Color headshot of Mary Adamek wearing eyeglasses and red shirtMary Adamek is the Director of the Music Therapy Program at the University of Iowa. Dr. Adamek co-authored the textbook, Music in Special Education, published by the American Music Therapy Association (AMTA) and she has contributed chapters in three textbooks published by AMTA, Effectiveness of Music Therapy Procedures: Documentation of Research and Clinical PracticeModels of Music Therapy Interventions in School Settings, and An Introduction to Music Therapy. She maintains an active leadership role in state, regional and national music therapy organizations and is a past-president of AMTA. Dr. Adamek has extensive professional experience as a music therapist and music educator. She is a specialist in the areas of music in special education, full inclusion music education, and supervision of music therapy students in training. She is involved in interdisciplinary research at University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics to help adolescents use music therapy to decrease pain and anxiety after spinal fusion surgery, supported in part by a Clinician/Researcher grant from AMTA. Read her full bio.
Color headshot of Eileen Ball wearing eyeglasses, necklaces, and green jacketEileen Wynne Ball is a professor in the Program for the Advancement of Learning at Curry College. Her PhD is from Syracuse University, where she created Phonological Awareness Interventions and studied the effects of increased phonological awareness on later reading proficiency. Since that time, Dr. Ball has published extensively on reading, language, assessment, and teacher education. Currently, Dr. Ball facilitates digital storytelling workshops with the intention to broaden one’s reflective practice and as an attempt to deepen one’s sense of community and inclusion.
Color photo of Nina G. performing comedy onstage; she's smiling and holding a microphoneNina G. is the San Francisco Bay Area’s favorite female stuttering stand-up comedian (granted, she is the only one). She is also a disability activist, storyteller, children’s book author, and educator. She brings her humor to help people confront and understand social justice issues such as disability, diversity, and equity. When she isn’t performing at comedy clubs like the San Francisco Punchline or the Laugh Factory, she is playing colleges and presenting as a keynote speaker to children with disabilities and training professionals. Nina is part of the comedy troupe The Comedians with Disabilities Act, which brings laughter and awareness to audiences of all ages across the country. She is the author of the children’s book Once Upon an Accommodation: A Book About Learning Disabilities, which helps children and adults advocate for their rights as a person with a Disability. Nina’s one-person show, Going Beyond Inspirational, a comical exploration about growing up with Learning and Speech Disabilities, debuted in 2015 and was featured on CBS San Francisco Local.
Color headshot of Liz Delsandro wearing eyeglasses and necklaceElizabeth (Liz) Delsandro is a senior clinical speech-language pathologist at the Waisman Center of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, focusing on clinical work in the Autism and Developmental Disabilities Clinic, Down Syndrome Clinic, Newborn Follow-Up Clinic, and the Feeding Clinic. Prior to joining the Waisman Center in 2017, Liz was a clinical associate professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Iowa. Her primary responsibilities were supervising graduate student clinicians in working with individuals with autism spectrum disorders in the Wendell Johnson Speech and Hearing Clinic, teaching graduate-level courses, and developing quality and innovative programming for individuals with autism (e.g., summer science club, summer cooking club, etc.). Liz was also one of the co-creators of the Awesome Autism Awareness and Acceptance Art Project, a community engagement art project in Iowa City and surrounding areas. 
Color photo of Michele Friedner, smiling, in red and yellow scarf with arms crossedMichele Friedner teaches in the department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago and is the author of Valuing Deaf Worlds in Rural India (Rutgers University Press, 2015). She is a social and medical anthropologist whose work examines both the category of and experience of “deafness” and “disability,” particularly in urban India. She’s interested in how political economic changes in India have created new opportunities and constraints for deaf and disabled people in the arenas of employment, education, politics, religion, and everyday life. In working with sign language-using deaf people, she also attends to the limits of disability as both a juridical and legislative category and as an explanatory concept within social theory. She is on the editorial board of Disability Studies Quarterly, on the Society for Medical Anthropology’s Disability Research Interest Group Steering Committee, and is an advisor on the European Research Council-funded project Mobile Deaf, a deaf-run research project based at Heriot Watt University analyzing deaf peoples’ translanguaging in various empirical contexts. Read her full bio at https://humdev.uchicago.edu/directory/michele-friedner.
