Speakers

Speakers at this year’s event include:

  • VICTORIA JAYE – Acting Head of Fiction & Entertainment Multiplatform Commissioning, BBC
  • DAVID SPITZ – Director of Business Development, WPP
  • JACK WAKSHLAG – Chief Research Officer, Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.

 

Speakers’ Bios:

 

    Ivan Askwith is Director of Strategy for Big Spaceship, an award-winning digital creative agency based in Brooklyn, NY. Building upon his time as a media analyst in MIT’s Convergence Culture Consortium, Ivan specializes in developing campaigns that generate deep cross-platform audience engagement with entertainment franchises and brands. Recent projects include work for Second Life, NBC, A&E, HBO and Sony Pictures.
    He holds a Master’s degree from MIT’s Program in Comparative Media Studies, where his work focused on modern television’s increasing emphasis on transmedia narrative in creating and sustaining audience engagement. He has contributed chapters on audience behavior and franchise development to books including, “Reading Lost” and “Battleground: The Media,” a media studies encyclopedia. He is a frequent speaker on transmedia strategy and online communities at both academic and business conferences and an occasional contributor to magazines like Slate and Salon.
    As Editorial Director/Assistant Vice President of Access Intelligence’s Broadband Group & Editor, Seth oversees the editorial content for Access Intelligence’s Broadband Group, edits CableWorld and writes CableFAX Daily’s Programmer’s Page. Prior to his work in cable, Seth led Access Intelligence’s Defense Group for more than a decade, during which time its products garnered national awards for editorial excellence. A former White House Bureau Chief for Access Intelligence’s Defense Daily, Seth joined the company in 1986 as a reporter for Soviet Aerospace after receiving an M.A. in defense and international relations from The Paul H. Nitze School of The Johns Hopkins University.
    Eleanor Baird is a strategist with a passion for media metrics and online advertising. She is currently the Director of Partnerships & Analytics at TubeMogul, an online video promotion, distribution, and analytics company in Emeryville, California. Before moving west, she was a Senior Associate with Compete, a Boston-based web analytics firm where she advised Fortune 50 telecommunications companies on their online marketing strategy. Eleanor is a C3 alumna who worked with Consortium while earning her MBA at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and writing her master’s thesis on targeted online advertising. She is originally from Toronto, Canada.
    With over 10 years of experience in managing complex software projects, for brands such as PlayStation through to Channel 4 Television, David’s interest is in how entertainment and communication utilities work together to enable audiences to co-produce bespoke experiences. As such, the combination of technology, media law and art to produce invention which is commercial and socially beneficial, remains at the core of David’s service design work. In 2007 David created an unique entertainment format for Ford Motor Company, titled, Where are the Joneses? – a social media sitcom where the audience influenced the daily production of a road trip to seek out 27 sperm donor siblings. Produced with the UK leading comedy production company, Baby Cow, Where are the Joneses? enabled a world leading brand to engage audiences with authenticity and generosity. It was the first and largest branded media production to be Licenced under the Creative Commons commercial license.
