#btconf Düsseldorf, Germany 17 - 18 Apr 2023

The speakers at beyond tellerrand inspire, encourage, motivate and educate. Coming in from all over the world. Please make them feel very welcome and see who it is this year.

Stay tuned, while we reveal the rest of the line-up bit by bit.

Emily Anhalt

Emily Anhalt

Dr. Emily Anhalt is the Co-Founder and Chief Clinical Officer of Coa. As a psychoanalytic psychologist, she has spent the past decade working clinically with entrepreneurs, and conducted extensive research about how people can improve their mental and emotional fitness. Frustrated with the quick-fix attitude of mental healthcare in our culture, she wanted to create a mental health solution that honors the complexity of the human condition and the importance of clinical integrity. She has spoken around the world about proactive mental health and emotional fitness, and has collaborated with some of the fastest-growing technology companies and VC firms in the world, including Google, Asana, Github, Unilever, and Bloomberg.

Michelle Barker

Michelle Barker

A self-described CSS enthusiast, Michelle is author of front-end blog CSS { In Real Life }, where she aims to share some of the wonderful things we can do with CSS (and web development in general) from the perspective of someone working with it every day. As a Senior Front End Developer at Ada Mode, Michelle is passionate about harnessing our web development superpowers to make a positive impact on the world. With a background in illustration, she enjoys building creative demos, as well as helping developers fall in love with CSS through her technical writing for Smashing Magazine, Codrops, CSS Tricks and others.

Hugh Elliott

Hugh Elliott

Hugh Elliott is a Creative Technologist and podcaster. His focus has been on hardware and physical interactions. He also produces two podcasts; Can’t Sell This and Dismissed. In the first, he chats with driven individuals about creativity, process and staying inspired. In the second, he and his guests try and pull the curtain back on the psychology of being let go from your job.

Cassie Evans

Cassie Evans

Cassie is a creative developer with a background in graphic design and motion design. She got started with coding back in the days of Myspace and Neopets and is on a mission to make the internet more whimsical again. She currently works in developer relations at GreenSock, tinkering, educating and getting people excited about animation on the web.

Scott Kellum

Scott Kellum

Scott Kellum is the founder of Typetura, a typography as a service company offering both bespoke and ready-made typographic solutions. With over 15 years of design experience across type, editorial, digital, and print design; Scott’s experience gives him a unique perspective on the typographic challenges and opportunities in the design industry. He has invented multiple web technologies, holds two patents, and has contributed to major projects at Vox Media, Darden Studio, and Roger Black Studio. These accomplishments include inventing dynamic typographic systems, high impact ad formats, new parallax techniques, and the fluid typesetting technology that powers Typetura itself.

Mario Klingemann

Mario Klingemann

Mario Klingemann is an artist who uses algorithms and artificial intelligence to create and investigate systems. He is particularly interested in human perception of art and creativity, researching methods in which machines can augment or emulate these processes. Thus his artistic research spans a wide range of areas like generative art, cybernetic aesthetics, information theory, robotics, feedback loops, pattern recognition, emergent behaviours, neural networks, cultural data or storytelling.

Since early 2020 he has been active in the field of blockchain-based art and played an instrumental role in the stewardship and emergence of the ecologically responsible NFT community around Hic et Nunc and Tezos.

Mario is also the creator and guardian of Botto, an autonomous decentralised AI artist which, steered by its community, has created and sold NFTs for over 2 million US$ since its inception in fall 2021 and currently ranks among the top-10 artists on SuperRare.

He was winner of the Lumen Prize Gold 2018, received an honorary mention at the Prix Ars Electronica 2020 and won the British Library Labs Creative Award 2015. He was artist in residence at the Google Arts & Culture Lab and has been recognised as a pioneer in the field of AI art. His work has been featured in art publications as well as academic research and has been shown in international museums and at art festivals like Ars Electronica, the Centre Pompidou, ZKM, the Barbican, the Ermitage, the Photographers' Gallery, Colección Solo Madrid, Nature Morte Gallery New Delhi, Residenzschloss Dresden, Grey Area Foundation, Mediacity Biennale Seoul, the British Library and MoMA. He is represented by Onkaos, Madrid and DAM Gallery Berlin.

Eike König

Eike König

Eike is known for a couple of reasons and multiple things he does. When I met eike first, I knew him primarily from his work with Hort. Hort is a Berlin based graphic design studio made up of a mixed bag of uniquely selected, creative and spirited people. Throughout its existence Hort has been a constant pioneer in re-inventing the visual language of contemporary graphic design. Hortʼs ongoing experimental enthusiasm has inspired many budding young designers, found its way as an influential source amongst contemporaries and has been featured in countless publications.

