FOE5 - Futures of Entreteniment

Ana Domb Krauskopf is Director of Brand Innovation at Almabrands in Chile and a Futures of Entertainment Fellow. She is a journalist, film and music producer and ethnographer and teaches courses on applied communications with Universidad del Desarrollo. Prior to moving to Chile, she worked in user experience research at THE MEME, a design consultancy firm based out of Cambridge.

Ana holds a Master’s degree from the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, where she was a researcher with the Convergence Culture Consortium. In her native Costa Rica, she co-founded Cinergia, the first film production fund designed to stimulate media activity in Central America and Cuba. There, she also worked with the Papaya Music label, where she co-produced the Papaya Fest, an eclectic large-scale Central American music festival.

Over the past few years, Ana’s work has focused on alternative distribution and audience engagement. She co-authored “If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead: Creating Value in a Spreadable Marketplace” with Henry Jenkins and Xiaochang Li, the white paper which inspired the forthcoming NYU Press book Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Society by Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. She also wrote the white paper “Tacky and Proud: Exploring Technobrega’s Value Network” for the Consortium.

Ana has also consulted with Turner Broadcasting and Comcast, as well as working beside anthropologist and FoE Fellow Grant McCracken. She can be found on Twitter @anadk.

C. Lee Harrignton is Professor of Sociology and Affiliate of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Miami University and a Futures of Entertainment Fellow. Her areas of research include television studies, fan studies, and the sociology of law.

Lee’s long research collaboration with Denise D. Bielby has focused on the daytime soap opera genre, its audiences and fans, and its global circulation. Their joint work includes their 2008 book on global television distribution, Global TV: Exporting Television and Culture in the World Market; the 2001 edited collection Popular Culture: Production and Consumption; and the 1995 book Soap Fans: Pursuing Pleasure and Making Meaning in Everyday Life.

She also  co-edited a 2011 book on U.S. daytime serial dramas entitled The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era with Abigail De Kosnik and Sam Ford and a 2007 anthology on fandom titled Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World with Jonathan Gray and Cornel Sandvoss and an upcoming collection on the U.S. soap opera.

Lee has published on issues of sexual representation on television in Feminist Media Studies and Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media and issues of aging actors and audiences in Journal of Aging Studies and International Journal of Cultural Studies. For the Convergence Culture Consortium, she wrote “Aging and the Future of Media Fandom”.

Current research projects include a study of acting and aging on daytime soaps and a study of media framing of death row volunteers (inmates who want to be executed). She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California-Santa Barbara.

Andy Ellwood is Director of Business Development for Gowalla, where he has helped create global brand partnerships with Disney, CNN, Sundance Film Festival, National Geographic, and other brands.

Andy, a resident of New York, is a graduate of Texas A&M with a degree in Corporate Finance. Before going to work with Gowalla, he worked in luxury travel sales, most recently as Vice President of Sales for Marquis Jet. He began his career at Northwestern Mutual. He can be found on Twitter @andyellwood.

Brian Whitman is co-founder of The Echo Nest. He teaches computers how to make, listen to, and read about music. Brian received his doctorate from the Machine Listening group at MIT’s Media Lab in 2005 and his Master’s in Computer Science from Columbia University’s Natural Language Processing group in 2000.

His research links automatically extracted community knowledge of music to its acoustic properties to “learn the meaning of music.” His composition and sound art projects consider the effects of machine interpretation of large amounts of media, such as the first actual “computer music” (as in music for computers) of “Eigenradio.”

As the co-founder and CTO of the Echo Nest Corporation, Brian architects an open platform with billions of data points about the world of music: from the listeners to the musicians to the sounds within the songs.

Bruno Natal is a member of the Queremos team, a crowdfunding company dedicated to bringing international bands to Rio de Janeiro through raising money from fans to organizing bands to come to the city. The company begins a campaign to raise money to bring a band to Rio, dividing the costs into refundable tickets. Once the minimum is raised to bring a band to Rio and tickets go on sale, those first people who bought these refundable tickets to fund the trip are eligible for a partial or sometimes even full refund, based on the success of ticket sales for the concert. The company is interested in eventually expanding the model beyond music shows.

In addition to his work with Queremos, Bruno is a Brazilian documentarian and music writer with a Master’s degree in Screen documentary from Goldsmiths, University of London. He directed, filmed and produced Dub Echoes about the influence of Jamaican dub on the evolution of electronic music and films about Chico Buarque, Maria Bethânia and others, as well as television series.

Bruno writes a weekly column for Rio de Janeiro’s newspaper O Globo, has blogged at URBe for the past eight years and is one of the editors of culture portal OEsquema.

Caitlin Boyle is founder and president of Film Sprout, a consulting and booking agency that broadens the audience and social impact of documentaries through public screening events.
She is the architect of national screening and outreach initiatives for dozens of independent documentaries, including King Corn, Pray the Devil Back to Hell, The End of the Line, A Small Act, and Bag It.

Previously on staff at NPR affiliates WFIU and WFUV and PBS affiliate WNET, Caitlin is a graduate of Columbia University and the Indiana University Graduate School of Journalism. Her workshops and presentations on grassroots film distribution have rallied enterprising filmmakers at SXSW, Hot Docs, Independent Film Week, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Los Angeles Film Festival, and The New York Foundation for the Arts.

She serves on the board of Brooklyn documentary arts center UnionDocs, and on the advisory board of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts Research Institute for the Advancement of Cinema Arts and Commerce.

Chris O’Brien is a business and technology at The San Jose Mercury News, where he has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade. His column explores the people, ideas, and companies that drive the world’s leading innovation economy.

