Speaker Bios
Joyce Bettencourt is an artist, content creator & evangelist of online social media and believes in it's power to raise social awareness, foster community and spark creative collaboration through mediums like blogging, podcasting, video/machinima & virtual worlds. Joyce is the Web 2.0 specialist for Global Kids (a href="http://www.globalkids.org/">globalkids.org), which runs online digital media initiatives to prepare urban youth in becoming global citizens and community leaders. She developed and is chief editor of their widely read youth media-focused blog holymeatballs.org. Joyce is also the co-founder and Creative Director of The Vesuvius Group, LLC (thevesuviusgroup.com), a creative agency specializing in developing online environments for community-building, whose mission is to support institutions and companies that are engaging in projects that make a difference in their member communities and the larger world. In her free time, she also enjoys traveling, writing poetry, gardening and teaching art. SL: Rhiannon Chatnoir. http://joycebettencourt.com/.
Topper Carew is a producer, director and founder of Urban Neo. He was born and raised in Boston. After attending Howard, Yale and MIT, he officially started his film and television career. He has received over fifty awards for his graphic design, film, and television work. His television projects have aired in prime time on ABC, NBC, Showtime, HBO, PBS and Fox. His theatrical films have been distributed by Universal and New Line. His prime time series, MARTIN, made it to syndication. Topper is also an architect and has a Ph.D. in Communications. In addition, he has served on numerous national boards.
Larry Goldbetter is the new President of the National Writers Union/UAW Local 1981, the only U.S. labor union and advocacy organization for freelance writers in all genres, media and formats. Since taking office this past June, he is part of a leadership team that is rebuilding the union by opposing the Google book settlement on the grounds that it violates copyright law, gives Google a monopoly, does not justly compensate authors and allows Google to track and sell readers' personal information. He is also working with 47 NYC freelancers to recover $360,000 owed them by a major textbook publisher. An advocate of US Labor Against the War and racial justice, he joined 20,000 marchers, many union members, who went to Louisiana to protest racial injustice against "the Jena Six." He worked for 12 years as a freelance writer and labor consultant after almost three decades as a union activist in basic industry, health care, and as a truck driver.
Dave Goodman has been producing public affairs radio shows and working as a station-based and independent news reporter/producer for 27 years. His productions include "The Alternative Presidential Convention," "The All Night Kosher Deli Radio Show," "No Censorship Radio," and his current programs "RADIO with a VIEW" and "Makes W I D E Turns" on WMBR, Cambridge. Since it's inception in April 2008, he has served as News Editor and audio producer for the on-line news and culture publication Open Media Boston. His accomplishments in community media include training hundreds of students in the art and craft of print and radio journalism.
E. Jeanne Harnois is the national Financial Secretary/Treasurer and the co-chair of the Journalism Division for the National Writers Union. She has written newspaper features, arts and entertainment reviews, and ghostwritten books. She currently writes a blog and an online column, although has taken a break from writing to work on the NWU website and to finish up her Masters degree. She is about to start a new blog on social media, focusing on how writers can get the most out of applications such as Facebook and Twitter.
Fred Johnson is a documentary maker, writer, media educator, communication policy activist and researcher. Much of his work has been focused on media politics and relationships of geography, constructed social space, communications and culture. Johnson's documentary work has been broadcast on the Learning and Discovery Channels, WNET- New York, Kentucky Educational Television, BBC 2 and BBC's World Service. Johnson has been a practitioner of citizen engaged media and community media for over 30 years in numerous settings. As a recipient of a Television Arts Fellowship from the Fulbright Commission he produced and directed documentaries for the British Broadcasting Corporation in London in the 90s that were cutting-edge experiments in participatory media. As a researcher and writer Johnson has frequently explored the convergence of citizen media and networked communications. Notably with the Benton Foundation in a 2006 survey of US community media practices in the digital era, What’s Going on in Community Media.
Dan Kennedy is a regular commentator on media issues on "Beat the Press," on WGBH-TV (Channel 2), and an assistant professor at Northeastern University's School of Journalism and specializing in new-media trends. He writes a weekly online column for The Guardian's Comment is Free America section, and was a 2008 and 2009 finalist for the Syracuse U. Mirror Award in media commentary. He's a contributing writer for CommonWealth Magazine and the Boston Phoenix. As the Phoenix's former media columnist, he won the National Press Club's Arthur Rowse Award for Press Criticism and the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies' 1999 award for media reporting. His weblog, Media Nation, is featured on Jim Romenesko's media-news site at Poynter.org and on the Project for Excellence in Journalism's Daily Briefing page.
Jesse Kirdahy-Scalia studied sociology at Boston College, focusing on emergent social organization in online communities, and framing strategies and access issues in participatory news communities. As the Technology Editor at Open Media Boston, Jesse writes on open source trends, tactics for social movements and personal computing. He has been working with the Movement / Media Research Action Project since 2004 to research and create tools for media analysis and the Global Justice Movement.
Lori Landay is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at Berklee College of Music, where she teaches Visual Culture, Film Studies, and other interdisciplinary courses. She is also L1Aura Loire in Second Life, where she creates virtual art installations and explores the grid. In both realities, she combines critical and creative work to research music, education, and art, ponder virtual subjectivity, make machinima, and experiment with other aspects of digital media and mixed reality. She is the author of Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women: The Female Trickster in American Culture, articles on digital narrative, virtual worlds, silent film, I Love Lucy, and other topics, and the forthcoming TV MIlestones book I Love Lucy.
