Allison Stadd

Hillary Rea is an award-winning storyteller, narrative consultant, and podcast producer.

She is the producer and host of Five Word Life Story, a podcast where five words change her guests’ lives and how they see it. You can listen to this podcast and all three seasons of her former podcast, Rashomon, anywhere you listen to podcasts.

Through her company, Tell Me A Story, Hillary works with people in the public eye (actors, reality television stars, content creators, authors, and podcasters, etc.) who need to craft a new narrative after a life and career where their story hasn’t fully been their own. Together they find the story that supports who they are now, develop the tools and skills to communicate it with impact, and become more confident as they become more visible.

Hillary lives in Philadelphia and spends most of her free time walking her longhair miniature dachshund, Ebi.

This event was brought to you by The Navy Yard and The Center for Design Philadelphia

About Anne:
I am a writer and musician based in Philadelphia+New York and the executive director of Asian Arts Initiative.

You can find me on Twitter, Instagram and subscribe to my newsletter on Substack.

I went to UC Santa Cruz and studied enough French to last me a lifetime before moving to France for a couple years and deciding I didn’t want to spend a lifetime there.

I went to Columbia University to get a Masters Degree in Japanese Literature before deciding I wanted to sell Japanese literature, not write about it.

I am the Board Co-Chair of the Asian American Writers Workshop and serve on multiple commissions serving the City of Philadelphia on behalf of the Arts sector and the Asian American community.

I am in a band called TOTALLY AUTOMATIC. We are a stream of absurdities. One day the bandcamp page will be full of stuff.

This event was brought to you by The Navy Yard and The Center for Design Philadelphia

Rebecca Fisher is the cofounder of Beyond the Bell Tours , an inclusive historical walking tour company in Philadelphia. Graduating from Haverford College in 2018 with honors in Italian Studies degree with a concentration in Peace, Justice and Human Rights, she is multilingual and wrote her thesis about inclusive tourism. She has presented her thesis research internationally. She’s passionate about the intersection of tourism and social justice. She was most recently the Tuttleman Artist in Residence at Haverford College, where she designed an on-campus tour covering many of the justice themes covered on a typical Beyond the Bell Tour called: The People’s History Tour of Haverford College, for which she received the Young Alumni Award in 2018. She currently is a consultant on the “Our Market Project” led by artist Michelle Angela Ortiz in the 9th street market.

This CreativeMornings Philadelphia event was generously hosted by our partners at Center for DesignPhiladelphia and The Navy Yard

Mackie Ermocida started working in the food and beverage industry in 2006 and eventually earned her BA in Tourism & Hospitality Management from Temple University in 2009. She continued on to earn an MBA and MS in Managing Human Capital in 2015. She then went on to earn her JD from Temple University Beasley School of Law. While she earned her graduate degrees, she was a Contracting Officer for the Department of Defense and the General Services Administration. She currently holds the role of Associate Counsel at Comcast Business. However, the constant thread throughout her life has been her love of food. This passion lead her to create a food social media account, aptly named @mackies_meals, over the pandemic - which focuses on recipes and highlighting lesser known food events through the city. She has had recipes of hers shared on the Parmigiano Reggiano Website and Billy Penn. She values not only the creative expression of food, but the stories as well. They are, in her opinion, what make food in this city uniquely amazing.

This event was brought to you by The Navy Yard and The Center for Design Philadelphia

Brian Biggs is an author, illustrator, and designer in Philadelphia. He’s currently writing and illustrating books, constantly drawing pictures, and teaching illustration at Tyler School of Art/Temple University.

He has written or illustrated more than seventy books, some of them being New York Times Bestsellers and several being shown at The Society of Illustrators. The books he has written and illustrated have been read by many imaginative adults and clever children all around the world.

Brian has also designed fonts, appeared briefly on Martha Stewart’s The Apprentice, raced bicycles in Iceland, worked as a university professor, performed live ambient guitar, served as calligrapher for a princess, and for a short time played the accordion quite well.

He’s available for all sorts of illustration,, hand-lettering, maps, packaging, animation, and even writing and speaking.

Clients include (but are not limited to) : MoMA, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Ritchey Bikes, The New York Times, Knopf, Hyperion/Disney, Harpercollins, Adobe Systems, Random House, The Princeton Public Library, Bill Graham Presents, Rodeo Labs, Penguin, The Washington Post, Warner Bros, Workman, Simon & Schuster, Rubio’s Coastal Grill, The Yellow Pages, The Philadelphia Book Festival.

He would love to work with you.

This event was brought to you by The Navy Yard and The Center for Design Philadelphia

Dr. Sarah Gulish is a Grammy-nominated educator, author, and speaker. For sixteen years, Sarah worked as a public school music teacher in Montgomery County, PA. She also serves as an adjunct professor of music education at Temple University and West Chester University. Her teaching centers on creativity and improvisation in courses focused on new music learners. 

