Our Story

Dana A. Heller is Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, Michigan.  Prior to that, she was Eminent Scholar and Louis I. Jaffe Professor of English at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.  She holds a B.A. from Goddard College, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in American literature from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  She is the author/editor of eight books and numerous articles on topics related to television, popular culture, media, and gender and sexuality studies.  She was the recipient of Fulbright Fellowships in Russia, Bulgaria, and Belarus, and an exchange fellow in Osaka through the Japanese American Studies Fund.

Manuel Betancourt is a Colombian-born film and television writer. He is a contributing editor at Film Quarterly, where he publishes his column, “Cineando,” all about Latin American cinema, and a regular contributor to Electric Literature, where he focuses on book-to-film adaptations. His work has been featured in The New York Times, BuzzFeed Reader, Vulture, The Los Angeles Times, Film Comment, Esquire, The Atlantic, Los Angeles Review of Books and Vice, among others. Betancourt is the former Film & TV editor at Remezcla. He is the author of “Judy at Carnegie Hall,” as well as one of the contributing writers of Chad Sell’s critically acclaimed graphic novel “The Cardboard Kingdom” and its sequel. Betancourt is a member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association; GALECA, The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics; as well as a founding member of LEJA, Latino Entertainment Journalists Association. In 2019 he was selected to be the Writer in Residence at the Sundance Institute’s Documentary and Story Edit Lab. Betancourt holds a doctorate degree in English Literatures from Rutgers University.

Daniel D’Addario is the chief correspondent at Variety and the author of the novel The Talent. At Variety, he writes features and criticism and is among the moderators of the magazine’s Actors on Actors video series; he was previously the television critic both at Variety and at Time. D’Addario has won awards from the Los Angeles Press Club for profile writing and for political commentary. He is a graduate of Columbia University.

Michael X. Delli Carpini is the Oscar H. Gandy Emeritus Professor of Communication and Democracy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, where he served as Dean, and was previously Director of the Public Policy Program of the Pew Charitable Trusts.  His research explores the role of the citizen in democratic politics, with particular emphasis on the impact of mass media and information and communications technologies on public opinion, public deliberation, political knowledge, and political participation, and has authored several books, articles and essays on the subjects.

Roxana Hadadi is a TV critic with Vulture/New York magazine who also writes about film and pop culture, with a particular interest in labor, feminism, and Middle Eastern and Muslim representation. Her reviews, essays, recaps, and other writing have also been published by RogerEbert.com, the LA Times, GQ, Slate, The A.V. Club, Polygon, The Washington Post, Pajiba, Crooked Marquee, The Playlist, Fox Digital, Bright Wall/Dark Room, and Inverse. She is a regular panelist on NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, and her written and video essays have been published by Criterion and Film Movement. She holds a master’s degree in literature from American University.

Doug Herzog was formerly the President of Viacom’s Music Entertainment Group where he oversaw Comedy Central, MTV, VH1, Spike, TVLand and Logo. Herzog left the company in January 2017. Herzog is widely recognized in the industry for leading and building some of cable television’s most successful network brands, as well as launching long-running hits that permeated the cultural zeitgeist. Under his leadership, Viacom became home to some of television’s most acclaimed and enduring franchises, including The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report, South Park, The Real World, UFC, Key & Peele, Inside Amy Schumer, Hot in Cleveland, Workaholics, and Younger.

Michael Isip is President & CEO of KQED, the San Francisco Bay Area’s PBS and NPR media resource. Isip has a quarter century of media experience and has played a critical role in KQED’s growth and transformation into a multimedia organization. He joined KQED in 2001 as a Television Executive Producer and has served in a number of senior roles, including Senior VP & Chief Content Officer and Executive VP & Chief Operating Officer. Prior to KQED, Isip led production at KVIE Public Television, Sacramento. He started his career at WLS-TV, Chicago. Isip is a senior fellow for the American Leadership Forum — Silicon Valley and serves on the boards of Public Radio Exchange, American Documentary Inc., Joint Venture Silicon Valley, and the Silicon Valley Leadership Group. Isip has a B.A. from Cornell University and a J.D. from DePaul College of Law.

Cynthia López is CEO of New York Women in Film & Television. An award-winning media strategist, and former Commissioner of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, López implemented strategies to support film and TV production throughout the five boroughs. She joined the City of New York from American Documentary | POV, where she had worked since 2000, eventually becoming executive vice president and co-executive producer of the award-winning PBS documentary series. During López’s tenure at the POV series she championed diversifying the national PBS schedule through the CPB funded Diverse Voices Program, which provided major funding for this creative program that included mentorship and financial support for diverse filmmakers that had not been featured on a national broadcast. Cynthia is the recipient of eleven News & Documentary Emmy Awards, four George Foster Peabody Awards, two duPont – Columbia Awards and many other prestigious industry awards.

