Participants

LIZ CANNER - the Anti-ad Agency
Liz Canner is an award winning media artist and independent filmmaker who has produced and directed six documentaries and created multiple video art pieces and installations. Her work explores crucial issues such as police brutality, economic exploitation, globalization and sexuality in order to generate dialogue around topics which the mainstream media tends to overlook. She has been the recipient of 16 grants for her work from foundations such as the Lef foundation and The Paul Robeson Fund for Independent Media. Her videos have been broadcast on television nationally on PBS stations, Free Speech TV, Deep Dish TV and internationally in England, Nicaragua, New Zealand, Haiti and Germany. Her documentaries have screened at numerous museums, galleries and film festivals along with being used by over two thousand grass roots groups as organizing tools for social change. A number of years ago, she and Pagan Kennedy formed the Anti-ad Agency, a collective of filmmakers, writers and artists who collaborate with non-profits to produce 30 second spots which lampoon commercials. She has served on the Board of Directors of The Boston Cyberarts Festival and The Boston Film and Video Foundation.

RODERICK COOVER - School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Roderick Coover is a documentary filmmaker/visual anthropologist working especially in digital video and new media. He teaches at the Art Institute of Chicago. Coover holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1999) and a M.A. from Brown University(1993). His current work includes a number of digital/multimedia documentary projects that incorporate footage recorded in Africa and France. One of these projects, the work Professor Coover will be presenting at the conference, is a recently completed documentary and DVD prototype on the rhetorics of new media and documentary form entitled, "Visualizing Cultures in the Age of Digital Media."

ALISON CORNYN - Picture-Projects
Alison Cornyn produced an International on-line project for the New York Times Electronic Media Company about Bosnia entitled "Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace" which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. She has worked on projects for Harper Collins including "CHAOS", an interactive CD-ROM game that teaches the basic principles of Chaos Theory. She is an artist and photographer whose work includes design for both electronic and physical environments. Her interactive installations have been shown in Cologne, Germany, and the US. Her video work has been shown in various galleries in New York City and Bogota, Columbia. Cornyn was recently guest curator and exhibitor at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville, Florida. Her show, "b/t*", is a multimedia exploration of the underlying relationships between people, objects and ideas. Prior to her involvement in multimedia, she worked for 5 years as an art director and set decorator in the film business in Los Angeles and New York. She is currently an adjunct professor in the art department at City College. Alison has a BA in Art History and Fine Art from Connecticut College, an MFA from Hunter College and a Master's Degree from the Interactive Telecommunication Program at New York University.

DAVID ISAY -Sound Portraits
David Isay is a regular contributor to National Public Radio's news-magazines. Over the past ten years his radio documentary and feature work has won almost every award in broadcasting including: two Peabodies, two Robert F. Kennedy Awards and two Livingston Awards for young journalists. David has also received the Prix Italia (Europe's oldest and most distinguished broadcasting honor), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1994). "Holding On", a book of photographs and text based on his series The American Folklife Radio Project was published by Norton in 1996. "Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago", based on the pair of documentaries he produced with two young men growing up in Chicago housing projects was published by Scribner in June 1997. David lives in New York City.

SUE JOHNSON - Picture-Projects
Sue Johnson has worked extensively producing stories and web projects for, among others, the Discovery Online web site and the Museum of Natural History. She developed the Breast Cancer Forum, a web site for women dealing with breast cancer. Sue also produced and developed a permanent interactive computer installation for the Smithsonian's Museum of the American Indian. Her work as a documentary photographer deals with social issues, often those concerning women. Sue has traveled extensively collecting images and words from people in Vietnam, South America and Croatia. These images are worked into interactive video installations, the latest of which was commissioned by Creative Time for their Multimedia exhibition at the Anchorage (Summer 1997) and was installed in Utrecht, Holland (Spring, 1998). Sue's web project "Chant" was awarded a Finishing Fund Grant from the Center for Experimental Television in NY and was exhibited as a physical installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville, Florida in 1998. Sue received a BA in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard University and a Master's Degree from the Interactive Telecommunication Program at New York University.

