Trained at The Australian Ballet School & having enjoyed a thrilling & fulfilling career with The Australian Ballet as a Principal Artist, Robert took his passion & discipline he developed as a dancer & set his sights on diversifying his knowledge, skills & abilities.

With education and experience, he continually expanded his ability to move his own body on stage & through this, moving an audience through a wide range of emotions. Beyond his dancing career, he strives to continue to move people towards a satisfying encounter with dance.

Robert is motivated by the form that a dancer gains from training in the traditions of classical ballet, where respect & discipline can facilitate breathtaking strength & freedom.

He is also inspired by the innovation that forms the function of any artist, that being to bravely & boldly express oneself through art for the greater good of a community.

As Artistic Director, Robert continues to contribute to the Global Arts Community, enriching his knowledge of the art form to which he has devoted his life.

He is excited by & committed to the Louisville community with its abundant respect for the arts and its exciting perspective on the future.

GE Appliances, a Haier company, is headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, where Marcia Brey leads the Lean strategy for the business focusing on delivering winning products and services for customers & consumers while minimizing waste throughout ALL functions.

Known as the Lean Enterprise, Marcia is responsible for implementing transformational, cross-functional processes, growing the capability of employees and improving management systems at GE Appliances. Marcia earned her Master’s degrees from both the University of Louisville in Mechanical Engineering & the University of Arizona in Quality & Reliability Engineering.

Marcia began her 26-year career at Appliances on GE’s Edison Engineering Program & has worked across multiple product lines in Design Engineering, Customer Service, Sales, Marketing, Distribution, Quality & Manufacturing.

She most recently was the plant manager for the Bottom-Freezer Refrigeration factory where she managed a $100M budget and led a team of 1,000 employees making significant improvements in safety, quality, delivery, cost & employee satisfaction. She assumed her current role in Jan. 2017.

Marcia has volunteered with the American Red Cross for the past 10-years as the GE Appliance representative on the Board of Directors. She has led several Red Cross service projects as well as several committees AND assumed the role of Chair of the Board for the Kentucky Region of the American Red Cross in July of 2019. Marcia also volunteers at her church, St. Gabriel, leading several committees.

She has been recognized by Today’s Woman, Business First’s “Top 40 under 40” and as a Manufacturing Institute “STEP Ahead leader.”

Marcia & her husband, Greg, are raising their 3 children in Louisville.

Alex attends Saint Xavier High School in Louisville, Kentucky and has served as Lieutenant Governor of the Kentucky Youth Assembly and more recently elected to serve as the KYA President of the Senate.

Additionally, he was selected to represent Kentucky at the Conference On National Affairs.

Since the age of 11, Alex has been leading a bipartisan effort in the Kentucky legislature to end the use of corporal punishment in schools.

Alex has also written opinion pieces for The Courier-Journal.

He enjoys running cross country & participating in Saint Xavier High School’s service club & student council.

The Saint Xavier faculty awarded Alex the Ryken Underclassman Award for outstanding industry, school spirit, cooperation, and loyalty.

Josh runs IDEAS xLab – an artist-led nonprofit based in Louisville, KY. He is an artist with a background in entrepreneurship, art & business administration, & editorial production – & explores the world through photography (& a lot of running), documenting his journey through joshmiller.ventures.

In addition to his outdoor explorations, Josh celebrates the brilliance and strength of marginalized people including LGBTQ+ & Black communities through photography & collaborative storytelling.

Josh was selected for Louisville Business First’s Forty under 40 and is a distance runner, a TEDx speaker, an advisor for the Derby Diversity & Business Summit, & founding Board Member of Civitas: Regional LGBTQ Chamber of Commerce headquartered in Louisville, KY.

From 2016 – July 2019, he served as the Co-Chair of the Louisville Health Advisory Board’s Communications Committee.

In 2019, IDEAS xLab was named Nonprofit of the Year by the Derby Diversity & Business Summit.

Lee Pennington is a graduate of Berea College and the University of Iowa. He holds two Honorary Doctor degrees – A Doctor of Literature from World University & Doctor of Philosophy in Arts from The Academy of Southern Arts & Letters. He taught for nearly 40 years, the last 32 as Professor of English and creative writing at the University of Kentucky’s Jefferson Community College until he retired in 1999. Lee is the author of 22 books including I Knew a Woman (1977) Thigmotropism (1993) & Appalachian Newground (2016)–each nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His latest book is Daughters of Leda (2017)—selected as a finalist for “Best Book of Poetry published in 2017” by the American Book Fest. His Songs of Bloody Harlan was reprinted and re-released in 2019. He has had over 1300 poems published in more than 300 magazines in America & abroad. He has had 9 plays produced, wrote the script for The Moonshine War (MGM, 1970, starring Alan Alda, Richard Widmark, etc.), & has published thousands of articles & short stories in everything from Playgirl to Mountain Life & Work. Since 1990, through his video production company, JoLe Productions (joleproductions.com),  Lee, along with his late wife, Joy, have produced 21 documentaries including In Search of the Mudmen (1990), Wales: History in Bondage (1995), & Secret of the Stones (1998), Eyes that Look at the Sky: The Mystery of Easter Island (2001), The Mound Builders (2001), The Serpent Fort: Solving the Mystery of FT. Mountain, Georgia (2005), Let Me Not Drown on the Waters: Fred Rydholm, Michigan’s “Mr. Copper.”  Since 2011, Lee has produced 5 more documentaries: Some Days You Clean, Some Days You Litter: The Amazing Warner Sizemore, 2012; Room To Fly: Anne Caudill’s Album, 2013; Bosnian Pyramids Hidden History, 2015; Seafaring Strangers: Vikings in America, Part I, 2016; & Gunung Padang: Monument to Atlantis, 2017.

Lee has traveled extensively (in all the USA, in all the Canadian Provinces except 2, & in 90 foreign countries). For the past dozen years, he has served as president of the Ancient Kentucke Historical Association, a group dedicated to the study and research of pre-Columbian contact in the Americas. In 2013 the University of Louisville. opened the Lee & Joy Pennington Cultural Heritage Gallery, named after Lee & his late wife. The gallery contains UofL’s most valuable works including the likes of the first editions of Galileo, Copernicus, & Sir Isaac Newton. It will house all of Lee’s writings, films, & many artifacts he’s collected traveling around the world. He presently lives in Kratz House, a designated historic home, in Middletown, KY with his lady, Jill Baker, an artist who has illustrated several of his books.