During his time in Silicon Valley, O’Brien has covered the dot-com boom and bust. His 2002 series of articles, “Rich Man, Poor Company,” won several journalism prizes for the way it detailed the people who made the most money running the companies that turned into the biggest disasters. Subsequently, O’Brien helped cover the California Energy Crisis, producing several notable stories exploring the finances of the state’s bankrupt utilities and the consequences of complex policy decisions that contributed to the disaster.

More recently, O’Brien’s column has challenged the conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley concerning the strategy of using mergers and layoffs to reinvent companies. He has also explored the economic impact and the disconnect between local technology companies and the struggling local governments.

Outside of the Mercury News, O’Brien has also been active in exploring ideas related to the future of journalism. In 2007, he received a News Challenge grant from the Knight Foundation to research and design the newsroom of the future. He also blogs about the changing media landscape for PBS’ IdeaLab.

Chuck Fromm is the publisher and founder of Worship Leader magazine and CEO of its parent company, Worship Leader Media. The latter is a pioneering nondenominational communications company that serves churches through remediating ancient content in contemporary language and imagery. He has lectured on communications, theology, and worship at graduate schools and seminaries (Princeton, Fuller Theological Seminary, Liberty University, Baylor, and Oxford, among others).

Chuck has also served as an adjunct at USC in the Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism, teaching “Communicating Religion.” Heholds a Ph.D. from the School of Intercultural Studies at Fuller Theological Seminary. He received a communication award from Fuller for his doctoral thesis Textual Communities and New Song in the Multimedia Age: The Routinization of Charisma in the Jesus Movement. Chuck has founded numerous print and digital-based magazines, as well as creating diverse learning environments for pastors, worship leaders, technologists and more.

As President of Maranatha! Music for 22 years, he developed the series Praise (that launched an entirely new genre—Praise & Worship—fueling an industry and a movement), Kids Praise, Psalms Alive!, and The Words of Worship. His leadership there was rewarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Gospel Music Association in 1990 and a President’s award from the National Religious Broadcasters in 1991, as well as a Grammy for Best Children’s recording 1992, A Cappella Kids (produced and released by his recording label).

Is founder and CEO of Loku.com, a company devoted to helping folks tap into the local scene. Before starting Loku, Dan was an executive with Bain & Company, Primedia and Kohlberg, Kravis & Roberts. While on the road, he often wondered how people build an attachment to place and develop the feeling of roots. In an age when the internet has disconnected people more than ever, he sought to find a better way to help people re-connect and engage with their local community. Doing so, however, was a mammoth undertaking that took three years and more than $350,000 of Street’s own money along with another $1 million in angel capital.  The result: Big Data for Local, a proprietary technology that analyzes online information and creates the wisdom of an insider.

Denise Mann is Associate Professor in the School of Theater, Film and Television at UCLA and head of the UCLA Producers Program. She is co-chair of the annual Transmedia Hollywood conference with Henry Jenkins, a collaborative event between UCLA and the University of Southern California and a sister event to the Futures of Entertainment conference and a Futures of Entertainment Fellow.

Denise is author of the 2008 book Hollywood Independents: The Postwar Talent Takeover. She is also co-editor of the 1992 book Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer, with Lynn Spigel. She has  published articles on television and consumer culture in a range of journals and was associate editor of Camera Obscura, a journal of feminism and film theory, from 1986 to 1992.

At UCLA, Denise teaches courses on contemporary entertainment industry practices, as well as film and television history and theory. In addition, she is a consultant with Creek and River Co., a Tokyo-based media management firm, and is a board member of the Association Internationale des Medias (AIM) in Paris.

She has spoken at events from the Tokyo International Film Festival and Shanghai International Film Festival to a wide range of academic conferences. Denise has also spoken at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute, Shanghai University, Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne and the Institut National de L’Aduiovisuel (INA).

Erin McKeown is a writer, multi-instrumentalist, and performer who has released multiple full-length albums, EPs, an upcoming concert film, and a groundbreaking internet concert series since the debut of her first album, Distillation

For most of the last decade, Erin has spent an average of 200 nights a year onstage, building a loyal fan base across the United States and Europe. She has appeared on Later with Jools Holland, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, NPR, and BBC. She has had numerous film, television, and commercial placements. She’s even written a song via text message with her friend, Rachel Maddow.

Erin is also active in teaching, writing poems and op-eds, and  political activism, lobbying regularly on Capitol Hill about issues concerning musicians and technology. She currently serves as a fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Her latest studio album is Hundreds of Lions, produced by Sam Kassirer and out now on Righteous Babe Records. “Live At Lincoln Hall,” a concert film recorded to celebrate Erin’s first decade in music, was released in Spring 2011. McKeown is currently working on a book of poems, looking for ways to incorporate her love of sports into her career, and writing her next studio project, due in early 2012. In the summer of 2009, she created “Cabin Fever”, a live internet concert series broadcast from her picturesque cabin in rural western Massachusetts. Described as “Wayne’s World meets the Judy Garland Show”, the series has garnered considerable attention for its entertaining exploration of the intersections of art, technology, and commerce. You can watch the entire series here.

Raised in Fredericksburg, VA, Erin began playing piano at age 3. At age 12, she picked up the electric guitar, learning to play by ear, from friends, and with her trusty Tascam 4-track recorder. She wrote her first songs shortly thereafter. During her time at Brown University, Erin added the mandolin, banjo, and bass to her instrumental arsenal. In her early 20′s, she added the kit drums.

Ernest J. Wilson III is Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication and Walter H. Annenberg Chair in Communication. He served on the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting from 2000 to 2010, the last year as chairman.

Ernest has been active across Asia for more than two decades, including in China, India, Japan and Vietnam. His research has focused on innovation, and information and communication technologies in developing countries and emerging economies, especially in Asia and Africa. He has conducted research in both India and China. He is author of the book The Information Revolution and Developing Countries with MIT Press.

