Dan Wieden

In 1982 four young and ambitious people took a card table, a few chairs and several cardboard file cabinets and began what would become one of the most respected advertising agencies in the world.  One of those four was Dan Wieden, co-founder, president, and creative director of Wieden+Kennedy, a company Wieden describes as driven by chaos, energy, and passion.

Starting with a single client, Nike, the list of high-profile clients soon skyrocked to include Microsoft, Coca-Cola, ESPN, Subaru, Nike, Honda motorcycles, Microsoft, and TV Guide. Thanks to their innovation and creative genius, the company has snagged a plethora of awards including, National Agency of the Year in 1991 and 1996. In addition, Wieden himself was named one of the world’s 50 CyberElite by Time magazine and one of the 32 members of the Once Club Creative Hall of Fame.

Bill Oakley

 
Bill Oakley is a writer and producer best known for his work on “The Simpsons”. Bill co-wrote twelve episodes of the series, including “Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy” and “Who Shot Mr. Burns?” Along with his writing partner, Bill served as head writer and showrunner for the show’s seventh and eighth seasons – regarded by many fans as the apex of “The Simpsons” classic era. He earned three Emmy awards and a Peabody for his work on the series.

Bill also served as a consulting producer on “Futurama” and co-created “Mission Hill”, an animated series about twentysomethings which became a worldwide cult hit that ran continuously on Cartoon Network’s “Adult Swim” for six years.

Bill got started with comedy in high school, where he founded his school’s humor magazine. He later attended Harvard University, where he was vice president of “The Harvard Lampoon”; he currently serves as a Trustee of that organization.

Bill has also written feature film scripts and developed a number of television pilots, including “The Funkhousers”, directed by Frank Oz, and the one-hour CBS dramedy pilot “22 Birthdays” with Doug Liman. He is also a cartoonist and is currently developing several animated projects which he intends to draw and design.

Teresa Drilling

 

Teresa Drilling is an Emmy and Telly award-winning world-class Animator.  She was one of two people awarded the first Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation Emmy ever presented, for Will Vinton’s “Claymation Comedy of Horrors”. She received the award in 1991 and just this year Teresa garnered the same award for her work on Aardman Animation’s “Creature Comforts”.

Teresa worked on “Chicken Run” and “Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit” for Aardman. She worked at Vinton Studios for many years, has animated over 50 television commercials and recently won a Telly Award for her work on a spot for Touchmark Bank.

Recently Teresa worked as a lead animator on “Coraline”.

EMEK

 

Emek, sometimes called “The Thinking Man’s Poster Artist,” has a visual style notable for the attention to detail coupled with layers of meaning in the artwork. The infusion of socio-political commentary into pop culture imagery has made Emek’s work instantly recognizable in the field. His finely-crafted work is mostly hand-drawn in the tradition of the classic psychedelic posters from the 1960’s and his special limited edition silkscreen posters for live concerts performed around the world are in great demand.

He has created hundreds of posters for some of the top alternative bands and events including: Radiohead, Coachella, Queens of the Stone Age, Tool, System of a Down, Jane’s Addiction, The Flaming Lips, as well as album covers from Neil Young and Pearl Jam to Henry Rollins and Erykah Badu. Over the last two decades, Emek’s work has been shown in galleries across the United States, in Berlin, London, Tokyo, Belgium, and Canada.

Larry Brooks

 

Larry Brooks is a modern day Renaissance Man. After a five-year stint pitching for the Texas Rangers, he traded in his baseball uniform and mitt for a Wall Street suit and briefcase and started pushing stocks. That was followed by pushing paper as a personnel manager in a department store, followed by a few more examples of various ill-matched positions, all of which became lampooning fodder for magazine articles under his byline.

It was the writing gigs that hit the home run for Brooks. In October 2000, his first published novel, “Darkness Bound,” (about a stockbroker who hates stock brokering) appeared on the USA Today best-seller list for three weeks. That was followed by more novels, “Pressure Points,” “Serpent’s Dance,” and “Bait and Switch,” the last of which earned a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly and a spot on the lead Editor’s Choice for that month. Screenplays for all his books are in various stages of development.

Jen Jako

 

Jennifer Jako studied design at L’Ecole d’Arts Plastiques in Monaco and the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Oregon. She is owner of Fix Studio, which The Oregonian called a “hotshot architecture firm.” Clients for interiors and custom designed furniture include Ace Hotel, Doug Fir Lounge, Nostrana, clarklewis, Por Que No and Bunk Sandwiches, all of which have been lauded in the New York Times, and clarklewis and Nostrana were voted best restaurants by the Oregonian in years 2004 and 2006 respectively. She and partner Chris Bleiler, founded the biennial furniture design exhibit ShowPDX and were both featured in last fall’s edition of Portland Spaces.

As an activist/lecturer working to raise awareness about AIDS, she directed and produced, Blood Lines, which The New York Times called “a pointed, moving documentary” It was broadcast on MTV from 1999-2004 and won the Best Short Award at the 26th Northwest Film & Video Festival Program. Jako has also consulted with writers at CBS and ABC and informed content for recent episodes of Gray’s Anatomy and Without a Trace.

Rick Emerson (emcee)

 

According to Willamette Week, “Emerson is the type of talk jock who is more interested in entertaining listeners with snide remarks and absurdist rants than spouting political dogma or sports stats. It’s an approach that is rare in today’s talk radio universe, and it’s one that puts Emerson in the same category, if not class, as Howard Stern. Emerson’s delivery is brash, uncompromisingly geeky, smart, occasionally completely off the mark and funny.”