    Nancy Baym is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas where she teaches about communication technology, interpersonal communication and qualitative research methods. She pioneered the study of online community and fandom in the early 1990s, writing about how soap opera fans built relationships with one another while transforming television viewing into a collaborative endeavor. Her book Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom and Online Community (Sage, 2000) synthesizes that work. Her book “Personal Connections in the Digital Age” will be released in April, 2010. With Annette Markham, she is co-editor of Internet Inquiry: Conversation about Method (Sage). Other recent publications include “The New Shape of Online Community: The Case of Swedish Independent Music Fandom” in First Monday and, with Robert Burnett, “Amateur Experts: International Fan Labor in Swedish Independent Music” in The International Journal of Cultural Studies, as well as articles in Information, Communication and Society and New Media & Society. She was a co-founder of the Association of Internet Researchers and served as its President. She blogs at OnlineFandom.com
    Brian is an experimental media producer and the Founder/CEO of 14-year-old media lab GMD Studios. In those years he’s worn such diverse hats as publisher of indie film news journal indieWIRE, content publisher, fan building consultant, advertising creative, and alternate reality game designer. Brian came to crossmedia production out of the D.I.Y and independent traditions in the music scene as producer. www.gmdstudios.com
    Mia Consalvo is Visiting Associate Professor in the Comparative Media Studies program for 2009-2010. She is also Associate Professor at Ohio University in the School of Media Arts and Studies. She is currently serving as President of the Association of Internet Researchers, and she is on the steering committee of Women in Games International. Her current research examines several topics, including the role of Japan in the formation of the videogame industry, the culture of casual games, and women’s gameplay. Her work has been published in Cinema Journal, Critical Studies in Media Communication, and Games and Culture, among others. She is also the author of Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames from MIT Press, and is co-editor of the forthcoming Blackwell Handbook of Internet Studies.
    Paul Dalen has been involved in music his entire life, as a musician in his teens and 20’s and a tour manager and FOH sound engineer after that. He retired from touring in the 90’s and worked for Clear Channel / Bill Graham Presents in San Francisco.
    In 2001 he moved to New York and spent the next 5+ years at Maine Road Management. At the time of his departure the client roster included David Bowie, David Byrne, Luna, Joe Henry, Beth Orton, Helmet, Dean and Britta, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Air, Jim White, Laura Cantrell and Joe Ely.
    In 2006 he created Reverse Thread with one goal in mind: to work steadfastly with people that he respects, without interruptions or compromises, helping this small group of talented individuals reach their goals.
    Without the distractions inherent in a large client roster he is free to be completely focused on his sole task: working with a short list of artists, producers and mixers that he admires professionally and enjoys personally.
    Duncombe teaches and writes on the history of mass and alternative media and the intersection of culture and politics. He is the author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy and Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture; the editor of the Cultural Resistance Reader; and the coauthor of The Bobbed Haired Bandit: A True Story of Crime and Celebrity in 1920s New York. He also writes widely on culture and politics for scholarly journals and collections, as well as popular publications like the New York Times, the Nation, and Playboy. In 1998, he was awarded the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching by the State University of New York, where he taught before coming to New York University. Professor Duncombe has been a lifelong political activist and is currently working on a book about propaganda during the New Deal.
    Dan Goldman is the writer-artist of the real-estate horror series Red Light Properties. A frequent speaker on both digital comic processes and online distribution, Dan is the creator of the Eisner-nominated web-to-print comic Shooting War and a founding member of the celebrated webcomics collective ACT-I-VATE. His recent nonfiction graphic novel 08: A Graphic Diary of The Campaign Trail has been archived in the New York Historical Society’s permanent collection.He lives in New York City.
    Ken Eklund is Writerguy, a game designer and writer focusing on serious alternative reality experiences. He led the creation of World Without Oil, the massively collaborative online “historical pre-enactment” of a global oil crisis, for ITVS in 2007 and Ruby’s Bequest, a collective exploration into the future of our systems for caring, with Institute For the Future in 2009. World Without Oil is the first alternative reality game to confront and attempt to solve a timely real-world problem, and Ruby’s Bequest is American’s first collaborative, grassroots healthcare experience. Ken’s career spans over two dozen electronic game titles plus a dozen educational Internet projects; he develops game designs and immersive, collaborative narratives as commercial entertainment, for museums and non-profits, and for clients in the private sector. His passion is to help games, especially online social games, realize their potential to affect people artistically and promote the public good.
    Sam Ford is Director of Customer Insights with Peppercom Strategic Communications and a research affiliate with the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium, a group he helped found and manage. He received his Master’s degree from the MIT Program in Comparative Media Studies and taught courses there on topics such as professional wrestling and soap operas. Sam’s has a Bachelor’s degree in news/editorial journalism, English, mass communication, and communication studies. He is a regular columnist for “The Ohio County Times-News” in Hartford, Ky., and has worked as a journalist in South Central Kentucky for various publications. In 2006, he won a Kentucky Press Association “Best Feature” award for his work with “The Greenville Leader-News.”