He has lectured on leadership, innovation and communications at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing University,Tsinghua University, and the State Council Office of Informatization, and he was a plenary speaker at the Boao Forum for Asia Annual Conference.

Ernest is a member of the International Advisory Board of the China International Cultural Exchange Center (CICEC), the Chinese E-Commerce Association, and the Center for Global Communication in Tokyo. He was a member of the senior trade mission to the PRC with the Secretary of Commerce in the Clinton administration, where he served as a senior official with the US Information Agency and the National Security Council at the White Hous, before becoming Deputy Director of the Global Information Infrastructure Commission. In 2007, he was asked by the U.S. State Department to help organize a day-long senior level briefing on China-Africa relations, and has testified before Congress on this topic. He was an advisor on Barack Obama’s campaign committee and served on the Presidential Transition Team in Washington, D.C. on international affairs and also on domestic innovation policies.

Ernest has a doctorate in political economy from Berkeley and a Bachelor’s Degree from Harvard College. His current work focuses on “sustainable innovation in the digital age.”

Gary Goldberger is Co-Founder and President of FableVision, where his role includes setting strategic goals and building cross-industry partnerships and alliances, with a special focus on digital gaming – including PBS/PBS Kids, MIT Education Arcade, Nickelodeon/Noggin, Scholastic/Weston Woods, and Jim Henson Productions.

One of the leaders of Games for Change-New England, Gary speaks nationally about positive uses of gaming in education and other pro-social applications. In Boston, he has worked closely with the Mayor’s Office and the Governor’s Office to identify resources and programs that will help establish Boston as the hub of digital gaming. His pioneering of paperless animation technology earned him a Silver BDA award in 1999.

In his role as Director of Production for nearly two decades, Gary manages complex, large-scale multimedia initiatives, including the recent multi-million dollar online game called Lure of the Labyrinth – a DOE-funded project created in partnership with MIT and Maryland Public TV, which teaches middle school math and literacy. He was also the lead in developing media for the Generation Cures transmedia project with Children’s Hospital Trust, which uses animation, online games, and graphic novels to encourage philanthropy in kids and families. Gary graduated from Clark University with a degree in Physics and Studio Art – proof positive that the right and left sides of the brain can work together with wonderful results!

Is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of Kansas.
She has experience working within a variety of media industries including magazine, TV, and documentary video production. Her research and writing focuses on the relationships between urban environments and networked technologies; uses of locative and mobile media; and the meaning of physical place within digital environments.

Germaine’s most recent work investigates how people use location-based social media in order to express, experience, and reorganize physical spaces and social relations. She is currently working on publishing her findings from “You’re the Manager, but I’m the Mayor: Understanding Foursquare Check-ins in Claimed Venues,” a project that was completed as part of the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England. The project examined relationships between vendors and customers over location-based services as well as other social media platforms. Germaine is also currently co-editing an anthology investigating experiences and industrial logics of globalization and localization within new media production and consumption.

She completed her MA and is finishing her PhD in the Media & Cultural Studies program at the University of Wisconsin –Madison.

Grant McCracken is a research affiliate with the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT who has consulted widely in the corporate world, including the Coca-Cola Company, IKEA, Ford, Kraft, Kodak, and Kimberly Clark. He is a Futures of Entertainment Fellow and a member of the IBM Social Networking Advisory Board.

He is author of the forthcoming book Culturematic from Harvard Business Review Press. Previously, he authored the 2009 book Chief Culture Officer: How to Create a Living, Breathing Corporation, the 2008 book Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture, the 2006 book Flock and Flow: Predicting and Managing Change in a Dynamic Marketplace, the 2005 book Culture and Consumption II: Markets, Meaning, and Brand Management, the 1997 book Plenitude: Culture by Commotion, the 1996 book Big Hair: A Journey into the Transformation of Self, the 1990 book Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities, and the 1988 book The Long Interview. For the Convergence Culture Consortium, he wrote “Assumption Hunters: A New Profession for the Corporation in the Throes of Structural Change”.

Grant has been the director of the Institute of Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum, a senior lecturer at the Harvard Business School, a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge, and an adjunct professor at McGill University. He holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Chicago. Grant writes regularly about popular culture at This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. He can be found on Twitter @grant27.

Helen Nissenbaum is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, and Computer Science at New York University, where she is also Senior Faculty Fellow of the Information Law Institute. Her areas of expertise span social, ethical, and political implications of information technology and digital media.

Helen’s research publications have appeared in journals of philosophy, politics, law, media studies, information studies, and computer science. She has written and edited four books, including Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life, which was published in 2010 by Stanford University Press. The National Science Foundation, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Ford Foundation, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of the National Coordinator have supported her work on privacy, trust online, and security, as well as several studies of values embodied in computer system design, including search engines, digital games, facial recognition technology, and health information systems.

Helen holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University and a B.A. (Hons) from the University of the Witwatersrand.

Before joining the faculty at NYU, she served as Associate Director of the Center for Human Values at Princeton University.

Henry Jenkins is Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. From 1993-2009, he was the MIT Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities and co-directed MIT’s Comparative Media Studies graduate degree program. As one of the first media scholars to chart the changing role of the audience in an environment of increasingly pervasive digital content, Henry is a widely recognized expert on the effects of participatory media on society, politics and culture; the role of journalism in the digital age; transmedia storytelling; and fan culture. He is also a Futures of Entertainment Fellow.

Henry is co-author of the book Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Society with SamFord and Joshua Green, forthcoming from New York University Press. The book is based on a white paper Henry co-wrote with Xiaochang Li and Ana Domb for the Convergence Culture Consortium, entitled “If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead: Creating Value in a Spreadable Marketplace”. He is also author of the 2006 book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.

