Nice to Meet You

Chrissie Bonner is a graphic facilitator, teacher, author, and illustrator.  

Her interest in visual work is rooted in cultivating the mindsets necessary for transformative change and designing environments for people to be creative and do their best thinking. She is passionate about hosting spaces for reimagining, leveraging deep listening and collective creativity.  You can read more about her background and work here. 

Ro Adler is an artist, educator, facilitator, and graphic recorder. They believe in the power of collaboration, and they love to create visuals that support both clarity and emotion for people doing important work.

They come to Illustrating Progress from Philly’s vibrant community arts world, where they have served as a teaching artist, program administrator, and consultant. In addition to working as a graphic recorder, Ro is pursuing an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art. 

Their favorite mediums are oil paint, digital illustration, and paper mâché.

Elizabeth Beier is a creative powerhouse with ten years of experience, centered around illustration, comics and graphic facilitation. Since founding Art + Story LLC in 2020, she has provided illustration, graphic facilitation and design services to nonprofits, healthcare organizations both large and small, and other companies. Her graphic novel “The Big Book of Bisexual Trials and Errors” (2017, Northwest Press) was called one of the best LGBT graphic novels of the year by The Advocate. Several of her illustrated stories centering women’s issues have been featured on the Washington Post homepage. She is also an adjunct professor of comics at California College of the Arts. What sets Elizabeth apart is her strong visual skills, coupled with a strong and studied sense of how to tell a great story.

Maddy Conover is an artist living in Philadelphia, PA. As an elementary schooler, she began learning how to “mind map,” both digitally and by hand. Ever since then, mind mapping has been essential to her creative practice.
She received her MFA in Printmaking from the Tyler School of Art & Architecture at Temple University and her BA in Studio Art and Sustainable Food & Farming from the University of Massachusetts – Amherst. In her free time, she enjoys screenprinting, painting, cooking, and hanging out with her dog, Miwa.https://madeleineconover.com/ Contact: conovermadeleine@gmail.com 

Ellen has over 20 years of experience working with nonprofit, for-profit, and government agencies in management and leadership consulting capacities. Ellen enjoys generating value through leadership development, executive coaching, diversity programming, strategic planning, training, team building, managing change, organizational learning, and building high-performance work systems. She is a facilitator, coach, and the owner and principal consultant of Partnering For Change, LLC, a Philadelphia-based organization development consulting firm creating new solutions and approaches that lead to sustainable results, greater success, and healthier, higher-performing organizations. 

You can learn more about Partnering for Change and Ellen here: https://www.partneringforchange.com/. 

Neha is a visual facilitator, collaborator, and also the founder of ThinkALOUD where her endeavor is to hold space for creative exploration and strategic decision-making for impact-driven leaders and teams.  Throughout her career Neha has been fascinated with leveraging creative tools such as storyboards, sketchnotes, and graphic recording to help visualize and build the larger picture.   Neha draws on her experience of consulting businesses and nonprofits across the globe with two of the world’s largest management advisory firms.          She is an ICF (ACC) certified leadership coach and a Master Practitioner of the Energy Leadership Index (ELITM).   She was born, raised, and educated in India, now lives in Atlanta, Georgia and together with her husband finds everyday joy in raising their little ones.  You can learn more about Neha at www.thinkaloudcoaching.com . 

Terry LaBan has been obsessed with telling stories using both words and pictures since he could hold a pencil. 

After graduating from the University of Michigan's School of Art and Design, Terry traveled around the world for a year and a half, and, soon after returning, began his career as a political cartoonist for the Ann Arbor News. He went on to work for many years in the comic book industry as both an artist and writer for numerous publishers, including Fantagaphics Books, Dark Horse Comics and DC Vertigo. 

In 2001, his daily comic strip, “Edge City,” was nationally syndicated by King Features Syndicate, and ran in newspapers around the country for 15 years.

Terry discovered graphic recording in 2015 and immediately realized it was a perfect fit for his skills. In addition to his visual storytelling work, Terry has taught classes in graphic narrative as an adjunct professor at Jefferson University and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He likes cats, oriental rugs, old rock and roll, and having lunch outside. 

In addition to being an Illustrating Progress team member, Terry is also the Founder of his own company, Breakthrough Visuals, a company which offers a full range of visual storytelling services to businesses and organizations.

Haley is an artist and visual practitioner originally from the North Shore of Massachusetts. Her artistic practice began at a young age and continued as a lifelong journey focusing on sense-making based on experiences and the meanings they hold through painting, drawing, writing, and printmaking. Haley was introduced to the world of graphic facilitation while working as an Events Coordinator at Easthampton City Arts in Easthampton, MA in 2019.  Haley believes organizing thoughts and their relationships to one another to create shared understanding and amplify the message in a structured visual outcome is important, exciting, and necessary work relevant to projects of all shapes and sizes.   She also runs her own visual facilitation practice based in Philadelphia.  You can see more of her work at https://haleymcdevitt.com/ Contact: haley@illustratingprogress.com

Madeleine Jubilee Saito is an award-winning professional cartoonist and graphic designer living on Duwamish land in Seattle, Washington.

Madeleine grew up in the woods of rural Illinois, then in a mid-sized post-industrial city in Illinois, and now lives in Seattle. She is a white Lithuanian American cis woman, a Christian, and an anti-capitalist.

Some words you might use to describe her work are comics poetry, poetry comics, or experimental comics. She is interested in many things, including friendship, formal experimentation, medieval sacred comics, the built environment, solidarity, climate justice, the psalms, the material world, and the sacred.  You can learn even more about Madeleine and her work at https://madeleinejubileesaito.net/. 

Rommy Torrico is a formerly undocumented, queer, trans nonbinary visual artist born in Iquique, Chile, and raised in Florida. They have been involved in social movement spaces encompassing (im)migrant, queer, and trans rights struggles for over a decade and infuse much of their work with personal experience and the stories their communities share. Over the years, Torrico’s work has been included in several publications and exhibited at the Getty Museum, the Smithsonian Museum, the Library of Congress, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía as well as many galleries and museums throughout the Americas and internationally.

You can learn more about them and their creative portfolio at https://www.rommytorrico.com/

Rick is a content production professional with experience across diverse roles bridging the creative and technical realms. What began as a passion for music in his native Costa Rica led him to relocate to the US to pursue a degree in Music and Audio Production from Shenandoah University in Virginia.

This would eventually develop into a career including extensive project management work for content localization projects in over 20 languages for companies such as American Airlines and Apple, as well as composer, producer, and recording engineer credits on hundreds of recordings.

After 20 years working in NYC and Los Angeles, he is now back in Costa Rica with his wife, where they enjoy their free time exploring the country with their dog Pax.