Vivek Bald, Bengali Harlem, Assistant Professor of Writing and Digital Media, MIT
Vivek Bald is a documentary filmmaker and scholar whose work focuses on histories of migration and diaspora, particularly from the South Asian subcontinent. His current work, which examines the desertion and settlement of Indian Muslim merchant sailors in U.S. port cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is the basis for a forthcoming book, Bengali Harlem and the Hidden Histories of South Asian New York, and a documentary film, In Search of Bengali Harlem.
Frank Bentley, Principal Staff Research Scientist, Motorola Applied Research Center
Frank Bentley’s work combines methods from anthropology, computer science, human computer interaction, and design to invent and prototype new concepts to strengthen social relationships. This path moves from ethnographic-style studies, to prototypes with field evaluations, to creating new products from these concepts. Recent work has included Contacts 3.0, the concept for the social phonebook in MOTOBLUR, and TuVista, a sports-video system that provides multi-angle replays and fan-generated content to mobile devices within 30 seconds of a play occurring.
John Bracken, Director of Journalism and Media Innovation, Knight Foundation
John Bracken directs the Knight Foundation foundation’s grantmaking in journalism and media innovation. An expert in online innovation and social entrepreneurship, Bracken previously served as a program officer at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, where he managed investments in technology and innovation and global Internet freedom, and worked to strengthen nonprofit start-ups. He also has worked with the Ford Foundation as a program associate in media policy and technology, and analyzed the social and policy impact of the Internet for the Center for Media Education.
Sasha Costanza-Chock, Assistant Professor, MIT Comparative Media Studies
Sasha Costanza-Chock is a scholar and media maker who works in the interrelated areas of social movements and information and communication technologies; participatory technology design and community based participatory research; and the transnational movement for media justice and communication rights, including comunicación populár. Dr. Costanza-Chock holds a Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California, where he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate; he is also a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. While living in Los Angeles, he worked on a variety of civic media projects with community-based organizations, including the award-winningVozMob.net platform. More information about Sasha’s work can be found at schock.cc.
Catherine D’Ignazio, Lecturer, MIT Comparative Media Studies
Catherine D’Ignazio, is an artist, software developer and educator. She is the Director of the Institute for Infinitely Small Things, a founding member of the experimental curatorial group Platform2 and leads the Experimental Geography Research Cluster at RISD’s Digital+Media program. Her artwork has been exhibited at the ICA Boston, Eyebeam, and MASSMoCA, and has won awards from the Tanne Foundation and Turbulence.org.
Glorianna Davenport, Principal Research Scientist, MIT Media Lab
Trained as a sculptor and documentary filmmaker, Ms. Davenport has achieved international recognition for her work in the digital media forms. Davenport’s research explores fundamental issues related to the collaborative co-construction of digital media experiences, where the task of narration is split among authors, consumers, and computer mediators. Davenport’s recent work focuses on the creation of customizable, personalizable storyteller systems which dynamically serve and adapt to a widely dispersed society of audience.
Audrey Ewell, 99% – The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film
With partner Aaron Altes, Audrey Ewell is an award-winning director and producer of the internationally theatrically distributed documentary film Until the Light Takes Us. They are currently working on a narrative thriller, Dark Places, and 99% – The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film.
Gerry Flahive, HIGHRISE, One Millionth Tower
During his 30 years with the internationally-acclaimed National Film Board of Canada, Gerry Flahive has produced more than 50 films and new-media projects on a wide range of subjects, including health care, cultural diversity, criminal justice, national identity, history, communications, diplomacy, globalization and racism. He has produced hits that have won a Genie, the award for Best Canadian First Feature at the Toronto International Film Festival, and multiple international awards. At the forefront of the NFB’s innovative work with digital media, Flahive has produced the groundbreaking multi-platform Filmmaker-in-Residence project at Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital, winner of the 2008 Webby Award for Best Documentary Series, against such competitors as MIT Media Lab, PBS and National Public Radio. He is currently producing HIGHRISE, a multi-year many-media documentary project looking at global sub/urbanization. The HIGHRISE web documentary Out My Window won a 2011 Emmy and IDFA’s first-ever Digital Storytelling Award.
Shari Frilot, Senior Programmer and Curator, New Frontiers, Sundance Film Festival
An alumna of Harvard/Radcliffe University, and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, Shari Frilot is a filmmaker who has produced television for the CBS affiliate in Boston and for WNYC and WNET in New York before creating her own independent award-winning films, including Strange & Charmed, A Cosmic Demonstration of Sexuality, What Is A Line? and the feature documentary, Black Nations/Queer Nations? In tandem with filmmaking, Shari also maintains a career in festival programming, occupying a distinguished position on the curatorial vanguard through her pioneering development of immersive cinematic environments. As the Festival Director of the MIX festival in New York (1992-1996) she co-founded the first gay Latin American film festivals, MIX BRASIL and MIX MÉXICO film festivals. As Co-Director of Programming for OUTFEST (1998-2001), she founded the Platinum section which introduced cinematic performance installation and performance to the festival. She is presently in her 11th year as a Senior Programmer for the Sundance Film Festival. She is the curator and driving creative force behind New Frontier, an exhibition and commissioning initiative that focuses on cinematic work being created at the intersections of art, film and new media technology.