At USC, Henry has formed the Participatory Culture and Learning Labs, which includes Project New Media Literacies, an initiative he began at MIT, as well as Media Activism and Participatory Politics, a research group seeking to better understand the blurring lines between participatory culture and civic engagement. He is also co-chair, with Denise Mann, of the Transmedia Hollywood conference. At MIT, Henry was principal investigator for a variety of research groups, including the Convergence Culture Consortium, The Education Arcade, the Knight Center for Future Civic Media, and the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab.

Additionally, Henry wrote the 2006 book Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture; the 2006 book The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture; the 1992 book Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture; and the 1992 book What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic. With John Tulloch, he co-wrote the 1995 book Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek. And, with Ravi Purushotma, Margaret Weigel, Katie Clinton, and Alice J. Robison, Henry is co-author of Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, released as a book in 2009.

As an editor, Henry put together the 1998 book The Children’s Culture Reader. He is also co-editor of the 2003 book Democracy and New Media with David Thorburn; the 2003 book Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition with David Thorburn; the 2003 book Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture with Tara McPherson and Jane Shattuc; and the 2000 book From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games with Justine Cassell; and the 1994 book Classical Hollywood Comedy with Christine Brunovska Karnick.

Henry has a Ph.D. in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and a Master’s degree in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa. He blogs regularly at Confessions of an Aca-Fan. Henry can be found on Twitter @henryjenkins.

Ilya Vedrashko is the head of the Research & Development Group at Hill Holliday, a Boston-based advertising agency. In his role, Ilya studies and experiments with emerging media behaviors. His work has appeared in Forbes, Wired, The New York Times, Communication Arts, Advertising Age, and other industry publications. He is also a Futures of Entertainment Fellow.

Prior to joining Hill Holliday, Ilya earned his Master’s degree from the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, where he was a media analyst and one of the founders of the Convergence Culture Consortium research project. His Master’s thesis is entitled “Advertising in Computer Games“.

For the Convergence Culture Consortium, Ilya authored “Vision Report 2010: In-Game Advertising”.

Since 2004, Ilya has edited the Advertising Lab blog, which tracks innovations in advertising technologies. He can be found on Twitter @vedrashko.

Jamin Warren is the founder and president of Kill Screen Media Group. Kill Screen is a videogame arts and culture company dedicated to bringing games to culture and culture to games. He has been cited as an expert on games, interactivity, and web culture in the New Yorker, New York Times, Fast Company, Paris Review, Technology Review, Maxim, and others.

Kill Screen publishes a quarterly magazine and website featuring writing from talent at GQ, Esquire, the New Yorker, and The Colbert Report.  In 2011, TIME named KillScreenDaily.com one of its top websites of the year, and Kill Screen launched a ground-breaking partnership with Pitchfork Media, the second largest music website in the world.  The editorial arm has been covered in Wired, Fast Company, the FADER, and Details The New Yorker called Kill Screen “the McSweeney’s of interactive media.”

Under Kill Screen’s production arm Kill Screen MFG, Jamin and his partner Tavit Geudelekian have produced games for clients like Sony Music and worked with or presented with agencies like Mother, Wieden + Kennedy, Radical Media, the Barbarian Group and others.

Prior to starting Kill Screen, Jamin was an arts and entertainment reporter for The Wall Street Journal. During his tenure, he covered everything from virtual charity walks, designer t-shirts, the secret influencers of the Internet, North Carolina jump-roping teams, and the identity of the owner of the meme factory 4chan. Before the Journal, Jamin was a music critic for Pitchfork Media, and his writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Paris Review, Details, and others.

He currently lives in Brooklyn.

João Brasil is a musician, DJ, performer, music producer and composer from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He graduated at Berklee College of Music , Boston, and he has an MA degree in Design for Interactive Media at Middlesex University, London.

His first album, 8 Hits, was released in a major record label in Brazil (Som Livre) and was composed, played, singed, recorded, mixed and mastered by him. “Baranga,” a song from 8 Hits, was a huge web success in Brazil, becoming MTV’s official song for a TV show called Mucho Macho, and João played and sang this song on many popular TV shows in Brazil, like Domingão do Faustão.

His second album “Big Forbidden Dance” is a Post Baile Funk /Mashups album where he mixes the “high” and “low” culture with traditional Brazilian baile funk beats. He has performed material from this album in almost all of Brazil’s major cities (Rio, São Paulo, Bahia, Minas Gerais, Porto Alegre, Pará, and Rio Grande do Sul), London, Germany, France, Portugal, Austria, Switzerland, and Holland. In May 2011, he released his first European EP, entitled L.O.V.E. Banana, with guest artist Lovefoxxx (from CSS) at Man Recordings. In 2010, he made his most ambitious project, the “365 mashups project”: one mashup per day.

In addition, as a DJ, João runs two of the most successful parties in Rio de Janeiro: Dancing Cheetah and Calzone. In London, he is a resident of Club Popozuda, Musicalia and Baby Bitch (Jungle Drums Magazine)  party, and he plays often at Secousse (Radioclit party) as well. He made official remixes for major artists like CSS, Bonde do Rolê, N.A.S.A., and received first prize in a remix competition for the German label Man Recordings. João was also commissioned to make the soundtrack for the fireworks and laser show for New Year’s Eve (2010 – 2011) at the Copacabana Beach Party. The 23-minute orchestral mashup piece reached more than 2 million people during the event.

DJ Fatboy Slim said João Brasil is his favorite Brazilian new artist. João plays his electronic music “live” using laptop and MIDI controllers. His main music interests/research are: Brazilian guetto-tech music styles (Baile Funk, Tecnobrega and Electronic Forró), pop music, mashup and remix culture, pop culture and alternative ways for electronic music performance.

