Getting to Know Exhibitor Baby Ventures
Baby Ventures™ is a local indie children’s book company and the brainchild of long-time friends, collaborators, and DC-area residents Lisa Hall and Golzar Kheiltash. Both life-long travelers, Lisa and Golzar share a deep reverence for the rich diversity that makes up our global village. When motherhood recently entered the picture, so did the idea for one-of-a-kind board books for infants and toddlers: Combining Lisa’s vibrant illustrations with themes of adventure and diversity, each Baby Ventures book inspires little ones early on to explore all the people, cultures, and places that make up our wonder-filled world.
Lisa and Golzar draw from their own real-life adventures in diverse locales across six continents to create their Baby Ventures book series. When they launched Baby Ventures in 2016, they already had the ABCs of Washington, DC in mind as their inaugural title – an ode to the city where they first met as colleagues at a non-profit near Eastern Market in Southeast DC. Now living in Annapolis and Gaithersburg, MD, respectively, Lisa and Golzar have released their second title, the ABCs of Annapolis, Maryland’s Capital City.
Lisa is a life-long artist with a knack for children’s art, inspired by her many travels around the world. She served in the Peace Corps in Mali, West Africa, worked in Australia, backpacked across Latin America, and volunteered at orphanages in India and Bolivia. She has been retailing her children’s artwork for the past decade and is now drawing from her experiences to create the Baby Ventures book series. Her professional career also includes over 10 years of marketing and communications experience at international non-profits and other organizations in Washington, DC.
An avid humanitarian and advocate, Golzar trained as a lawyer and spent eleven years working on behalf of vulnerable populations at leading non-profit advocacy organizations worldwide, including in Washington, DC and New York. Her work took her from big cities and small towns throughout the US to European capitals, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Since becoming mom to a tenacious little bookworm, Golzar is committed to a new passion arising from her many experiences: creating adventure-inspired, diversity-friendly, and beautifully illustrated board books for young children everywhere.
Lisa and Golzar joined the Gaithersburg Book Festival for the first time as exhibit authors in 2017, and are thrilled to return again this year. Participating in the Gaithersburg Book Festival is also personally meaningful to Golzar, who have been taking her little one to the Festival’s fun-filled and diversity-inspired Children’s Village at the Festival since 2015.
We hope you’ll join co-authors Lisa Hall and Golzar Kheiltash at the Gaithersburg Book Festival on May 19th! You can find their popular ABCs of Washington, DC, their new ABCs of Annapolis, canvas art, and much more at the Baby Ventures booth – come say hello!