Arts + Transportation Forum

Ashley Hairston Doughty is a visual storyteller, explaining personal experiences through verbal and visual language. Much of her practice deals with socio-economic, racial, and gender-based issues, particularly those relating to cultural misconceptions and the development of personal identity. Doughty’s distinctive perspective has grown through residing in nine different cities throughout her lifetime, mostly in the southeastern, midwestern, and southwestern United States. Although trained as a graphic designer, Doughty’s artwork often crosses multiple media, including typography, illustration, writing, fiber and materials, and book arts. She shares and encourages such art-making as an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and through her design studio, Design Kettle. Doughty’s work is included in the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection in Chicago and has received awards from the Caxton Club, the College Book Arts Association and Arion Press.

Alexis Moore, AICP, is a Principal Planner with the City of Lakewood, Colorado and is passionate about the intersection of arts and planning. Alexis has managed several federally-funded arts-related grant projects including the 40 West Arts District Urban Design and Mobility Concepts Plan, which launched the creation of the state-certified 40 West Arts Creative District along historic West Colfax Avenue and the W Line light rail, and the 40 West ArtLine project, funded through a major Our Town Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The ArtLine has received numerous awards, including a CBCA Business for the Arts Award, the Governor’s Award for Downtown Excellence in the Best Use of Public Space, and 5280 Magazine’s Top of the Town Editor’s Choice Award for Best Place to See Art in Denver.
Alexis serves on the 40 West Arts District Board of Directors and is a 2016 CBCA Leadership Arts Graduate. In 2019, Alexis was appointed by Denver Mayor Hancock to serve on the Denver Commission of Cultural Affairs where she currently chairs the Public Art Program Sub-Committee. She holds undergraduate degrees in Environmental Studies and Spanish from Colorado State University and a master’s degree in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Alexis has worked as an urban planner in the public, private, and non-profit sectors in the U.S. and New Zealand.

Ben Stone is Director of Arts & Culture at Smart Growth America and its program Transportation for America. Ben leads the organization’s broad efforts to help communities across the country better integrate arts, culture, and creative placemaking into neighborhood revitalization, equitable development, and transportation planning efforts. Ben holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; a bachelor’s degree in American Studies from Tufts University; and a Master in City Planning from MIT, where he focused on land use planning, urban design, and the intersection of the arts and community development. Prior to joining SGA, Ben served as Executive Director of Station North Arts & Entertainment, Inc., where he employed an arts-based revitalization and placemaking strategy to guide development in the state-designated Arts District in Baltimore. Under Ben’s leadership, Station North became a national model for creative placemaking and equitable development through the arts and innovative collaboration. Ben has also served as an architectural designer/planner for the Baltimore Development Corporation, working on revitalization projects in Baltimore’s Middle Branch, Central Business District, and Station North. As a frequent conference speaker and guest lecturer and critic, Ben has advised students, practitioners, and artists on creative placemaking and community-engaged art. Ben has been recognized as a Fellow of the Salzburg Global Forum for Young Cultural Innovators (2014), a Baltimore Business Journal 40 under 40 Honoree (2014), and a Next City Vanguard (2012).

Marcus Young 楊墨 is a behavioral artist making work that challenges paradigms of who is an artist, how to live mindfully, and what is social action. He is currently artist in residence for the Minnesota Department of Transportation; Art for Social Change Program Director at HECUA; and stage director for Ananya Dance Theatre. From 2006 to 2015, he was City Artist in St. Paul, where his project Everyday Poems for City Sidewalk transformed the city’s sidewalk maintenance program into a publishing entity for poetry. He is the founding artist for Don’t You Feel It Too?—an ongoing participatory street dance practice of social healing and inner-life liberation.

Ed Sealover has been a reporter at the Denver Business Journal since March 2009. He covers state government, transportation, economic development, hospitality, tourism, and the beverage industry. The 2020 legislative session was the 14th one that he has covered for three different newspapers.

He graduated from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in 1995 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and worked at daily newspapers in Arkansas and South Carolina before coming to Colorado in 2000. He worked for the Colorado Springs Gazette and Rocky Mountain News before his time at the DBJ. Throughout his career, he’s received 132 awards from national organizations and from press associations in five different states in categories that include beat reporting, political reporting, public service and investigative reporting.

When not covering government, Sealover lives in Wheat Ridge with his wife, Denise, and their children, Lincoln and Jane. He also has written two books: "Mountain Brew: A Guide to Colorado Breweries” and “Colorado Excursions with History, Hikes and Hops.”