Nicholas Quah is the podcast critic at New York Magazine’s Vulture and a contributing critic at NPR’s Fresh Air. One of the earliest journalists dedicated to covering the podcast industry, he is also the founder of Hot Pod, widely considered to be a leading trade newsletter covering the podcast business, which was sold to Vox Media. Originally from Malaysia, he has a B.A. from Wesleyan University, an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and was a Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 2017.

Kent Rees is an industry-leading digital and content marketing strategist. He is currently the general manager and chief marketing officer for FAST Studios, a company that owns and operates ad-support streaming TV networks.  Prior to that, he was the Chief Marketing Officer for Pop TV and the EVP and General Manager of Pivot.  Mr. Rees went to NYU Film School and has been an adjunct professor at Emerson College since 2018.

Mark Ruffin is the program director of the Real Jazz channel on Sirius/XM Satellite Radio.  Before that he spent over 25 years as a fixture in jazz broadcasting and journalism in Chicago, winning two Emmy Awards for his efforts to bring stories about jazz to television on WTTW-TV.  Mr. Ruffin worked as the jazz editor for Chicago Magazine and has written hundreds of articles on jazz, broadcasting and African-American culture.  In 2020, Mr. Ruffin released his first book, Bebop Fairy Tales: A Historical Fiction Trilogy on Jazz, Intolerance and Baseball.

Russ Schriefer is a leading American political and corporate strategist, media consultant, and the Founding Partner of Strategic Partners & Media. With senior roles advising eight presidential campaigns, his groundbreaking advertising prompted one veteran columnist to praise his work as the “most powerful, focused, and skillfully executed political ad campaign I have ever witnessed.” Schriefer offers strategic counsel, coaching, and crisis messaging to elected leaders, global CEOs, and Fortune 500 companies. He has played a pivotal role in producing three Republican National Conventions, curating the agenda, creating legacy films, and developing prime-time narratives. Russ is passionate about live theater and actively contributes as the board vice chair at the Tony Award-winning Signature Theater.

Cynthia Tucker is a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist.  Her weekly column, which appears in newspapers around the country, focuses on political and cultural issues, including income inequality, social justice and reform of the public education system. Tucker has spent most of her career in newspapers, working as a reporter and editor. For seventeen years, she served as editorial page editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, overseeing the newspaper’s editorial policies on everything from local elections to foreign affairs. She also worked as a Washington-based political columnist for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. After leaving the newspaper, she spent three years as a visiting professor at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, where she was also a Charlayne Hunter-Gault writer-in-residence. Tucker is currently journalist-in-residence at the University of South Alabama.

Bonnie Turner is a veteran film and television writer and producer with more than forty years of experience. She began in Atlanta producing for Ted Turner and was present at the launch of CNN. In the mid-eighties she wrote and produced for “Saturday Night Live.” During her tenure, her work introduced many comical words and phrases into the pop zeitgeist. Turner wrote five successful films for Paramount Pictures including the feature-length version of “Wayne’s World,” which set a comedy box office record. She then wrote and produced for the Carsey-Werner company where she created “3rd Rock From The Sun” and “That ’70s Show.”

Mark Whitaker is the former managing editor of CNN Worldwide, Washington bureau chief for NBC News, and Editor of Newsweek, where he rose to become the first African American leader of a national newsweekly. He is now an author and Emmy Award-winning Contributing Correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning. Whitaker’s books include the critically acclaimed memoir, My Long Trip Home; Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance, about the historic legacy of Black Pittsburgh; and Saying It Loud: 1966-The Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement.

Andrea Wishom is President of Skywalker Holdings, LLC, where her responsibilities include the financial, philanthropic, and strategic priorities of a diversified family office. An award-winning media executive, Andrea joined Skywalker from Harpo Productions where she spent over two decades launching, developing and producing some of the most successful programming in television history for The Oprah Winfrey Show, and OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network. As Executive Vice President she played a key role in leading OWN to become a top 30 network within its first year and the #1 Cable Network among African American Women. As Executive Producer of Super Soul Sunday, she won a GLAAD award. Wishom is the lead independent director of Pinterest , and serves as a director for Tory Burch, LLC. She previously served on the board of Nextdoor Holdings, Inc.

