Speakers mDAC 2017

Dan Ayoub (KeyNote : Microsoft, Seattle WA)

​Dan is a 20-year veteran of the video game industry who has recently made the move to focus on Education within Microsoft. Working alongside a host of products like Hololens, VR, 3D Paint, Story Remix, and more, Dan is focused on empowering educators to use technology to unlock the creative potential of students and to enable better learning outcomes.
 
 Talk Track:
 
Dan will discuss Microsoft’s vision around the importance of empowering creatives, and how future trends like Mixed Reality, AI, and similar technologies will change education (and our world) forever.

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​Hamilton Cline ​

Drawing is his passion, but during the day you will find him at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco where he is a faculty teacher specializing in front end web development, as well as delivering lectures on 3D Printing, VR and UX. Hamilton is also an app developer and inventor. But his inspired work as a portrait painter has recently caught the eye of the media from KRON 4 and SF Gate to the New York Times for his stealth sketching done using his iPhone on BART. John Hays is a professional character artist for video games requiring a very precise knowledge of the human form and ability to paint and draw, as well as dexterity with digital painting. His expertise is grounded in a background in traditional sculpting and hand drawn animation. Born in Canada, he now resides here in the Silicon Valley where he works for one of the large video game studios. But on his free time he paints using his android tablet and the app Infinite Painter.​

Daniel Leighton

​Daniel Leighton is an Augmented Reality artist, iPad painter, filmmaker, and technologist who started programming at the age of eleven. Having Crohn’s Disease since birth, Leighton faced his mortality from a very young age. Countless invasive procedures, hospitalizations and surgeries helped drive him to dive deep into a lifelong quest to understand the workings of his body and his emotions. He creates emotional landscapes with simple lines and brilliant colors to capture complicated states of the human psyche, while exploring the possibilities of technology and human emotion being harnessed for the greater good. Leighton adds Augmented Reality (AR) to his paintings by combining his backgrounds in filmmaking and computer programming. Using the Daniel Leighton Art + AR app, viewers can experience additional dimensions of Daniel’s AR-enhanced paintings. As art critic, Shana Nys Dambrot, says about Daniel’s app, “[it] turns your device into a viewing portal into what it is tempting to describe as a parallel universe.”

​James Alan Conway

​Jim Conway is a digital artist with a teacher’s heart. During the day, he teaches art at Bulldog Tech, an innovative middle school in San Jose and the first New Tech Network school in Silicon Valley that has a mission to prepare its students for the 21st century. But, in any spare time, you will find him painting, especially on his iPad. Trained at San Jose State University, he started his life as a professional artist, and then trained as a teacher. The two passions finally came together when he began teaching art at Bulldog. His work recently attracted the attention of Apple HQ and he was invited to join the PGA tour where he painted landscapes of the golf course, featured in Tech Crunch and other online blogs.

John Hayes

John is a professional artist, whose career has spanned over 2 decades and multiple disciples. Beginning in magazine illustration, then moving onto sculpting maquettes, hand-drawn animation, and finally digital media, working as an artist in video game development. John has designed, modeled and animated characters for games published by Nintendo, Capcom, Sega, Sony, Microsoft, and is currently creating characters for Super Evil MegaCorp. After the release of the first Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet, with its built-in writing and drawing stylus, John was enabled to comfortably create art images on the go, anywhere, anytime. He found drawing and painting on a mobile device to a be freeing and relaxing way to visually express himself without the need of a desk or wall outlet. John teaching experience includes his time as a guest instructor at the Art Institute of California, releasing several published lessons and tutorials for 3D artist magazine, and features by the Foundry and CG Arena. Several of his original images have been recognized and awarded by CGHub and CG society.

Julia L. Kay

​​Julia L. Kay (http://studiojuliakay.com) is a painter, printmaker, photographer, muralist, digital artist, and author. Her book "Portrait Revolution" (http://studiojuliakay.com/PortraitRevolution), published simultaneously in the USA and UK in April, 2017, features 450 portraits by the members of Julia Kay's Portrait Party (http://studiojuliakay.com/jkpp/join), an international community of artists who make portraits of each other. Every conceivable media can be found in the book, from oil paintings to snowmen, and of course it includes lots of mobile digital art. In addition to portraiture and self-portraiture, major themes in Julia's work include colorful, expressionistic animals and semi-abstractions based on the shadows of tropical plants. She draws every day and loves to experiment, and encourages everyone to have fun with their art-making.

​Michael Clawson

​Michael Clawson is ‘Chief Fish’ at Big Fish Creations. His career began in Silicon Valley when Apple Computer and Adobe Systems first made their mark in Desktop Publishing. He was introduced to interactive media early in his career, transitioned to production artist, and later, creator and lead principal of an Interactive Department at a major advertising agency. Specializing in branding across multiple media platforms, his diverse repertoire includes a hybrid combination of designer and developer with emphasis on graphic design, branding, photography and communication. Michael extensively uses his mobile phone to create contents for his production company.