PAGAN KENNEDY - the Anti-ad Agency,
http://www.channel1.com/users/pagan
Pagan Kennedy is the author of seven books. Her most recent, to be released by Viking Press in 2001, tells the true story of William Sheppard, a black American missionary who became the first Westerner to enter the "forbidden city" of the Kuba people in the Congo. One of Pagan's novels, The Exes, was optioned by MTV films and may be out on TV this year; another novel, Spinsters, was short-listed for the Orange Prize, Britian's highest-paying literary award. A former columnist for both the Village Voice and The Web Magazine, she has written extensively about underground media. She has taught writing at Johns Hopkins and Boston College; she now teaches privately.
Two years ago, she co-founded the Anti-Ad Agency with Liz Canner. The Anti-Ad Agency makes TV spots for non-profit groups - projects have involved everything from writing scripts to finding costumes to distribution. Pagan acts as the webmaster, co-writer, gofer and media-outreach person for the Agency.

SUSAN McCORMICK - the University at Albany, State University of NY
Susan McCormick is a doctoral student in the Department of History, University at Albany - State University of New York. Her research focuses on U.S. social history and the intersections of work, public policy and gender; oral and video history; and the integration of new media into research and teaching in history. She is completing a multimedia research and documentation project, 'Banning Homework: A Case Study of Class, Community and State in the Fulton County Glove Industry', that incorporates a traditional text narrative with a World Wide Web site, and an audio/radio documentary. She is the Managing Editor of the Journal for MultiMedia History, a peer-reviewed journal published on the World Wide Web that explores how new and multimedia transform research, documentation, and dissemination of historical scholarship. She is also a Co-Producer of Talking History, a radio program broadcast on the radio and the Internet that explores historical themes, the historical profession, and the relevance of historical knowledge to understanding contemporary social, political, and cultural issues.

SUSAN MEISELAS
Susan Meiselas is an award winning documentary photographer best known for her work in Central America. In 1978, Meiselas received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for "outstanding courage and reporting" for her coverage of the insurrection in Nicaragua that same year. In 1992 she was named a MacArthur Fellow. Meiselas joined Magnum Photos in 1976.

Her photographs have been published worldwide in the pages of Time, The New York Times, Paris Match, Geo and Life, among others. She is the author of two monographs: "Carnival Strippers" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976) and "Nicaragua" (Pantheon, 1981). She is the editor of "Learn to See" (Polaroid Foundation, 1975), "El Salvador: Work of 30 Photographers" (Writers & Readers,1983), and "Chile From Within" (W.W. Norton, 1990). Meiselas has also co-directed two films: "Living at Risk: The Story of a Nicaraguan Family" (1985) and "Pictures from a Revolution" (1991). Her work "Kurdistan: in the Shadow of History" is a book (Random House, 1997) and a website, akaKURDISTAN.

JULIA MELTZER - The Speculative Archive for Historical Clarification
Julia Meltzer is an artist living in Brooklyn. Her installations and single channel documentary videos have been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues such as Creative Time's Art in the Anchorage, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, and at the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival. Past projects have taken on issues of police brutality, the economy of tourism in Los Angeles, and the politics of gender and identity on the internet. Her current work examines new technologies of urban policing and the mapping of crime. She received her MFA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and her BA from Brown University. She is currently a Visiting Professor of Video and Digital Media at Hampshire College.

ANNA NORRIS - Pixel Press

FRED RITCHIN - Pixel Press
Fred Ritchin is a professor at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program and has written one of the first books to explore the impact of the digital revolution on photography ("In Our Own Image," Aperture, 1990, reissued 1999). He worked on the pioneering web documentary "Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace" with photographer Gilles Peress that the New York Times nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and recently won a grant from the Hasselblad Foundation to work on a new project, "Witnessing and the Web: An Experiment in Documentary Photography."