John Bartlett is currently the VP of Partnerships and Licensing for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He has spent the past 20 years working for children’s educational publishers including Broderbund Software, The Learning Company, Knowledge Adventure, Riverdeep, History, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

John’s focus has been to identify opportunities for distributing children’s educational and eduatainment content across multiple channels and platforms.  This has included console, mobile and tablet apps, ebooks, online, film and TV, and virtual worlds.

His experience in working with a variety of business models including fremium, micro transactions, subscription, as well as traditional paid models and extensive licensing of brands and content.

His channels expertise includes both consumer (retail and direct) and school.  He also has experience in licensing for international markets.  His current focus is on creating a multi platform strategy for children’s properties and franchises.

Jonathan Taplin is a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California and the Director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab. The Lab, sponsored by IBM, Verizon, Mattel, Levi Strauss and others, is USC’s vehicle for an ongoing knowledge exchange with public institutions and private sector firms that are on the front lines of technological change in communications. His areas of specialization are in international communication management and the field of digital media entertainment. He was recently named one of the 75 “Edgerati” in the U.S. by the Deloitte Center for the Edge, a leading innovation think tank. He is also a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a Fellow at the Center for Public Diplomacy, a member of the International Advisory Board of the Singapore Media Authority, and a member of the Board of Directors of Public Knowledge.

Jonathan Zittrain is Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.

He performed the first large-scale tests of Internet filtering in China and Saudi Arabia, and now as part of the OpenNet Initiative he has co-edited a series of studies of Internet filtering by national governments, including ”Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering,” and “Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace.”

Jonathan is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society, the Board of Directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Board of Advisors for Scientific American.  His book The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It is available from Yale University Press and Penguin UK — and under a Creative Commons license.  Papers may be found here.

Joshua Green works at Undercurrent, a digital strategy firm in New York City, where he is a Research Specialist.

He is co-author (with Henry Jenkins and Sam Ford) of Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Society, forthcoming from New York University Press and (with Jean Burgess) of the 2009 book YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture, the first large-scale analysis of YouTube’s content, structure, and uses. Joshua is also a Futures of Entertainment Fellow.

Before joining Undercurrent, Joshua served as Project Manager of the Media Industries Project at the Carsey-Wolf Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Previous to that, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Program in Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, where he was also Research Manager of the Convergence Culture Consortium project. He has published work about television, new media, and participatory culture.

For the Convergence Culture Consortium, Joshua co-authored “YouTube: Online Video and Co-Created Value” with Jean Burgess.

Joshua holds a PhD in Media Studies from the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. He can be found on Twitter @joshgreen.

Laura Anne Edwards is founder of Alura Entertainment, LLC, a boutique brand and content consultancy specializing in answering the WHY of campaigns from inception through to execution. This rigorous approach consistently saves clients time and money, resulting in greater ROI. Edwards has over 25 years experience managing large creative teams working with television networks, motion picture studios, technology partners and Tier 1 mobile carriers. She is a frequent contributor, and panelist, engaging with the media and technology community on a global level through prestigious gatherings such as TED, BIF, and DLD.  Edwards is sought after for her de-facto role as an innovation scout – mined through her rich, interdisciplinary background.

A partial list of clients includes: FX Networks, AirBank, Universal Studios Home Entertainment, DirecTV, HandsOn Mobile, Kodak Motion Picture Division, Lifetime Television, North American HD-DVD Alliance, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Writers Guild Foundation, Independent Feature Project-West, 1-Zone Ltd., Ringtales, LLC, Aspen Medical Products and M-Factor. She lent her expertise to the M/E Insights Magazine article iPad Perspectives. Seeing a way to make a difference, Edwards recently founded DataOasis.org and AluraBrava.org, entities dedicated to liberating publicly funded data and promoting high concept“transmedia” projects which champion culture and accelerate connectedness.

Laurie Dean Baird  is a strategic advisor to the Georgia Tech Institute for People and Technology (IPaT), focusing on the entertainment sector by identifying emerging technology trends and research topics, and developing relationships with major media companies.

IPaT serves as a catalyst of research activities that pursue transformations in consumer media, and other complex human enterprises by integrating advances in human-centered computing, architectural and digital design, policy, and system science and engineering. She is also a Futures of Entertainment Fellow.

Laurie has more than 20 years of experience in corporate strategy, business development and R&D in the digital media market.   She was director of technology partnerships for Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. where she was responsible for global R&D partnerships in new media.  She also explored emerging creative, cultural, participatory and social practices.  She launched Turner’s university research program and managed relationships with start-ups, innovative industry insiders, analysts and the investment community, identifying strategic partners and funding trials, prototypes and research supporting Turner’s News, Entertainment, Kids and Sports brands and sales teams.  She led the monthly technology insights global webcast, the international new media business exchanges and the immersive new media leadership program that educated Time Warner global executives on the state-of-the-art and future vision of entertainment-related technologies and practices.

Laurie has advised several domestic and international research organizations, including the MIT Media Lab and Convergence Culture Consortium; Georgia Tech – GVU Center; University of Southern California – Stevens Institute for Innovation; Stanford University - Media X; University of Abertay Dundee – Dare to be Digital; and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University – Multimedia Innovation Centre. Laurie also serves on the Corporation Visiting Committee for the MIT School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. She is a patent holder and has twice been named as one of the “Most Powerful Women in Cable Technology” by Women in Cable Telecommunications (WICT) and CableFax Magazine.  She was also named a finalist for Women in Technology –Woman of the Year.She earned a bachelor’s of science degree in physics and bachelor’s of arts degree in sociology from St. Lawrence University.  She also earned a master’s of science degree in management (MBA) from the MITSloan School of Management. She can be found on Twitter @LawD

Lynn Liccardo is a longtime soap opera journalist and blogger. Her critical observations on soaps – their content, the industry that produces them, and the culture that both loves them and loves to ridicule them – connect soap opera’s past and present with its future and begin to form a larger framework within which to more fully examine the genre. She has also written extensively about soap opera creator, Irna Phillips, and is currently preparing proposals for both a biography and documentary film on her life.