​Martha Zlatar (Art Coach)

​Martha has advised emerging and mid-career visual artists on realizing their artistic goals for the last 14 years. She coaches on clarity of vision, relationship with money, embracing the business owner within, time management, unleashing your creativity and many other issues relevant to artists and art entrepreneurs. Martha’s passion for psychology, business and the arts led her to launch ArtMatch, an art business and creativity coaching practice that supports creatives on becoming more “business savvy” and “professionals” on becoming more “creative”. Her 28 years of diverse business experience took her to the worlds of Market Research, International Business, Event Management & Promotion, Training and Meeting Facilitation and Art Business Consulting (New York City, Brussels, New Orleans and San Francisco).
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Meri Walker ​

With over four decades of photojournalism, printmaking, fine art exhibition, and teaching behind her, when Meri Walker picked up her first iPhone five years ago, she put down all her other cameras and never looked back. Her mobile artwork makes deliberate use of the limitations of mobile devices for art-making in ways that are both deliberate and serendipitous. Alternately simple, surreal, detailed, somber, and humorous, Meri’s mobile imagery ties traditional black-and-white photographic strategies to many-layers multi-media painting strategies with the intention of drawing attention to the truth and beauty of everyday life. Meri is an avid exhibitor, both online and in traditional gallery and museum spaces, and looks forward to a day when we quit “quibbling” about the fine art of iPhoneography.

Meri Walker work can be seen here : http://iphoneartgirl.com

Jeremy Sutton

Artist, author, speaker, instructor and live event painter Jeremy Sutton is a San Francisco-based, internationally recognized, digital painting pioneer and Corel Painter Master who has used digital paint since 1991. Born in London, Jeremy has a degree in Physics from Oxford University; studied drawing, print-making and sculpture at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford; and lithography and drawing at the Vrije Academie, The Hague, The Netherlands. His clients range from Apple and Oracle to Virgin Atlantic Airways and the Government of Monaco. He has been a keynote speaker at many conferences such as Macworld, SIGGRAPH and Imaging USA. Author of the Painter Creativity: Digital Artist's Handbook series of books, Jeremy was selected by San Francisco General Hospital to paint (with mixed digital and traditional media) one of the iconic large Hearts displayed on Union Square, San Francisco, now on display in the Visa Headquarters. He will be teaching an iPad painting workshop at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, in July. Jeremy has created live digital paintings for: -Cirque du Soleil's TOTEM show in San Francisco; -Toronto's Scotia Bank Nuit Blanche arts festival; -SEMA, Las Vegas, the world's largest custom car show. He was the featured live event iPad artist at the opening night celebration of the “David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition” at the de Young Museum, San Francisco, and, this summer, will be the featured live event iPad artist at the Smithsonian Institute's American Art Museum event 'America Now! Innovation in Art'.

You can check him out here

Jeannie Mecorney

Graduating from the University of California at Berkeley with a degree in Studio Art Practice, Jeannie spent over 25 years as a graphic designer in film, animation, print, television and the web before creating the Multimedia Art and Technology program [currently the Digital Art and Animation program] at Cañada College in Redwood City. She created curriculum and taught digital painting, photography, imaging, illustration, graphic design, color management and photo restoration. She love sketching, en plain air painting and taking her tablet wherever she go. She is currently hold the creative director position at MobileArt.HOW 

​Learn more about Jeannie​

Sumit Vishwakarma

Sumit Vishwakarma is the founder of Mobile Art Academy and curator of mDAC Summit. Professionally an engineer and an artist at heart, Sumit exclusively creates art on iPad and tablets using different apps, his fingers or a stylus. His goal is to educate kids, teens and adults about simple digital techniques that can be applied with traditional painting skills to create beautiful artwork on tablets. He researches with new apps, app mashing and develop creative 'app-flows'. His scope of mobile creativity covers a wide spectrum from digital art to animation, 3D modeling to media creation and movie making.

He has been featured speaker at Macworld, National Creativity Summit - Pittsburgh, TEDx, 
Mobile Creativity & Innovation Symposium - NZ and several mobile art events. His work has been featured in various art galleries including the first Mobile Art Festival in Los Angles, Apple flagship store in San Francisco, Autodesk Sketchbook news, Macworld Digital Art gallery and other art & tech blogs such as cult-of-Mac, TUAW, iCreate Magazine.

Caroline Mustard

Caroline Mustard is the co-founder and education director of Mobile Art Academy. Born in England, she graduated Brighton University with a BA in Fine Arts (Painting). She is an accomplished artist with years of experience in art direction, scenic and faux painting. She recently returned to her roots as an artist and has embraced mobile art. With a passion for passing on what she has learned to others, Caroline leads the Mobile Art Academy’s education initiative with classes throughout the Silicon Valley to students of all ages. She has been featured in Fast Company, California State of Creativity Summit, Apple Inc and MobileArt.HOW
Her work can be seen at www.carolinemustard.com
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