    Joshua Green is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Comparative Media Studies Program working with the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT. His research looks at changing understandings of what television ‘is’, the formation of the participatory audience, and television branding in the context of participatory culture. He has published work on participatory culture and the relationship between producers and consumers, television scheduling strategies, the history of Australian television, and the construction of the cultural public sphere. He is co-author (with Jean Burgess, QUT) of YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture (Polity Press, April 2009), and speaks regularly at both industry and academic conferences. Green is an affiliate of the ARC Center of Excellence For Creative Industries and Innovation in Australia, and a member of the Advisory Board for the PBS social media project PBS Engage. He holds a PhD in Media Studies from the Queensland University of Technology.
    Patricia is a serial media and entertainment entrepreneur who founded a pioneering social media (Stylediary.net) site in 2004, which she sold in 2007. She is currently the CEO of 9, a transmedia production and consulting company that builds and consults on franchise projects for traditional and digital media, entertainment and internet business. Her startups and business insight has been heard at events including South by Southwest Interactive, Digital Hollywood, the Writer’s Guild of America, Community Next, Blogher, Women 2.0, Girls in Tech, and in mainstream business media/blogs including Mashable, Paid Content, TechCrunch, The Wall Street Journal, VentureBeat, TV Week, and others. As founder of Stylediary, her fashion advice has appeared in more than 250 media outlets. She’s the co-creator of the popular Huffington Post series The New Power Girls and Thenewpowergirls.com blog, which covers news and profiles of women startups and existing companies in multiple markets. Prior to entrepreneurship, Patricia worked in internet telecom and platform business at the engineering level and all facets of consumer sites. She’s a social entrepreneur using business for change in empowerment, the elderly and childrens causes. Blog: www.dailypatricia.com
    Noessa Higa is President of Visionaire Media, a multi-platform media company dedicated to creating content that promotes cross-cultural dialogue. She brings over fifteen years film, video and new media production, and has supervised the creative development, production, and launch of multiple web 2.0 social media platforms. Visionaire recently held a symposium (www.iDiplomacy.org) to discuss the role of new media and entertainment in public diplomacy. Previously, she co-founded Spiritclips.com, a dynamic community website dedicated to sharing inspirational films and stories. Prior to Spiritclips, she served as Director of Physical Production for First Look Studios. Her extensive career includes production work for Oscar-nominated producers at Sony, Disney, and Fox, and other top producers at Revolution, Paramount and Dreamworks. Her film experience includes working with advanced digital technologies and special effects.
    Tom has worked as a brand strategist in independent, innovative and creative-led agency environments, covering a wide range of brands across multiple categories. After crossing the Channel from Belgium, he worked as Senior Strategist at Naked Communications on clients such as Nokia, Unilever, Gap and Western Union. His approach to communications planning is fuelled by a hybrid of media, strategic and creative thinking, and is underpinned by a strong belief in the importance of Research & Development and product innovation. Having done four years of film studies, Tom is equally enthused by the untapped potential of storytelling in a marketing context. Tom is author of two internationally published books featuring and discussing the most innovative marketing cases worldwide, Advertising Is Dead, Long Live Advertising and Advertising Next.
    Jennifer Holt is Assistant Professor of film and media studies at UC Santa Barbara. Her research and writing are focused on issues related to media ownership and questions of policy and regulation as they relate to convergence. She is the co-editor of Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method (Blackwell, 2009) and is currently finishing a manuscript entitled Empires of Entertainment, which examines deregulation and media conglomeration from1980-1996 . At UCSB, her courses include media industries, television history and the blockbuster.