Katerina Cizek is a Peabody and two-time Emmy-winning documentarian. She is the artistic director and co-founder of the Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab. At the studio, she wrote (with Uricchio et al.) the world’s first field study on co-creating media called Collective Wisdom (forthcoming with MIT Press). For over a decade, Cizek worked as a documentary director at the National Film Board of Canada, transforming the organization into a world-leading digital hub, with the projects HIGHRISE and Filmmaker-in-Residence. Both community-based and globally recognized, these two ground-breaking long-form digital projects garnered international awards and critical acclaim. Cizek is a member of the Directors’ Guild of Canada, has served as an advisor at the Sundance Institutes’ New Frontier Lab and Stories of Change Program as well as CPH:DOX and ESoDoc. She is a founding member of the Guild of Future Architects, a member of the editorial collective at IMMERSE.

Aymar Jean “AJ” Christian is an associate professor of communication studies at Northwestern University. His first book, Open TV: Innovation Beyond Hollywood and the Rise of Web Television on New York University Press, argues the web brought innovation to television by opening development to independent producers. His work has been published in numerous academic journals, including the International Journal of Communication, Television & New Media, Social Media & Society, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, among others. He has juried television and video for the Peabody Awards, Gotham Awards, and Tribeca Film Festival, among others. His work has been recognized by the Field & MacArthur Foundation (Leaders for a New Chicago, 2019), Filmmaker Magazine (25 New Faces of Indie Film, 2018) NewCity (Chicago’s Film Hall of Fame, 2020), Chicago magazine (New Power List, 2021).

Dr. Christian co-founded OTV | Open Television, a research project and platform for intersectional television. OTV programs have received recognition from HBO, the Television Academy (Emmy Awards), Webby Awards, Streamy Awards, Gotham Awards, among others. Its programming partners have included the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Sundance Institute, and the city of Chicago, along with numerous galleries, community organizations, and universities.

Building on the success of OTV, he co-founded OTV Studio with Stephanie Jeter and Lilly Wachowski. OTV Studio is an incubator for intersectional film & television, developing artists and producing their short-form content to accelerate discovery and long-form development with an array of mission-aligned studios, production companies, and institutional partners.

He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.

Gabriel J.X. Dance is the deputy investigations editor at The New York Times focusing on the nexus of privacy and safety online. Previously, Dance was part of a team of journalists that reported on the data-sharing practices at Facebook and the bot economy on Twitter, was involved in the reporting on Donald Trump’s taxes, and was a founding managing editor at The Marshall Project. Dance has undergraduate degrees in computer science and technical journalism from Colorado State University, a master’s degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and was among a group of journalists at The Guardian who won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of widespread secret surveillance by the N.S.A..

Yasmin Elayat is an Emmy-award winning immersive director, United States Artists 2020 Fellow, and Co-Founder at Scatter, an immersive company pioneering Volumetric Filmmaking. Yasmin directed Scatter’s Zero Days VR (Sundance 2017) a documentary about cyber warfare and the Stuxnet virus, which won the Emmy for Original Approaches: Documentary. Yasmin is the co-creator of 18DaysInEgypt, which was lauded as one the Moments of Innovation in Participatory Documentary. Yasmin is a co-director of The Changing Same trilogy. Episode 1 premiered at Sundance 2021 and won “Best Immersive Narrative” at Tribeca Festival. Yasmin’s work has won multiple awards and exhibited at various festivals including Sundance, Tribeca, SIGGRAPH, Festival de Cannes, and the World Economic Forum.

Navid Khonsari, is the co-founder of  iNK Stories, an award-winning studio creating impact-forward original work across games, mixed reality (VR/AR) and immersive experiences, and has forged a new hybrid of documentary-games: ”Verite Games.” Drawing upon personal history Khonsari created 1979 Revolution: Black Friday, which received the industry’s top honors: a BAFTA, Facebook Game of the Year, Tribeca FF Storyscape, among others, and was recognized by UNESCO as a digital solution for peaceful conflict resolution. Khonsari is credited with having ushered in the current wave of contemporary AAA video games, such as Grand Theft Auto, Max Payne, Red Dead Revolver, and The Warriors, up to the recent Resident Evil: Biohazard. He is an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins, and guest lectures at Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Duke, Northwestern in Qatar, White House, UN, Sundance and more.

Liz Miller has two decades of experience in cross-platform documentary and environmental media. She is a full professor in Communications Studies at Concordia University in Tiohti:áke/Montreal. Her interactive documentary projects on pressing topics like climate change and environmental justice have been showcased in galleries, theatres, and science museums internationally.