CATHERINE RUSSELL - Concordia University
http://cinema.concordia.ca/russell/
Catherine Russell is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. She is the author of Narrative Mortality: Death, Closure and New Wave Cinemas (University of Minnesota Press, 1995) and Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (Duke University Press, 1999). She is presently working on a book on Japanese cinema.
from the description of Experimental Ethnography:
Experimental film and ethnographic film have long been considered separate, autonomous practices on the margins of mainstream cinema. By exploring the interplay between the two forms, Catherine Russell throws new light on both the avant-garde and visual anthropology. ... Arguing that video enables us to see film differently—not as a vanishing culture but as bodies inscripted in technology, Russell maps the slow fade from modernism to postmodern practices. Combining cultural critique with aesthetic analysis, she explores the dynamics of historical interruption, recovery, and reevaluation. As disciplinary boundaries dissolve, Russell contends, ethnography is a means of renewing the avant-gardism of “experimental” film, of mobilizing its play with language and form for historical ends. “Ethnography” likewise becomes an expansive term in which culture is represented from many different and fragmented perspectives. Original in both its choice of subject and its theoretical and methodological approaches, Experimental Ethnography will appeal to visual anthropologists, as well as film scholars interested in experimental and documentary practices.

DAVID THORNE - The Speculative Archive for Historical Clarification
David Thorne is a working artist in Brooklyn, New York. He produces work in a variety of formats combining low and high tech methods and materials. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in subway stations, art spaces, political publications, community centers, and street demonstrations. Current projects include the ongoing series of artist bookworks "Men in the News"; the collective project "Resistant Strains," producing political graphics and traveling exhibitions; "BOOM," a billboard project on globalization with Austrian artist Oliver Ressler; and "MAP: Mapping America's Prisons," a collaboration with artists and educators which will produce an atlas indicating the locations of all prison facilities in the United States.

LESLIE THORNTON - Brown University
Thornton's experimental work explores the subversive and the mysterious, the unwritten history of film and video. Using media as a medium through which one can think, with a fluidity similar to that of writing, she uses production as an exploratory process, with each work part of an ongoing investigation of meaning and form. Subject matter, politics, aesthetics and form are co-extensive. Thornton creates the media equivalent of poems, essays and experimental fiction, with each work evoking small revelations.

GERALD ZAHAVI - the University at Albany, State University of NY
Gerald Zahavi is Associate Professor of History at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He was trained at Cornell and Syracuse Universities, and received his doctorate in U.S. history from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University (with a specialization in modern U.S. economic, social, and labor history). He is the author of: "Workers, Managers, and Welfare Capitalism: The Shoemakers and Tanners of Endicott Johnson, 1890-1950" (University of Illinois Press, 1988), a 2-CD oral history of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, and a number of articles on the history of labor and radicalism. Reflecting his interest in the use of media - old and new - to communicate history to a wide audience, Zahavi co-founded the The Journal for Multi-Media History in 1997 (he currently serves as co-editor) and transformed the University at Albany History Department's WWW home page into a resource-rich site for researchers, teachers, and the general public. He is now actively involved in the creation of the History and MultiMedia Center at the University at Albany. In 1996, he founded Talking History, an aural history production center with a weekly FM radio program that is also broadcast over the Internet. In his spare time he serves as News and Public Affairs Director of WRPI-FM, a Pacifica-affiliated college/community radio station. His current research focuses on labor and communism (a book, Embers on the Land, is under contract with the University of North Carolina Press), welfare capitalism (The Open Hand of Capital: Welfare Capitalism in 20th-Century America, under contract with Ivan Dee Press), and the history of General Electric. Zahavi teaches courses in labor and business history, local and regional history, oral and video history, radio documentary production, general U.S. history, as well as methods courses in quantitative and statistical analysis of historical data.