  • VICTORIA JAYE – Acting Head of Fiction & Entertainment Multiplatform Commissioning, BBC
    Victoria Jaye heads up the creative team that commissions cross platform content and services for the BBC’s Entertainment, Drama and Comedy TV shows. She also oversees the commissioning of standalone multiplatform entertainment content and services. Her projects include: extended story worlds for TV Dramas such as Dr Who and original UK TV Comedy such as Psychoville; participative dual screen entertainment experiences for hit shows Strictly Come Dancing and The Apprentice; original cross platform formats such as Dragons’ Den Online, and new talent showcases www.bbc.co.uk/comedy – the BBC’s new digital home for all things funny. Prior to this, Victoria was channel editor of BBC One and BBC Three, responsible for developing both channels as fully integrated multiplatform brands. In these roles she pioneered a number of BBC and industry firsts including: near video on demand programme catch-up, online programme premieres for original UK Comedy and Drama, video podcasting and mobile video marketing.
    Henry Jenkins is Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts at USC. From1993-2009 , he directed MIT’s Comparative Media Studies graduate degree program , setting an innovative research agenda during a time of fundamental change in communication, journalism and entertainment. As one of the first media scholars to chart the changing role of the audience in an environment of increasingly pervasive digital content, Jenkins has been at the forefront of understanding the effects of participatory media on society, politics and culture. His research gives key insights to the success of social-networking Web sites, networked computer games, online fan communities and other advocacy organizations, and emerging news media outlets.
    While simultaneously acting as Invisible Children’s enforcer of regulatory compliance (aka the Legal Department), this Pepperdine School of Law graduate and Nashvillean is tackling the world of media relations – a task which includes (but is never limited to) creative partnerships and exposing Invisible Children to the public through print, television, and events. Add to all that, Jed is the main voice of Invisible Children’s blog. He is a busy man who loves the challenge. Jed’s affinity for exploration has yielded his obsession for studying maps, navigating back roads, watching LOST, and treasure-hunting on youtube. We also think it necessary to mention his fascinating and absolutely irrational fear of rabbits (“unpredictable terrors”).
    Dr. Derek Johnson’s research explores the collaborative, but uneasy, negotiations required of corporations, creators, and consumers as “franchised” intellectual properties have been shared among multiple sites of cultural production in the television, film, game, and comic industries. As part of this historical project, he has examined the licensing of Marvel Comics™ characters, the creative reimagining of Battlestar Galactica, the transnational partnerships supporting Transformers, and the grassroots production of video game mods. He has also written extensively on fandom and the role of audiences as creative laborers within the media industries. His work has been published most recently in journals including Popular Communication and The Velvet Light Trap, as well as the anthologies Reading Lost and Convergence Media History. At UNT, he teaches a wide variety of courses related to critical and cultural studies of media, including “Television Cultures,” “Video Game Theory and Design,” and “Television History.”
    Leora has lived many lives, most of them with a connection to entertainment, media, or communication studies. Past lives include record store clerk, radio host, writer on television shows in Canada that were quickly cancelled, and mobile media entrepreneur. Currently she is a Research Associate at the Harvard Business School, working in the area of digital media and its implications for marketing practice.  She holds a B.A. in Art History from the University of British Columbia and an M.A. in Media & Communications from the University of London, Goldsmiths College.
    Larkin’s research examines the role media play in the shaping of social life. This takes several directions but all of them emerge out of research in Nigeria. He writes on issues of circulation and the movement of cultural forms; Nigerian cultural production, especially video films; piracy; the materiality of media technologies; infrastructure and technological breakdown; and the relationship between media and forms of political rule. These issues come together in his book, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure & Culture in Urban Nigeria (Duke University Press). His current research is on the religious use of media by Muslim movements in Nigeria, the relationship between religion and mediation and how media shape new forms of religious publics.