Among her publications: a 1996 article for Soap Opera Weekly, “Who Really Watches the Daytime Soaps,” analyzing the demographics of soap opera audiences, cited in numerous scholarly articles.  Her essay, “The Ironic and Convoluted Relationship between Daytime and Primetime Soap Opera,” was published last year inThe Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era (co-edited by Futures of Entertainment Fellows Sam Ford, Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington).

Additionally, she’s advised a graduate thesis, spoken at popular culture events, and maintains a high profile in the on-line soap community.

She can be found at Red Room and Open Salon.

Matt Locke is the Founder and Director of Storythings, a company created to explore new ways of telling stories across different genres and platforms.

Before starting Storythings, Matt was Head of Multiplatform Commissioning at Channel 4. In this role, he was responsible for running the Multiplatform Commissioning team with a £7m budget for multi-platform projects around some of Channel 4′s biggest brands, including Million Pound Drop, Skins, Misfits, Embarassing Bodies and Big Brother, and developing a new commissioning strategy based on emerging audience behaviours. In addition to managing a restructure of the MPC team based on this strategy, Matt also recruited and managed the team responsible for building Channel 4’s online presence for the 2012 Paralympics.

Prior to this Matt was Commissioning Editor for Education at Channel 4, where he was responsible for a £5m annual budget, commissioning many cross platform and transmedia projects.  Matt was hired by Channel 4 to shift the Education department’s focus from linear TV to solely cross-platform commissioning – the only time a mainstream broadcaster has shifted an entire department’s budget from TV production to cross-platform production. During his time at Channel 4, Matt worked with his fellow commissioning editor Alice Taylor to deliver projects combining broadcast media, games and the web; including the double EMMY-winning www.battlefront.co.uk, the SXSW winning 1066 game www.channel4.com/1066, Broadcast Digital Award nominated Trafalgar Origins and the BAFTA winning Bow Street Runner game, as well as commissioning and scheduling a daily TV slot to accompany the online projects.

From 2001-2007, Matt was Head of Innovation for BBC New Media, where he ran a team responsible for developing internal and external innovation projects with the BBC’s content commissioning teams. He was one of the creators of the BBC’s Creative Archive project, and co-founded BBC Backstage and the BBC’s Innovation Labs.

Matt is a regular speaker at industry events, including Guardian Activate, the IPPR Media Convention, C21 Futuremedia conference, Thinking Digital, Sheffield DocFest, Intelligent Factual and MIPTV Cannes. In 2010 he was listed in both Broadcast Magazine’s ‘Hot 100′ and Wired Magazine’s ‘Wired 100′.

Matt is on the Advisory Boards of the National Media Museum, The Edinburgh TV Festival 2011, The Children’s Media Conference and The Brighton Photo Biennial. He also sits on the BAFTA Children’s Committee and the BAFTA Learning & Events Committee.

Maurício Mota is co-founder and Chief Storytelling Officer of The Alchemists Transmedia Storytelling Company, a global think/do tank that develops, produces, and manages stories across multiple media platforms for entertainment companies, corporate brands, and non-profit institutions. He has led The Alchemists’ work for clients from Coca-Cola and Petrobras to TV Globo and Elle. He is also a Futures of Entertainment Fellow.

Maurício was the first Latin American to speak at the Futures of Entertainment at MIT and has served on the jury at the Festival of Media in Valencia, Spain. He is also part of the world board of the Medici Institute, fostering innovative study of The Renaissance. He has focused efforts over the past few years of bringing the concepts of transmedia storytelling and leading innovators in that field to Brazil.

Prior to creating The Alchemists, Maurício worked with clients like Danone, Unilever, Nokia, Bradesco, Vivo, Banco Real, and Volkswagen. He began his career as an entrepreneur at 15, when he developed a story-creation platform with writer Sonia Rodrigues. Used in more than 4,000 schools, it was licensed eight times and used as a tool to facilitate innovation and creativity for companies/institutions such as the United Nations, Petrobas, and iG Brazil.

Maurício writes at The Alchemists Blog. He can be found on Twitter @maumota.

Melissa Anelli is the New York Times bestselling author of Harry, A History: The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon, as well as Senior Creative Consultant on Pottermore, the new interactive online experience from J.K. Rowling.

She also runs The Leaky Cauldron, the number one Harry Potter community online. Through Leaky, she and her team at the newly founded Mischief Management have run two successful LeakyCon conferences, the last of which served 3400 people in Orlando, FL.

Melissa is a graduate of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., lives in New York, and currently spends most of her time in London.

Mike King is a course author, instructor, and the Director of Marketing at Berkleemusic, the online extension school of Berklee College of Music.

Prior to working at Berklee, he was the Marketing/Product Manager at Rykodisc, where he oversaw marketing efforts for label artists including Mickey Hart, Jeb Loy Nichols, Morphine, Jess Klein, Voices On The Verge, Bill Hicks, The Slip, Pork Tornado (Phish), Kelly Joe Phelps, and Frank Zappa’s estate. Mike was the Director of Marketing and Managing Editor of Herb Alpert’s online musician’s resource for three years. His book, Music Marketing: Press, Promotion, Distribution, and Retail was published by Berklee Press in 2009.

