to 2005, he was also the Director of Programs, creating programs and series that include The Odyssey Project, Einstein's Revolutions, and Brown v Board 50 Years Later: Conversations on Race, Integration, and the Law. He was Deputy Commissioner at the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events from 2012 to 2014. From 2005 to 2012, he was Director of Global Community Investing at The Boeing Company, overseeing the company's grantmaking program in 60 offices throughout the globe. He began his career in Chicago as a program officer at the McCormick Tribune Foundation.