Bio examples: 38 short bios for social media, events and work

June Park is a muralist and illustrator in Philadelphia who paints large walls with small details. Since 2016 she has painted 23 murals across the city, from a three-story fish market in South Philadelphia to a row of portraits of crossing guards outside an elementary school in Kensington. Her illustrations have appeared on book covers, in a campaign for the city's buses and on the side of a food truck she still wishes she had charged more for. She grew up above her parents' dry-cleaning shop, where she learned to draw on the backs of claim tickets, and much of her work is about the people who keep a neighborhood running without being noticed. Every summer she teaches a free mural workshop for teenagers. Her next wall, at a public library branch in West Philadelphia, will be finished in June.

June Park is a Philadelphia muralist and illustrator. She has painted 23 murals across the city, many of them portraits of the people who keep neighborhoods running, from fishmongers to crossing guards. She grew up drawing on the backs of claim tickets in her parents' dry-cleaning shop.

June Park paints murals of the people Philadelphia overlooks, from fishmongers to crossing guards.

• Ceramicist in Asheville. Mugs that fit two hands. New glazes the first Friday of every month.
• Running coach for beginners over 40. Slower miles, fewer injuries. Free 8-week plan below.
• Food photographer. Restaurants, cookbooks and the occasional very good sandwich. Boston.
• Marine biology PhD student. Sharks, mostly. Field notes from the boat every Tuesday.
• Independent bookstore in Tulsa. Staff picks, author nights and a cat named Margins.

• Health reporter at a statewide newsroom. Hospitals, insurance and the bills nobody can explain. Tips welcome, DMs open.
• Product designer. Formerly fintech, now accessibility tools. Writing about forms people can actually fill in.
• Middle school science teacher. Seventh grade, 31 kids and one very old skeleton named Kevin.
• Economist at a regional bank. Housing, mostly. Views are mine; charts are everyone's.

• Restoring 1970s furniture, one drawer at a time.
• Night-shift nurse. Real talk about the 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. life.
• Learning piano at 52. Day 214.
• Dinners for two, under $10, in 30 minutes.

• Payroll specialist for restaurant groups · Multi-state tax · Making sure 400 cooks get paid right
• Grant writer for rural health clinics | $14M raised since 2019
• Data analyst moving into product · SQL, Python and asking “why?” twice

I write grant proposals for rural health clinics, mostly in Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta. Since 2019 my proposals have brought in $14 million for things like mobile dental vans, a telehealth program for diabetes care and a clinic roof that had leaked for eleven years. Before this I ran a free clinic's front desk for six years, so I know what a budget line looks like from the waiting room. I take on four or five clients a year so I can work the way I like: on site first, writing second. If you run a clinic with a deadline in the next six months, I'm glad to talk.

Carmen Ruiz leads reliability engineering at a payments company in Austin, where her team keeps checkout running for 30,000 small businesses. She has led the response to some of the largest outages in the company's history and is best known inside it for writing postmortems people actually read. At this conference she will talk about on-call rotations that don't burn people out.

Tobias Lund runs a twelve-person architecture studio in Minneapolis that designs schools. His firm's last three projects replaced portable classrooms with buildings that cost less to heat than the trailers did. He serves on the city's sustainability commission.

Dr. Aisha Mensah is a historian of medicine at a state university in Ohio and the host of a public radio series on the history of hospitals. Today she asks the questions; the panel gets the hard ones.

Greta Holm has taught beginner woodworking to more than 2,000 adults at her shop in Duluth, most of whom had never held a chisel. She believes anyone can make a cutting board in a weekend, and she has the patience to prove it.

I'm Sam Whitaker, and I make Small Print, a weekly show about the contracts people sign without reading: phone plans, leases, gym memberships, terms of service. I spent nine years as a consumer-protection lawyer before I started explaining contracts into a microphone instead. Every episode, a listener sends in one document and I read the whole thing so you don't have to.

Noor Siddiqui is a structural engineer who inspects bridges for a state transportation department. She has climbed, crawled under or been lowered in a bucket beneath more than 600 bridges, and she has opinions about all of them. She also writes a newsletter that explains infrastructure to people who aren't engineers.

My guest today has inspected more than six hundred bridges, from on top, from underneath and occasionally from a bucket hanging off a truck. She writes about infrastructure for people who just want to know whether the bridge on their commute is okay. Welcome, Noor Siddiqui.

Rafael Ortiz paints small oil landscapes of the Rio Grande Valley, most of them no larger than a paperback. He works outdoors in the hour after sunrise and finishes each painting in one sitting. His work has been shown in Texas and New Mexico, and he teaches a plein-air class for retirees in McAllen.

Hollow Pines is a folk duo from Bozeman, Montana: Ellie Marsh on fiddle and vocals, Dev Patel on guitar and banjo. They met in a hospital waiting room in 2019 and wrote their first song about the vending machine. Their second album, recorded in a converted grain elevator, came out in March. They play about 120 shows a year, most of them in towns with one stoplight.

I photograph weddings for couples who would rather not pose. Most of my favorite pictures happen in the hours nobody plans for: getting ready, the cake that leans, a grandmother who takes over the dance floor. I'm based in Savannah and travel anywhere with a decent coffee shop.

Marcus Bell (Horatio) is making his debut with the company. Regional credits include Romeo and Juliet and A Raisin in the Sun. By day he teaches high school drama in Hartford, where his students have seen this production twice and given him notes both times. He thanks his mother, for everything.

I'm a bookkeeper for small construction companies: general contractors, electricians and plumbers with between two and forty employees. I set up job costing so you know which jobs actually made money, run payroll and hand your accountant clean books at tax time. Before freelancing I spent eight years in the office of a commercial roofing company, so I know what a change order is and why it's late.

Priya leads customer support. Before joining us she ran support for a concert ticketing company through two summer festival seasons. She reads every one-star review herself and answers most of them. Outside work she is training for her first half marathon, slowly.

Harold Kim joined the board of the Eastside Literacy Project in 2022 and chairs its finance committee. He retired in 2021 after thirty years as a CPA, the last twelve as a partner at a regional accounting firm. He tutors adult readers on Wednesday evenings and has never missed a session for a board meeting.

Lina Ortega is a second-year master's student in public health studying how heat waves affect outdoor workers. Before graduate school she spent two years as a community health worker in Phoenix. She runs the department's writing group and bakes for its deadlines.

Coach Dana Brooks has led the Hawks, a U10 girls' soccer team, for four seasons. She played in college and works as a physical therapist, which means everyone warms up properly. Practices are Tuesdays and Thursdays at Lincoln Park.

I'm Theo Nakamura. I spent fifteen years as a line cook and now write Mise, a weekly letter about cooking at home like a professional, minus the yelling. Every Sunday you get one technique, one recipe that uses it and one thing I got wrong that week. About 9,000 people read it, including my old chef, who still finds the typos.

Mark Ellison is a passionate, results-driven professional with over ten years of experience in the industry. He is dedicated to excellence and loves helping clients achieve their goals. Mark is a team player who thrives in fast-paced environments and is always looking for new challenges. In his free time, he enjoys traveling, reading and spending time with family and friends. He believes in hard work and integrity.

Mark Ellison is an insurance broker in Fresno who helps farm families insure their equipment, crops and the trucks in between. In ten years he has handled more than 400 claims after hail, fire and one memorable runaway tractor. He grew up on a raisin farm in Selma and still answers his phone at 5 a.m. during harvest.