Chris Johnson, Question Bridge: Black Males
Chris Johnson is a photographic and video artist, writer, curator and arts administrator. He has also produced highly regarded performance works in collaboration with Suzanne Lacy. His artwork has been exhibited in two museum shows: Being There: 45 Oakland Artists, at the Oakland Museum of California in 2002 and Reflections in Black: A History Deconstructed, at the Mills College Museum in 2003. Chris Johnson is currently a full Professor of Photography at the California College of the Arts.
Ingrid Kopp, New Media Consultant, Tribeca Film Institute
Ingrid Kopp is Editor-in-Chief of Shooting People an international networking organization for independent filmmakers with over 38,000 members. She began her career in the Documentaries department at Channel 4 Television in the UK, moving to New York in 2004 to work as a producer for a number of independent production companies before taking her current post at Shooting People. Ingrid teaches Digital Bootcamp workshops for filmmakers, focusing on audience engagement and harnessing technology for storytelling. She has led the Bootcamp at the Frontline Club in London, Sheffield Doc/Fest, CPH:DOX, DCTV and Women Make Movies. In addition to her work with Shooting People, Ingrid writes about technology and storytelling for various publications and works as a documentary and interactive technology consultant for film festivals, broadcasters and foundations. She is also the New Media Consultant for the TFI New Media Fund.
Caroline Oh, Designer, 18 Days In Egypt
Caroline Oh is a graphic and interaction designer who has recently joined the team of Jigar Mehta and Yasmin Elayat for 18 Days In Egypt, a collaborative documentary project about the Egyptian Revolution. 18 Days In Egyptaims to showcase the power of crowd-sourced storytelling by creating an interactive platform in which Egyptians can tell the story of the revolution themselves minute-by-minute using their own personal media — their footage, their photos, their e-mails, their texts, and even their Tweets and Facebook updates. Caroline is particularly interested in storytelling platforms and environments. She has also acted as lead designer on a variety of award-winning interactive installations for the NYC-based design studio Potion for clients including the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Museum of Science and Industry and Bell Labs. Her most recent notable projects in this role are iPad apps for the New York Public Library and the Smithsonian Channel.
Scot Osterweil, Creative Director, MIT Education Arcade
Scot Osterweil is the Creative Director of the MIT Education Arcade and a research director in the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program. He is a designer of award-winning educational games, working in both academic and commercial environments, and his work has focused on what is authentically playful in challenging academic subjects. He has designed games for computers, handheld devices, and multi-player on-line environments. Scot is the creator of the acclaimed Zoombinis series of math and logic games, and leads a number of projects in the Education Arcade, including Vanished: The MIT/Smithsonian Curated Game (environmental science), Labyrinth (math), Kids Survey Network (data and statistics), Caduceus (medical science), and iCue (history and civics). He is a founding member, and Creative Director of the Learning Games Network where he leads the Hewlett Foundation’s Open Language Learning Initiative (ESL).
William Uricchio, Professor and Director, MIT Comparative Media Studies
William Uricchio is Professor and Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program and Professor of Comparative Media History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He is also Lead Principal Investigator of the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. His efforts as a documentary maker began in grammar school, and led to a short but formative professional career as an editor and director of social activism and anthropological documentaries. Uricchio’s academic career began in the classroom with Leo Hurwitz, Lewis Jacobs, Jay Leyda and George Stoney, and resulted in a dissertation on the ‘city film’ that focused on the early years of non-fiction film production, and particularly film’s relationship to other representational technologies such as the photograph, stereograph and panorama. Uricchio’s most recent books include Media Cultures (2006 Heidelberg), on responses to media in post 9/11 Germany and the US, and We Europeans? Media, Representations, identities (2009, Chicago). He is currently completing a manuscript on the concept of the televisual from the 17th century to the present.
Christine Walley, Associate Professor, MIT Anthropology
A documentary filmmaker and associate professor in Anthropology, Christine Walley is co-directing and producing a documentary, Exit Zero, exploring changing community life in a former Midwestern steel town. Her research and teaching interests include: the environment, development, gender, documentary/ethnographic film, and theories of globalization and capitalism. She received a B.A. in anthropology from Pomona College in 1987 and a Ph.D in sociocultural anthropology from New York University in 1999. Her book, Rough Waters: Nature and Development in an East African Marine Park (Princeton University Press, 2004), is based on 19 months of fieldwork in East Africa. She has published on the controversial topic of female genital surgeries in Africa as well as the relationship between science and “indigenous knowledge.”
Patricia Zimmerman, Professor, Department of Cinema, Photography, and Media Arts, Ithaca College
Patricia R. Zimmermann is professor in the Department of Cinema, Photography and Media Arts at Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York, USA. She is also codirector (with Tom Shevory) of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival in the Division of Interdisciplinary and International Studies at Ithaca College. She is the author of Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Indiana, 1995) States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies (Minnesota, 2000), and coeditor of Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories (California, 2008). With the late Erik Barnouw, Ruth Bradley, and Scott MacDonald, she coedits the Wide Angle Books series for Temple University Press, a series dedicated to documenting and analyzing the histories of the international nonprofit media arts sectors. She has published over 200 scholarly research articles and essays on film history and historiography, documentary and experimental film/video/digital arts, amateur film, political economy of media, and digital culture theory.