Color headshot of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson wearing black shirt, earrings, red glasses, smilingRosemarie Garland-Thomson is Professor of English and bioethics at Emory University, where she teaches disability studies, bioethics, American literature and culture, and feminist theory. She is a disability justice and culture thought leader, bioethicist, teacher, and humanities scholar. Her recent editorial, “Becoming Disabled,” was the inaugural article in the ongoing weekly series in the New York Times about disability by people living with disabilities. Her work develops the field of critical disability studies in the health humanities to bring forward disability access, inclusion, and identity to a broad range of institutions and communities. She is the author of Staring: How We Look and several other books. Her current project is How to Be Disabled: Shaping the Future for Everyone.
Color headshot of Juan Pablo Hourcade smiling, wearing eyeglasses and brown jacketJuan Pablo Hourcade is Associate Professor in the University of Iowa’s Department of Computer Science, UI3 Associate Director for Informatics Education, and a member of the Delta Center. His main area of research is human-computer interaction, with a focus on the design, implementation, and evaluation of technologies that support creativity, collaboration, well-being, healthy development, and information access for a variety of users, including children and older adults. He is the author of Child-Computer Interaction, the first comprehensive book on the topic, and has held various leadership roles in his research community. He is on the editorial boards of Interacting with Computers, Foundations and Trends in Human-Computer Interaction, and the International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction. He is editor of the Universal Interactions forum, and a blogger for interactions magazine.
Color headshot of Margaret Price in gray shirt and glasses, arms crossed. ©Sandra Costello 2017Margaret Price is Associate Professor of English and Director of Disability Studies at The Ohio State University. Her book Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life (2011) won the Outstanding Book Award from the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Her work also appears in Disability Studies Quarterly; Hypatia; Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture; Inside Higher Education; Creative Nonfiction; College Composition and Communication; and other venues. Margaret is now at work on a book titled Crip Spacetime. She is an incessant knitter, likes to wear interesting socks, and has a tiny dog named Ivy. Read more about Margaret’s work at http://margaretprice.wordpress.com.

Color headshot of Sami Schalk wearing a purple shirt and eyeglasses, standing against a white brick wallSami Schalk is an Assistant Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her interdisciplinary research focuses broadly on disability, race, and gender in contemporary American literature and culture, especially African American literature, speculative fiction, and women’s literature. Dr. Schalk’s first book Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction  (Duke University Press 2018) argues that black women writers of speculative fiction reimagine the possibilities and limits of bodyminds, changing the way we read and interpret categories like (dis)ability, race, gender and sexuality within the context of these non-realist texts. She has also begun a second book project on disability politics in contemporary African American art and activism, including the Black Panthers and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Color headshot of Joseph Straus in a collared blue shirt, standing near a wall with framed photos.Joseph Straus is Distinguished Professor at CUNY’s Graduate Center. A music theorist specializing in music since 1900, he has written technical music-theoretical articles, analytical studies of music by a variety of modernist composers, and, most recently, a series of articles and books that engage disability as a cultural practice. He has written textbooks that have become standard references. Many of his books and articles have received publication awards from the Society for Music Theory (SMT), of which he was President from 1997–99. His publications include Broken Beauty: Musical Modernism and the Representation of Disability (Oxford University Press, 2018), Extraordinary Measures: Music and Disability (Oxford University Press, 2011), and The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, co-edited with Blake Howe, Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, and Neil Lerner (Oxford University Press, 2016).
Color photo (headshot) of Patricia ZebrowskiPatricia M. (Tricia) Zebrowski is a professor emerita in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders. Her research focuses on the onset and development of stuttering in early childhood and the underlying cognitive factors that predict change readiness (including engagement in therapy) for teens who stutter. For over 20 years Tricia has directed UISPEAKS for Teens, a summer residential program for adolescents who stutter held on the UI campus. She is a Fellow of the American Speech-Language and Hearing Association and an American Board of Fluency and Fluency Disorders certified clinical specialist. Tricia has authored a book in stuttering intervention and numerous research and clinical papers in addition to educational videos on stuttering and stuttering intervention. She has presented widely at state, national and international conferences.