Mike has written three courses for Berkleemusic: Online Music Marketing with Topspin; Music Marketing 201; and Online Music Marketing: Campaign Strategies, Social Media, and Digital Distribution. He also teaches The Future of Music and the Music Business and Music Marketing 101for Berkleemusic. In addition Mike was recognized as the Best Music Business Teacher by the National Association of Record Industry Professionals (NARIP) in 2011.

He has written for Making Music magazine, International Musician, Hypebot, and American Songwriter, and has been quoted in The Huffington Post, The Boston Globe, Wired, CNN, The Boston Phoenix, The Chicago Tribune, Music Connection, and Muso. He’s also keynoted and presented at MIDEM, NAMM, NARM and Music 2.0.Mike plays bass and guitar. More on his work and book is available here, and he blogs here. Mike can be found on Twitter @atomzooey.

Mirko Tobias Schäfer is Assistant Professor for New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Utrecht at the Department for Media and Culture Studies.

He studied theater, film and media studies and communication studies at Vienna University in Austria and digital culture at Utrecht University in The Netherlands. He obtained a magister in theater, film and media studies from the University of Vienna in 2002, and a PhD from Utrecht University in 2008.

From 2000 to 2002, Mirko was organizer and co-curator of [d]vision - Vienna Festival for Digital Culture. After his graduation from Vienna University, he went to Utrecht University as a junior teacher/researcher, and wrote his dissertation on participatory culture.

Mirko is co-editor of the recently published volume Digital Material: Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology. He publishes on modified electronic consumer goods, software development and the socio-political debates on information and communication technology. Recently, his book Bastard Culture! How User Participation Transforms Cultural Production has been released by Amsterdam University Press.

Mirko can be found on Twitter @mirkoschaefer.

Molly Bingham is the founder of a new global journalism organization with the working title ORB.

This data-inspired, investigative journalism model will deliver stories in multimedia format to a global audience focusing on eight core topics that touch every person daily and challenge humanity collectively: Food, water, energy, health, education, environment, trade and governance.  ORB is novel in that it elevates no national, ideological, cultural or religious perspective above another in its content or audience – taking the perspective of humanity as a single interdependent community while acting as a fourth estate for the global public.

Based in Washington, DC, Molly has spent most of her career as a photojournalist covering conflict in Central Africa and the Middle East.  She worked as Official White House Photographer to the Vice-President from 1998-2001.  After 9/11, Molly began writing and has co-directed an award winning documentary film, Meeting Resistance about the Iraqi resistance to occupation.

In March 2003, Molly was arrested by Saddam Hussein’s security services with four other westerners during the invasion of Iraq, held for eight days in solitary confinement and interrogated at Abu Ghraib Prison. Molly has worked for a wide range of American and European news and magazine outlets, including The Guardian, The New York Times, and New York Times Sunday Magazine.  Her writing has been published by Vanity Fair, among others. She is on the board of the Center for Public Integrity and the Committee to Protect Journalists’ Leadership Council.  She was a 2005 Nieman Fellow and is a 2011 Sulzberger Leadership Fellow at Columbia University.

Molly has chapters in two forthcoming books, “Home from Iraq” in The Ethics and Efficacy of the War on Terror both due late fall 2011 and the other co-authored with partner Steve Connors, “Reporting the Story: Thoughts on Reporting on Violent Groups in a Turbulent Environment” appearing in A View from Below: Research Methods in Conflict Zones from Cambridge University Press.

Nancy Baym is Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas. She teaches about communication technology, interpersonal communication and qualitative research methods. She is also a Futures of Entertainment Fellow.

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 synthesizes that work.

Nancy is author of the 2010 book Personal Connections in the Digital Age, which focuses on digitally mediated community, relationships and social networks. She is also co-editor of the 2008 book Internet Inquiry: Conversation about Method with Annette Markham. Their book focuses on examining how exemplary qualitative researchers manage the challenges raised when studying the internet. She has published “The New Shape of Online Community: The Case of Swedish Independent Music Fandom” in First Monday, as well as articles in New Media & Society, The Handbook of New Media, and The Information Society. In addition, she authored “Embracing the Flow” for the Convergence Culture Consortium.

Nancy  was a co-founder of the Association of Internet Researchers and served as its President. She was one of several editors of The Internet Research Annual, Vol. 1, a 2004 collection of papers from AoIR conferences.  She blogs at OnlineFandom and Beautiful and Strange. She can be found on Twitter @nancybaym.

Parmesh Shahani works on innovation and culture at Godrej Industries and also serves as the Editor at Large for Verve, India’s leading fashion and luxury magazine.

He is also a Futures of Entertainment Fellow. Formerly, Parmesh served as research manager for the Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT.

He is author of the 2008 book Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love and (Be)longing in Contemporary India, a book based on his thesis work at MIT, where he earned a Master’s thesis from the Program in Comparative Media Studies. Prior to joining MIT, Parmesh founded Freshlimesoda.com, India’s first online youth expression community, and he has worked across the Indian media and corporate landscapes at organizations like Elle, the Times of India Group, Sony Entertainment Television, and Mahindra.

Parmesh is a TED Fellow, participating in the TED India conference in Mysore in 2009 and co-organizing TEDxMumbai and TEDx Delhi in 2010. He often presents on different aspects of creative and corporate India at forums such as Next Media (Canada), XMedia Lab (Australia, New Zealand) and at institutions like New York University and the Berghs School of Communication (Sweden). He can be found on Twitter @parmeshs.

Patricia R. Zimmermann is professor in the Department of Cinema, Photography and Media Arts at Ithaca College. She is also codirector (with Tom Shevory) of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, a major international multimedia festival housed at Ithaca College. She has also held endowed chair appointments as the Shaw Foundation Professor of New Media in the School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the Ida Beam Professor of Cinema and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa.