As the Gull Flies (2023) is part of the WasteScapes initiative (2019) and explores the entangled relationships between ring-billed gulls and Montreal residents. The immersive installation was featured  in The Biosphere, Montreal’s cutting-edge Science Museum for nine months.  SwampScapes (2018) offers an immersive journey to remote regions of the Everglades. The award-winning project was chosen to participate in the 2019 Climate Story Lab.  The Shore Line (2017) profiles a range of communities creatively responding to the global threats of unchecked development and rising sea levels. The project has been exhibited internationally and integrated into diverse trainings and curriculum.

Liz has written numerous articles about collaborative documentary, environmental media, and place-based pedagogies. She is the co-author of Going Public: The Art of Participatory Practice (2018) a book that explores the ethics and challenges of co-creation. She has been an active member of the International Association of Women in Television and Radio for two decades, serving on the International Board and chairing the Documentary Committee.

Dan Pacheco holds the Peter A. Horvitz Chair of Journalism Innovation at the Newhouse School of Public Communications and is a pioneer in the use of virtual reality for journalism. In 2014 he started and co-produced The Des Moines Register’s Harvest of Change VR project for the Oculus Rift, the world’s first large-scale use of virtual reality by a commercial news organization. Harvest of Change earned an Edward R. Murrow Award in 2015 for its innovative use of 360-degree video for virtual reality.

Previously, Pacheco spent 20 years in the trenches of digital publishing everywhere from Fortune 500 companies to startups. He started his career as an online producer for Washingtonpost.com, where he produced Interact, one of the first online news communities. As a principal product manager at America Online, he oversaw some of the internet’s first truly global community products. In 2005, after pioneering the first implementation of a social networking platform at a U.S. newspaper, he received a Newspaper Association of America’s “20 Under 40” award. And in 2007, he received a Knight News Challenge grant to build a democratized publishing service that evolved into an eBook platform.

Pacheco’s areas of emphasis are XR, data journalism and data visualization, and the exploration of emerging media platforms. He lives in Syracuse, NY with his partner and puppy.

Sergio Peçanha is an Opinion columnist and a graphics editor for The Washington Post. He uses visual elements such as illustrations, cartoons, maps, information graphics and videos to tell stories in print and digital media. Sergio writes and designs his own stories and focuses on pieces that generate empathy, amuse and explain complex concepts. Before joining the Post, he was a visual journalist at The New York Times for more than a decade, mostly coordinating graphics and multimedia coverage for the International desk. His work has been recognized multiple times by the Society for News Design and the Malofiej infographics awards, in Spain, Communication Arts, Society for Publication Design and Pictures of the Year. Sergio began his career in his hometown of Rio de Janeiro and has a B.A. in journalism and a masters degree in illustration.

Benjamin Stokes is a civic media scholar, game designer, and director of The Playful City Lab. He is also an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication, and at the AU Game Center. Previously, he co-founded Games for Change, the movement hub for advancing social change with games. At the MacArthur Foundation prior to academia, Benjamin was a program officer in their portfolio on Digital Media and Learning. Benjamin has also worked at the UC Berkeley School of Information as a postdoctoral scholar in data science. Design experience in civil society includes leading teams at NetAid/Mercy Corps in global citizenship education. His new book is Locally Played: Real-World Games for Stronger Places and Communities (MIT Press, 2020).

An alumnus of the Sundance Screenwriting Lab, Lance Weiler is recognized as a pioneer in mixing storytelling and technology. Wired magazine named him “one of 25 people helping to reinvent entertainment and change the face of Hollywood.” He was nominated for an International Emmy in digital fiction for his work on Collapsus: The Energy Risk Conspiracy. His collaboration with David Cronenberg entitled, Body/Mind/Change premiered at the TIFF Lightbox and went on to win the American Alliance of Museums’ Jim Blackaby Ingenuity Award. Lance co-created Frankenstein AI, a multi-year project that explores humanity’s relationship to artificial intelligence through storytelling, performance and immersion. Frankenstein AI was an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival and later was commissioned by the National Theatre’s Immersive Storytelling Studio and IDFA Doc Lab. Weiler’s most recent work entitled, Where There’s Smoke had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. The 1,400 sq ft experience became the first off-site installation to ever be staged at the festival. IndieWire wrote “Over 100 movies screened at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival, but one of its best offerings lets you walk inside the frame and experience a story from the inside out.” Lance is currently touring Where There’s Smoke and is developing the project into a limited TV series and YA novel.

Lance is a Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia University School of the Arts where he is jointly appointed in Film and Theatre. He co-founded the School of the Arts’ Digital Storytelling Lab and since 2013 has served as its director leading and shaping the lab’s vision and programming.