    Dr. JuYoung Lee brings 15 years of experience in market research and psychology to Ace Metrix. As Chief Scientist, she leads a team of scientists and thinkers whose mission at Ace Metrix is a relentless pursuit of innovation in advertising measurements and analytics. Her passion is finding new, creative solutions to old, stale problems. Prior to co-founding Ace Metrix, Dr. Lee spent her career at several market research firms including Lieberman Research Worldwide, Krumm & Associates and Aspex Research serving many of Fortune 500 companies. Dr. Lee holds a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Southern California.
    Lara Lee is a principal at Jump Associates, a growth and innovation strategy firm based in San Mateo, Calif. At Jump, she leads the firm’s brand community and sustainability practices and is a member of the executive management team. Named one of BusinessWeek’s top 25 “Masters of Innovation,” Lara is a frequent speaker at business, sustainability and marketing forums, most recently presenting at the Sustainable Brands ’09 conference, the Marketing Science Institute’s “New Art & Science of Branding” conference and the International IDSA conference. Additionally, Lara’s commentary and writings on sustainability, marketing, and business strategy have appeared in numerous publications, including The Harvard Business Review, BusinessWeek, Forbes and The New York Times.
    Lara has over 20 years of corporate experience in strategy, marketing, finance and general management, working around the globe with Fortune 500 organizations. Prior to Jump, Lara was VP of Enthusiast Services at Harley-Davidson, leading a division that included experiential services, a new business incubator and the company’s online presence. Over 14 years at Harley, Lara developed numerous self-funding marketing programs, served as founding director for the company’s ground breaking museum, launched a rider training business, and led a diverse set of community building programs to attract a new generation of riders, especially women. Lara holds dual master’s degrees in business administration and international affairs from the University of Pennsylvania and the Wharton School of Business, and a bachelor’s degree in Chinese language from Brown University.
    Geoffrey Long is a researcher and Communications Director for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, a research project of the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT. He is also a 2007 graduate of the MIT CMS Master’s program, an avid transmedia scholar, a writer, an artist and a filmmaker. He has been the editor-in-chief of the literary, culture and technology zine Inkblots, a co-founder of both the software collective Untyped and the award-winning film troupe Tohubohu Productions, and the founder of the creative consulting company Dreamsbay. His writing has appeared in Polaris, Gothik, Hika, {fray} and Guttergeek, and he is a frequent speaker at conferences including SIGGRAPH, SCMS, the Game Developers Conference, Pictoplasma and FuturePlay.
    Trapper Markelz has over 10 years of direct experience building consumer-facing web products that focus on community and conversation. GamerDNA was founded in 2006 as a digital gaming media company committed to developing customer value through the real-time observation and understanding of gamer behavior. Through its owned and operated consumer-facing properties, the company derives insights on the gaming community – essentially, what gamers are playing and saying in the games space, at any given time. This intelligence is thoughtfully applied to our businesses, which span social media, online content, and advertising solutions for publishers and brands. Prior to gamerDNA, Trapper co-founded 360voice.com, an online Xbox gaming community, and pioneered auto-blogging technology to drive new ways of interacting around games using data. As part of that project, he also designed and built a data-driven competitive gaming system for Proctor & Gamble that integrated into the Xbox 360 game console as part of a large media campaign. This led to an understanding of the competitive gaming space and the motivations behind virtual competition. Trapper also worked in Chicago, IL for Spencer Stuart and Associates for over 8 years, pioneering agile development strategies and adoption of Enterprise 2.0 methods that optimize processes around executive assessment, using data mining, folksonomies, and smarter search technologies. He attended the Rochester Institute of Technology were he graduated in 1999 with a degree in Information Technology and now lives in Arlington, MA with his wife Maureen and two daughters Lucy and Hannah.