Sarah is an active researcher, writer, presenter, and clinician at the state, national, and international levels. Her work has been published by F-flat Books, Routledge, Oxford University Press, Bloomsbury, Enharmonic Books, GIA, Sense Publishers, and various magazines, including Teaching Music Magazine, School Band and Orchestra Magazine, and InTune Magazine. 

In 2019, Sarah co-founded F-flat Books, a music publishing company focused on practical and equitable resources for musicians and music educators. Through an author-centric publishing model that positions people over profit, F-flat Books has provided a platform for new authors from various cultural backgrounds to share their songs and stories while being fairly compensated for doing so. F-flat Books has been recognized by Vh1 Save The Music Foundation, the NAMM Foundation, and others for their important work in fair-pay publishing. 

As a musician, Sarah has written, performed, and toured with groups in and around the east coast. Her music has been featured in film and Broadway and she supports young songwriters through courses and training at Songwriting for M.E.. Sarah lives in Philadelphia, PA, with her drummer husband and three creative kids. 

This event was brought to you by The Navy Yard and The Center for Design Philadelphia

John started with URBN in 2008 as an Architectural Coordinator on the Anthropologie store design team and holds a BA in Architecture from Philadelphia University. In his early years, he worked in a series of varying scale commercial architecture firms before leaving to form MINUS studios with colleagues in 2005. MINUS was primarily a design/build collaborative with contributors from various backgrounds. The focus of their work in Philadelphia was single family residential/multifamily residential. John landed at URBN after the 2008 market crash after a chance run in with the Anthropologie director of store design at a dinner party. He came to the Navy Yard for his interview and was immediately inspired by the campus and the brands. Across his time with URBN he has worked on all brands, food and beverage, campus infrastructure, & larger lifestyle projects such as our newest endeavors at Devon Yard & Delaware Valley University.

The event was brought to you by out local sponsor The Navy Yard

Matt Madden is a cartoonist and translator who has also taught in art schools around the world. He is known for his playful and inventive comics like the metafictional romp Ex Libris (Uncivilized Books) and 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style (Penguin Random House), a comics adaptation of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style which led to his initiation into Oubapo, The Workshop for Potential Comics, in 2005 and to his nomination as a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government in 2013.

He has also done translations from the French and Spanish, including Aristophane’s The Zabîme Sisters (First Second) and Edmond Baudoin’s Piero (New York Review Comics). He wrote two comics textbooks in collaboration with his wife, Jessica Abel, and the couple were series editors for The Best American Comics from Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt for six years. From 2012 to 2016, the whole family lived in Angoulême, France, while he and Jessica did residencies at La Maison des Auteurs. They now live in Philadelphia, where Matt is working on new comics and offering his services as a comics coach when he’s not looking after his kids or playing guitar.

The event was brought to you by The Center for DesignPhiladelphia

Albie’s Elevator -Step inside a fantastical elevator where self-appointed elevator operator, Albie, explores the ups and downs of preschool problem solving and discovers the arts with the help of her neighbors. Along with intercom robot Tibitz, her fuzzy friend Huggy Pepper, and real performers, visual artists, musicians, creators and arts educators, Albie works through her big feelings and has fun along the way.

Caitlin Corkery (Series Creator) is the Senior Manager of Series Production and the Philadelphia PBS affiliate, WHYY, where she oversaw the creation of two original children’s programs, Albie’s Elevator and The Infinite Art Hunt. Previously, she was the lead producer on the local restaurant review show Check, Please! Philly and developed WHYY’s first digital series, Delishtory. She wrote for the local theater company Tribe of Fools including the 2018 Barrymore-nominated Fishtown and hosts the local storytelling event, The Moth in Philadelphia.

Big Howl (production company) is an award-winning directing and producing team that resides deep in the heart of Philadelphia’s Fishtown. We have been creating short films, advertising, digital content, and live experiences for over a decade! We believe the meaning of life is to make the things we want to see in the world and be really fun and nice while doing it. Our clients include Hasbro, Netflix, Amazon Music, Comcast, and NBC Universal to name a few.

Brandon Ritter is Chief Operating Officer of FarmerJawn and Friends Foundation Fund.  He has stewarded capacity building at nonprofits for Pennsylvania and New Jersey cities.  He started growing food locally in Northwest Philadelphia at the age of twelve on small farm  production and graduated from Saul High School of Agricultural Sciences. With roots in farming  and education, he has over ten years of wealth in the nonprofit sector. Brandon has worked with  PHS in Philadelphia, Isles Inc in Trenton, NJ, and has most recently spent half a decade inspiring  people from all walks of life in Philadelphia to find their niche in agriculture with Food Moxie. 

The event was sponsored globally by MailChimp