Jonathan Cantwell

Jonathan Cantwell works closely with project coordinators and the rest of the technology and innovation team to maintain and expand WESTAF’s capacity to provide software tools to artists and organizations. They bring their expertise in coordinating a team of software engineers at Synacor, handling individual client needs, and configuring white-label web portals and other software products for major ISPs, and upgrading outdated code bases while maintaining necessary functionality. Cantwell had a lifelong interest in user experience and web accessibility, having started web development as a hobby to support and enhance the usability of the web portal of a collaborative fiction community they grew up with. They earned their bachelor’s degree in computer science from SUNY Buffalo in 2009 and was a semi-finalist for the Microsoft Imagine Cup in their senior year for a project in which they and their team built assistive technology for neurodivergent and disabled students and their teachers and caretakers.