Barbara Mende is coordinator of the Grievance and Contract Division of the National Writers Union. In that capacity she fields requests for grievance assistance and contract advice and assigns them to trained volunteers. She is also a national officer of the NWU and a member of the Boston Chapter steering committee. Since leaving the world of corporate marketing, Barbara has a long and varied background in freelance journalism and business writing. She is the author of How to Get a Job Through Want Ads.
Roberto Mighty is a filmmaker, new media producer, musician and spoken word producer. He creates original pieces, accepts commissions and does work for corporate, NGO and nonprofit clients. Roberto has worked with WGBH, John Updike, Sandra Cisneros, Andre Dubus III and Howard Zinn; HarperCollins, Random House, Houghton-Mifflin, Harvard Medical School, MIT and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Roberto is currently editing his documentary feature film, "KolorGirlz," about women comedians across the USA and is producing a jazz album at WGBH's Fraser Studio. He is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College. Roberto created and produced original primetime television series and specials on WCVB-TV Channel 5 for several years. http://www.robertomighty.com
Jason Pramas is editor/publisher of Open Media Boston - a weekly online metropolitan news publication. A journalist and photographer with some audio and video production background, he has primarily worked with the alternative and independent press. He also has long experience with web-based media and has taught social media at UMass Boston. In the Second Life virtual world, as the avatar Sunseeker Miklos, he is a member of the New Caerleon experimental university sim. Jason is a steering committee member of the National Writers Union/UAW Local 1981 - Boston Chapter.
Zach Seward is an assistant editor of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, where he covers innovation and business models in the news industry. He's also the voice of @NiemanLab on Twitter. Previously, he worked at The Wall Street Journal and Forbes.com.
Steve Simurda is a journalist with 30 years of experience who has been a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and has written for publications that include The Washington Post, Boston Globe, New York Daily News, Columbia Journalism Review, The Nation, Inc., Yankee, American Health, Lingua Franca, Mother Jones, and many others.
Felicia M. Sullivan is a community media advocate and educator living in Lowell, MA. She is currently working on her PhD in public policy at the McCormack School at UMass Boston and has 16 years of community-based practice. She works with community media & technology centers as well as social justice and arts organizations to bring the power of communication, media and information technologies to communities. She was previously the executive director of the Organizers' Collaborative. Prior to joining OC, she worked at Lowell Telecommunications Corporation a community media center in Lowell, MA as Director of the Lowell Community Technology Consortium. She has served on the national board of CTCNet. She currently is also affiliated with the University of Massachusetts. She speaks and writes frequently on issues of community communication in a connected age and the preservation of civic space in telecommunications. Connection. Capacity. Cognition. Creativity. Compassion. These are the values which fuel Ms. Sullivan’s work.
Rob Watson is communications coordinator at the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the state agency that promotes arts and culture through grants and services for nonprofit cultural organizations, artists, and schools. Rob works with the Legislature, the media, and the cultural community to communicate the value of the cultural sector to Massachusetts' economy and quality of life. Rob uses social media to connect the broader public with the agency's agenda, and edits the agency's three e-newsletters (Mass Culture Now, Creative Minds, Artist News) and its blogs (ArtSake and Keepers of Tradition). Prior to the MCC, Rob worked in communications at the Boston Center for the Arts and Screening for Mental Health, Inc. in Newton. He holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from Boston University and lives in Jamaica Plain.
Lisa Williams is the CEO & founder of Placeblogger.com, the world’s largest searchable index of local weblogs. Placeblogger was a winner of the Knight 21st Century News Challenge, which gives out $5 million dollars annually to innovators with projects that aim to define the future of journalism. Ms. Williams is also a fellow at the MIT Media Lab’s Center for Future Civic Media. The Media Lab is one of the most well-known university-based technology and innovation centers in the world. The newly formed Center for Future Civic Media focuses on meeting the information needs of humanity over the next 100 years. Prior to founding Placeblogger, Ms. Williams founded H2otown, an online community and news site by and for the residents of her hometown of Watertown, MA. H2otown became a nationally-recognized model for what came to be known as “citizen journalism,” or news created by nonjournalists to serve as a way to create a sense of community in their neighborhoods. Lisa has worked with the Boston Globe, Dan Gillmor’s Center for Civic Journalism, and countless startups and media organizations. She lives in Watertown, MA, with her spouse and two children. http://www.linkedin.com/in/lisawilliams
Gary Zabel has taught in the Philosophy Department of the University of Massachusetts at Boston since 1989. He is a longtime activist in the growing movement, now international in scope, to unionize contingent faculty. In the Second Life virtual world, as the avatar Georg Janick, Gary has founded and owns three of the four Caerleon sims: the Caerleon Art Collective 2, home to utopian atists' colonies; Caerleon Isle, a collaborative art sim; and New Caerleon, an experimental university. A lifelong photographer, Gary/Georg he has begun to import his photographs into Second Life, where he has combined them in the form of dynamically changing photomontages. His installation, Saturn's Elegy, appeared in the Rinascimento Virtuale exhibition in Forence in October 2008, and is published in the catalogue for that exhibition.
