Joanna Brown, founder and CEO of The Reading Guru, is a master Orton-Gillingham reading tutor with more than 15 years of experience providing personalized, one-on-one reading instruction. Joanna earned her M.S. in Elementary Education and Literacy from Bank Street College of Education in New York City in 2011, and her B.A. in History from the University of Colorado in 2004. Joanna is certified by the Center for Effective Reading Instruction (CERI) as a Structured Literacy Dyslexia Specialist (C-SLDS). She earned this certification through training at the Academy of Orton-Gillingham Practitioners and Educators (AOGPE) as well as with the digital, multisensory training program, Lexercise. She also has completed training with the Orton-Gillingham based, multi-sensory program Preventing Academic Failure (PAF).

Joanna began tutoring children in reading in New York City in 2005. She has worked with hundreds of struggling readers, dyslexic readers, and readers needing enrichment. Joanna founded The Reading Guru in 2019 after developing a series of tools and techniques to allow her to bring her Orton-Gillingham-based literacy tutoring to students all over the world. Joanna and her team of highly experienced tutors now work virtually with students who attend private schools, public schools, charter schools, and homeschools, both in the United States and internationally, so they understand the challenges students face in dramatically different educational environments. She and her team also work with students who have a variety of educational differences including dyslexia, dysgraphia, ADHD, speech and language disorders, writing issues, and executive functioning issues. In addition to her teaching and tutoring work, Joanna writes comedy, watches horror movies, fosters dogs and figure skates in her spare time.