In honor of the 30th anniversary of The Little Mermaid, DePaul Pop Culture Conference presented "A Celebration of Disney" in 2019. The conference raised almost $1000 for Huntington's Disease.
Keynote SpeakersPhilo Barnhart is a professional film anima- tor living in Oak Park, IL, known for his work on feature-length
films: The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, The Rescuers Down Under, The Secret of NIMH, Happily Ever After, An American Tail, and special effects for Star Trek: The Motion Picture. He has worked on many animated TV shows and video games including The Smurfs, Scooby Doo, Jem and the Holograms, Space Ace, Dragons Lair, and many more. The son of two Disney animators, Barnhart grew up watching the magic of art become animation. He spends his life continuing the tradition of making stories come to life through art. To this day, his artwork can still be found on Disney toys, books, home electronics/appliances, apparel, and posters. Currently Philo is working with Silver Phoenix Entertainment Inc. His latest comic title is Whis- pers from the Void.
Dr. Rebecca Williams is a Senior Lectureries at the University of South Wales. Her work on fandom has been published in journals such as Celebrity Studies, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Transformative Works & Cultures, Contin- uum, Popular Communication, and Cinema Jour- nal and she is a member of the Board of the Fan Studies Network. She is the author of Post-object Fandom: Television, Identity and Self-Narrative (2015, Bloomsbury) and editor of Torchwood Declassified (2013, I.B. Tauris) and Everybody Hurts (2018, University of Iowa Press). She is currently writing Theme Park Fandom: Distinction, Immersion & Participatory Culture for University of Amsterdam Press