As an 8 year old, Shawn Colvin taught herself to play songs on the piano from a book called “Lullabies and Night Songs,” with songs Alec Wilder and illustrations by Maurice Sendak. Later, as an adult about to give birth to her daughter, she used some of the songs from that book to record her first kids’ album, “Holiday Songs and Lullabies.” Now, almost 20 years later, she’s released “The Starlighter,” another album of children’s music that draws its source material from “Lull

Rachel Giannini spent years as a pre-school teacher in the Chicago area. She was so good at it that she has since become one of the subjects of an upcoming documentary about early childhood education called No Small Matter. She was so good at that, that the producers of the movie asked her to take on some of the outreach for the movie via their blog. She now works at the Chicago Children’s Museum on Navy pier as their Brand Ambassador. You can find all things Rachel at www.ra

Aaron Goldblatt runs Metcalfe Architecture and Design in Philadelphia with his partner Alan Metcalfe. They design a lot of public spaces, and spaces for kids, including health care spaces and informal education spaces like museums and botanic gardens. Alan’s background is in architecture, but Aaron’s is in museum design and art (he was a sculptor, ceramicist, and welder for years before getting into museums). As an actor, it’s funny to hear their philosophies about their work

Michael Granberry is an animator on the Amazon show for pre-schoolers Tumble Leaf. The show has won multiple emmy awards in its first two seasons, and it’s something you don’t see much in kids’ TV anymore; it’s quiet. It’s thoughtful, it doesn’t go for a lot of jokes. It’s a simple show that is anything but simple for the team at BixPix to create. Michael will tell us how he fell in love with the painstaking process of stop-motion animation, how he shifted from the horror gen

Eric Robles created the Nick show “Fanboy and Chum Chum.” He’s currently in the process of creating his second show for Nickelodeon, “Glitch Techs,” which won’t come out until sometime in 2018. Eric is a self-taught artist, and the story of how he got from the path to becoming a police officer to his first job in animation is an incredibly inspiring one. I’m excited for you to hear it. Thanks so much to Eric Robles for that great conversation, thanks to Audrey Gray at nick fo