When not working with Hort, founder Eike König takes on the role of mentor. He is the Professor of Graphic Design and Illustration at the HfG University of Arts, Offenbach, Germany. He has also led numerous creative workshops locally and internationally and conducted lectures at various universities around Germany. His knowledge and experience has taken him as far as South America and Australia, sharing his stories with different audiences at acclaimed design conferences.

When working on his own Eike König produces not answers, but rather discourse. Partly with autobiographical justification, in his creative structures. For moments, he becomes the deconstructivist in a world in which brands crumble into ever smaller particles. His work is bold, but beautiful and provokes conversations, I think.

You can expect a colourful and inspiring talk and I a looking forward to having Eike on our beyond tellerrand stage.

Sophie Koonin

Sophie Koonin

Sophie is the web engineering lead at Monzo Bank in London, responsible for the web platform across the organisation and working on internal tooling that powers Monzo’s award-winning customer service. Building websites since the age of 10, she’s passionate about creating inclusive, accessible and fun websites that people love. Sophie writes about tech & mental health at localghost.dev, builds intentionally useless web apps, and makes music.

Tobias Kunisch

Tobias Kunisch

Tobias is working on making type and typography accessible and available to everyone, everywhere as Design Lead for Google Fonts.

After co-founding Google Fonts as a 20% project in 2010, he also worked on other projects like Material Design and the Google Store before returning to the team.

As a web designer in the early 2000s he lived through the browser wars, converted from spacer GIFs to CSS layouts and discovered webfonts with @font-face. Since then he's been passionate about making the web more diverse, localised and beautiful by making typography something that everyone has access to. He's lived and worked in London, New York and San Francisco and has recently returned to face Berlin's long and grey winters.

Gemma O’Brien

Gemma O’Brien

Gemma O’Brien is an internationally renowned designer and artist known for her bold graphics, illustrative lettering and murals. Her work has been commissioned by Apple, Nike, Google, and is held in the permanent collection of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City. Outside her commercial design work, she explores language, nature and the human experience through her art practice.

Thomas Thwaites

Thomas Thwaites

Thomas Thwaites is a design researcher who undertakes projects that are not-quite possible (yet), as a means of probing the psychological and social impacts of technologies.

His work has been shown at galleries and museums across six continents including the National Museum of China, Cooper Hewitt, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Seoul, ZKM, and is in the permanent collections of the Victoria &Albert Museum the Design Museum London, the Banque De France, the Groote Museum, and the Asia Culture Centre (South Korea).

His projects occasionally receive a phenomenal amount of media and academic attention, as with his Toaster Project, where he attempted to make an electric toaster from scratch, and Goatman, where he attempted to take a holiday from being human. The books of these projects have been translated into Japanese, Korean, and Norwegian (with a forthcoming German edition of Goatman).

He’s received multiple awards for his work, including from Prix Ars Electronica, (Honorary Mention), The Wellcome Trust, and the renowned ‘Ig Nobel Prize for Biology’.

Aoi Yamaguchi

Aoi Yamaguchi

Born and raised in Hokkaido, Japan, Aoi Yamaguchi has been trained to master the basics of calligraphy by learning under the Master Zuiho Sato since at the age of 6, while refining her knowledge and skills. She is a recipient of numerous awards including the First Place prize from the Minister of Education at 44th Asahi Calligraphy Nationwide School Exhibit, Superior First Place at 33rd National Students Calligraphy Exhibition and others that are known as the supreme prizes at competitive public exhibitions. As a noteworthy event, she was nominated to participate in the group, 4th Hokkaido Elementary and Junior High Students Visit to China in 2000, representing the country of Japan and participated in calligraphy exchange sessions at Palace of Pupils of China.

Since landed in the U.S. in 2004, she has performed and exhibited her works in many galleries, museums, universities and festivals in the United States, across Europe, and Japan. Her works show her exploration in juxtaposing the traditional Eastern classics and her contemporary artistic expressions, as well as her unique ambition of transforming two-dimensional art of Japanese Calligraphy into the art of physical expression through performances. Currently residing in Berkeley, California, Yamaguchi continues her work on her conceptual calligraphy installations, exhibitions, and performances as she continues to push the boundaries of traditional Eastern classics and contemporary artistic expression.

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