    Grant McCracken holds a PhD from the University of Chicago in cultural anthropology. He is the author of Big Hair, Culture and Consumption, Culture and Consumption II: Markets, Meaning and Brand Management, Flock and Flow, The Long Interview, Plenitude: Culture by Commotion, Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture, and the forthcoming Chief Culture Officer: How to Create a Living, Breathing Corporation. He has been the director of the Institute of Contemporary Culture at the ROM (Royal Ontario Museum), a senior lecturer at the Harvard Business School, a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge and he is now an adjunct professor at McGill University. He has consulted widely in the corporate world, including the Coca-Cola Company, IKEA, Chrysler, Kraft, Kodak, and Kimberly Clark. He is a member of the IBM Social Networking Advisory Board.
    Jason Mittell is Associate Professor of American Studies and Film & Media Culture at Middlebury College. I am the author of Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (Routledge, 2004), and Television and American Culture (Oxford University Press, 2009). He is currently writing a book on narrative complexity in contemporary American television. His research interests include television history and criticism, media and cultural history, genre theory, narratology, animation and children’s media, cultural historiography, and new media studies & technological convergence. He blogs at Just TV.
    Mike started out as a DIY indie-filmmaker, and in 1998 collaborated with four other film school friends to create ‘The Blair Witch Project’. This integrated, interactive experience built a community around the film’s mythology, resulting in a pop-culture phenomenon with over $240 million in worldwide box-office and changed how marketers approached the Internet. Excited by this marketing/entertainment hybrid, Mike co-founded Campfire with Steve Wax and Gregg Hale, helping brands rethink marketing through active audience engagement. An acclaimed leader in the new marketing space, Campfire has created award winning programs for major brands including: Verizon, HBO, Audi, HP, Pontiac, USA Network and Warner Brothers.
    Maurício Mota is Chief Storytelling Officer and co-founder at The Alchemists Network, a Transmedia Storytelling ThinkDO Tank based in Rio de Janeiro and LA. Before founding The Alchemists he was involved with branded entertainment and advertising companies where he worked for clients such as Danone, Unilever, Nokia and other important local brands in Brazil. The Alchemists’s main objective is to incite a shift in the content and storytelling landscape by applying the concepts found in Jenkins’s Convergence Culture for brands, networks and education. Working with him on the initiative is Mark Warshaw (former Heroes’ Transmedia Director). The Alchemists initiative takes the form of a blog, workshops, consultancies, transmedia productions and an IPTV show. They are also involved with the Convergence Culture Consortium (C3) at MIT, and Maurício was responsible for bringing to C3 the first sponsor companies from outside the US.
    Maurício started his career as an entrepreneur at age 15, when he developed Autoria, the first Storytelling Game in Latin America, based on a PhD thesis about Roleplaying Games. He launched the game through his first company, and in two years it was applied in over 4,000 schools, sold in stores all over the country and is being used as an innovation and creativity tool by companies and institutions including the United Nations, Kraft Foods and TV networks.
    Named one of Rolling Stone’s “Agents of Change” for 2009, prior to boxee Ronen was the Head of Corporate Development and M&A for Comverse, Inc. a leading provider of software and service to Telecom service providers. Ronen was responsible for acquisitions valued at $450M, which were key to the company’s evolution from a Voicemail company to a Billing and VAS provider. Ronen joined Comverse in2002 when they acquired Odigo, a company he co-founded in 1998. Odigo was one of the early Instant Messaging services on the web serving over8M users worldwide, and earned Ronen the 2002 honor of being a member of Crain’s 40 under 40. Prior to Odigo Ronen served for 4.5 years in the Israeli Defense Force in the special computer unit, MAMRAM
    Frank Rose writes about media and entertainment, covering such topics as the Year Zero alternate reality game, Sony’s enormous gamble on the PlayStation 3, and the posthumous career of Philip K. Dick in Hollywood. He has also led debates about the future of media at venues ranging from the Cannes Film Festival to South by Southwest. Before joining Wired in 1999, he worked as a contributing writer at Fortune and Travel + Leisure and a contributing editor at Esquire. He is the author of The Agency, an unauthorized history of the oldest and at one time most successful talent agency in Hollywood, and West of Eden, a 1989 best-seller about the ouster of Steve Jobs from Apple (now available in an updated edition). He is currently writing a book about how the Internet is changing storytelling, documented at his blog Deep Media.
