Staff
Dana Kinzy (she/her) is director of the PPW, a position she has occupied since May 2025. She works on course scheduling and staffing, student requests, supervising program staff and departmental social media interns, and long-term development of the Program in Professional Writing. In addition to helping to revise long-standing course offerings, she creates writing courses specially designed to meet targeted needs of collaborative partners across campus and in the surrounding community. Prior to this position, she served as Associate Director of Rhetoric for eight years. She has co-written researched articles about teacher development, programmatic assessment, and writing program administration. She is currently collaborating with partners in the Siebel Center for Design and program faculty to study how incorporating Human Centered Design concepts in writing instruction can positively impact learning. She and one of her research partners, Carrie James, won an Instructional Innovation Mini-Grant in May 2025 to support this work.
Andrew Moss teaches writing and literature at the University of Illinois and has taught in the Program in Professional Writing since 1998. Andrew has received recognition for his teaching with the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (2007) and three English Department Undergraduate Teaching Awards (2004, 2007, 2021). In addition to BTW 250, his other courses have included BTW 380: Global Business Communication, BTW 263: Effective Grant Writing; BTW 263: Writing Effectively Forever, and BTW 271: Persuasive Writing.
Andrew has led two research projects that focus on writing pedagogy and the well-being of students: “Emotion and the Writing Process in the Program in Professional Writing,” with Kay Emmert; and “Wicked Problems as Writing Tasks: Teaching Writing Through HCD in College Composition Courses,” with Carrie James.
Andrew has developed courses in international business culture, grant writing, and practical business argument, and helped many teachers develop effective online instruction and courses. His extensive work with public schools and nonprofits in Champaign-Urbana has brought research and academic opportunities to under-served communities. His research interests include professional and technical writing pedagogy, emotion and pedagogy, and online course development.
Lily Dawn (she/her) joined the Program in Professional Writing as a Business and Technical Writing instructor in Fall 2023 and started her term as Assistant Director in Fall 2025. In this role, she collaborates with fellow PPW instructors to develop and share course materials on the Program in Professional Writing Instructor Resources website. She also recruits, advocates for, and supports graduate instructors, while also assisting the administrative agendas of the Co-Directors. She received the PPW Teaching Award in Spring 2025 for her approach to teaching ethical AI use to business writing students. Outside of the Professional Writing Program, Lily is a PhD student in the English department. Her research centers on long 18th-century transatlantic ecocriticism, specifically the ways in which relationships to more-than-humans change in literature during early American colonization.