    Joel Rubinson is Chief Research Officer at The ARF, where he directs the organization’s priorities and initiatives on behalf of 400+ advertisers, advertising agencies, associations, research firms, and media companies. Joel is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and an active blogger. He holds an MBA in statistics and economics from the University of Chicago and a BS from NYU and never leaves home without his harmonica. Follow him on Twitter: @joelrubinson.
    Léo has worked in digital communications at the Brazilian energy company, Petrobras, since 2003, where he is the coordinator of Digital Communication in the Multimedia department. He graduated from UCSal (Catholic University of Salvador) in Advertising, has an MBA in Communications from ESPM (Graduate School of Marketing and Propaganda – Rio de Janeiro), and Post Graduate in Computer Graphics (Salvador University). He worked on the planning and creation of campaigns for advertising agencies, produced and wrote screenplays for independent TV programs, and developed digital communication campaigns in Brazil. He is also a former professor of Desktop Publishing at UNIFACS (Salvador – Bahia) and Corporate Digital Communication for Post Graduate Students at Candido Mendes University (Rio de Janeiro).
    Loraine Sammy is a Canadian activist and artist in the entertainment design media industry, based out of Vancouver, BC. Along with co-creator Marissa Lee, she developed racebending.com: a grassroots protest website focused on whitewashing, discrimination and the lack of media representation for marginalized groups. Through years of conference attendance and online community, Loraine has amassed extensive personal experience with situational fan culture in North America. She has been not only an observer but a participant in the postmodern overlap between fanworks and source material, the continued challenging of privilege within both, and the overall effects that these elements have on our wider art and internet cultures.
    Jane Shattuc is Professor of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College in Boston. She has written primarily about American and European television industries and how their aesthetic and industrial forms relate to class and gender. Her books include: Television, Tabloids, Tears: Fassbinder and Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995) and The Talking Cure: TV Talk Shows and Women (New York: Routledge, 1997). She co-edited Hop on Pop: the Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002) with Henry Jenkins and Tara McPherson. Her newest work is The American Television Industry co-written with Michael Curtin (UC-Santa Barbara) is due on December 2009 from the British Film Institute.
    Andrew is a teacher, social organizer and human rights activist, comedian, actor, and writer. He spent years performing sketch comedy for hundreds of colleges across the US only to stop touring so that he could devote himself full time to the HP Alliance which he co-founded in 2005. Andrew has also co-written, acted in, and produced online videos that have been viewed more than six million times and continues to perform stand up comedy in the Boston area. He has trained at an acting conservatory in London and studied under peace and civil rights activists in both Northern Ireland and the United States. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brandeis University, Andrew is dedicated to learning and extrapolating how modern myth, new media, and expressive therapy can transform our lives both personally and collectively.
    As Director of Business Development for WPP, David works with parent and operating company management to drive partnerships, investments and new product offerings in the areas of digital marketing and analytics. David joined WPP in 2005 as part of the group’s MBA rotation program, holding operating company roles with WPP’s Ogilvy and Mediaedge:CIA units prior to joining the corporate strategy and business development team in 2007. Before WPP, he was a management consultant with Deloitte’s Media & Communications practice. David has a BA from Princeton, MS from MIT (Comparative Media Studies) and MBA from Columbia Business School.
    Louisa Stein is Assistant Professor of Television, Film, and New Media at San Diego State University, where she heads the Critical Studies curriculum. She received her PhD from NYU’s Department of Cinema Studies in 2006. Louisa’s work focuses on transmedia culture, genre, and youth media. Her research investigates how meanings circulate across history, across media platforms and technologies, and between media producers and audiences. She has published on audiences and transmedia engagement in a range of journals and edited collections including Cinema Journal and the forthcoming Flow Anthology. Much of Louisa’s work also uses genre as a lens to investigate transmedia relationships within and across historical and industrial contexts. Her recently published co-edited collection, Teen Television: Programming and Fandom (McFarland, 2008) traverses issues of production, text, and new media reception as it explores the multifaceted terrain of teen television programming. Her in-process book project, Millennial Noir, explores the resurgence of noir in contemporary transmedia culture. By looking at the combination of teen and noir generic elements in our current media moment, this work interrogates the mediated politics of becoming an adult in our contemporary culture.
    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 has held visiting professorships at Stockholm University, the Freie Universität Berlin, and Philips Universität Marburg; and Guggenheim, Fulbright and Humboldt fellowships have supported his research. Uricchio considers the interplay of media technologies and cultural practices, and their role in (re-) constructing representation, knowledge and publics. In part, he researches and develops new histories of ‘old’ media (early photography, telephony, film, broadcasting, and new media) when they were new. And in part, he investigates the interactions of media cultures and their audiences through research into such areas as peer-to-peer communities and cultural citizenship, media and cultural identity, and historical representation in computer games and reenactments. 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, New Collectivities and Europe (2009, Chicago). He is currently completing a manuscript on the concept of the televisual from the 17th century to the present.
  • JACK WAKSHLAG – Chief Research Officer, Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.
    Jack Wakshlag, chief research officer for Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. (TBS, Inc.), is among the leading research analysts in media today. His portfolio includes all research supporting Turner’s strategic development, marketing, distribution and ad sales. Previously, he was head of research for The WB television network and associate professor of telecommunications at Indiana University. The author of numerous articles and textbook chapters, Jack is a board member of Wharton School’s Future of Advertising Project, is a Steering Committee Member of the Board of The Council for Research Excellence, and received a distinguished Alumni Award from Michigan State University.
    Jordan Weisman is a leader in ARG and computer gaming. He has been the creative and motivating force behind the founding and success of a number of entertainment companies, including: FASA Corporation (roleplaying games), Virtual World Entertainment (the world’s first public networked virtual reality entertainment centers) acquired by the Disney Family in 1992, FASA Interactive (PC games, including the MechWarrior franchise) acquired by Microsoft in 1999, WhizKids (collectible games, including HeroClix) acquired by Topps Inc. in 2003, and 42 Entertainment (alternate reality gaming). He co-writes the teen fiction Cathy series with Sean Stewart.At Microsoft, Jordan was the Creative Director for the entire entertainment business unit which included all PC and Xbox titles. While there, he conceived of the pioneering transmedia non-linear storytelling experience for Steven Spielberg’s movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which has spawned a whole new genre of interactive entertainment called Alternate Reality Games. Jordan and the 42 Entertainment team have remained in the forefront of ARGs with such experiences as “I Love Bees,” “Year Zero,” and many others to their credit.
    With over a decade of online experience, Mark brings seasoned leadership to the management of all marketing, business development, and client services activity for eXelate, the first and largest trading platform for online targeting data. eXelate connects data on over 150M UV per month to hundreds of agencies, ad networks and media exchanges seeking to refine their online audience targeting. Previously, he was Chief Marketing Officer and Corporate EVP of MediaSpan Group where he led all marketing and business development activity as well as built the 1400+ affiliate Local Online Ad Network. Prior to MediaSpan, he was a Founder and President of WorldNow / WorldNow Network, the largest network and video content management/ web services provider for local TV station websites. Mark started his online adventure as a Group Director at Internet pioneer Modem Media – Poppe Tyson where his clients included IBM, MCI, HSBC, Standard & Poors and Priceline.
    His marketing career began in brand management working with clients including J Crew, Nike, Timberland and Jansport after receiving his MBA from the University of Rochester’s Simon School of Business and a BS in Finance (with Honors) from Gannon University, where he was awarded the University’s Distinguished Young Alumnus Award in 2004.

More speakers will be announced soon!

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