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). She was coeditor with Erik Barnouw of The Flaherty: Four Decades in the Cause of Independent Cinema (Wide Angle, 1996). Her current book project on digital arts, Public Domain: Cinemas, Histories, Visualities, analyzes the relationship between historiography, political engagements, and digital art practices.

Patricia 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 in a wide swathe of international journals ranging from Screen, Genders, Journal of Film and Video, Afterimage, Framework, Asian Communications Quarterly, Cinema Journal, Wide Angle, Cultural Studies, DOX, Film History, Socialist Review, Journal of Communications Inquiry, and The Moving Image. Her blog, Open Spaces, explores openings, closings and thresholds in international public media, especially documentary. She has also spoken around the globe.

As a journalist, Patricia’s writing on media arts and media public policy has been published in The Independent, Gannett Newspapers, Lola, Afterimage, Main, Lingua Franca, Search for a Common Ground, GFEM.org, CommonDreams.org, NAMAC.org, and Filmmaker.com. Her blog, Open Spaces, probes the openings, closings and thresholds of international public media, especially documentary, experimental and archival forms. She has also worked extensively as a curator and programmer.

He is co-author of the forthcoming Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Society with Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green with New York University Press. He is also co-editor of the 2011 book The Survival of Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era with Abigail De Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington.

Sam has written for BusinessWeek, The Huffington Post, Portfolio, Chief Marketer, The Public Relations Strategist, PR News, Bulldog Reporter, The Christian Science Monitor, and a range of other publications and blogs. His has also been quoted or had his work featured in Investor’s Business Daily, New York TImes Magazine, The Financial Times, CNN, NPR, BBC Worldwide, The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Télérama,The Boston Globe, Boing Boing, Slashdot, Mashable, ESPN: The Magazine, Reader’s Digest, Soap Opera Weekly, PRWeek, The Firm Voice, and other publications. He has spoken at South by Southwest Interactive, The Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s School of WOM, the Futures of Entertainment conference and the annual conferences of The Society of Cinema and Media Studies and the Popular Culture Association, among others. He is also on the editorial board of Transformative Works and Cultures.

For the Convergence Culture Consortium, Sam authored “Fandemonium: A Tag Team Approach to Enabling and Mobilizing Fans“, “No Room for Pack Rats: Media Consumption and the College Dorm“, and “Fanning the Audience’s Flames: Ten Ways to Embrace and Cultivate Fan Communities“.

Sam holds a Master’s degree from the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT and a Bachelor’s degree from Western Kentucky University, where he majored in news/editorial journalism, mass communication, communication studies, and English. He is a Kentucky Press Association award-winning journalist and has performed in a variety of local professional wrestling events. He lives in Bowling Green, Kentucky, with wife Amanda and daughter Emma. He writes regularly for FastCompany. Sam can be found on Twitter @Sam_Ford.

Sarah Banet-Weiser is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism and the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

She is a Futures of Entertainment Fellow. Her teaching and research interests include feminist theory, race and the media, youth culture, popular and consumer culture, and citizenship and national identity. She teaches courses in culture and communication, gender and media, youth culture, feminist theory and cultural studies.

Sarah’s co-edited collection, Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times, co-edited with Roopali Muhkerjee, is coming out in 2012 from New York University Press. Her current book project with NYU Press, Authentic TM: Political Possibility in a Brand Culture, examines brand culture, youth, and political possibility through an investigation of self-branding, creativity, politics, and religion.

Her 1999 book, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity,  explores a popular cultural ritual, the beauty pageant, as a space in which national identities, desires, and anxieties about race and gender are played out.  She also authored a 2007 book on consumer citizenship and the children’s cable network: Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship and co-edited the 2007 book Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting with Cynthia Chris and Anthony Freitas.

She has published articles in the academic journals Critical Studies and Media Communication, Feminist Theory, the International Journal of Communication, and Television and New Media, among others. Sarah co-edits, with Kent Ono, a book series with New York University Press, entitled “Critical Cultural Communication,” and is the editor of American Quarterly.

Seung Bak is a co-founder/co-CEO of DramaFever, a rapidly growing online video service specializing in global distribution of East Asian, South Asian, and Latin American TV and movies.
Prior to founding DramaFever, Seung was Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for Capital IQ, a leading provider of information services to the global financial community. Seung served a variety of marketing, sales, strategy, finance, and operational roles in helping Capital IQ grow from a seed stage startup to a $350+ million revenue business.

Previously, he was an investment banker at CapitalKey Advisors, the precursor to Capital IQ, where he advised venture-stage and middle-market companies.

Seung earned a BA in Economics from the University of Rochester.

Sheila Murphy Seles is Director of Digital and Social Media with the Advertising Research Foundation.

Previously, she was a researcher with the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium. She is also a Futures of Entertainment Fellow.

Sheila earned her Master’s degree from the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Her graduate work culminated in a Master’s thesis entitled “Audience Research for Fun and Profit: Rediscovering the Value of Television Audiences” that explains how the television research industry can take advantage digital logic.  While at MIT, she was honored as a 2010 Graduate Woman of Excellence.

For the Convergence Culture Consortium, Sheila authored “It’s (Not) the End of TV as We Know It: Understanding Online Television and Its Audience” and “Tune On, Tune In, Cash Out: Maximizing the Value of Television Audiences”.

Sheila is currently based in New York City where she can be found playing obscure board games, catching up with her DVR, and wandering around the city. She can be found on Twitter @shelila

Timo Vuorensola is a film director from Finland.

His first feature, the sci-fi comedy Star Wreck: In The Pirkinning, was seven years in the making. It has since achieved cult success, and has been downloaded over 8 million times through official torrents.  Timo’s second feature,  the sci-fi comedy, Iron Sky, which tells the story of Nazis who come from the Far Side of the Moon, is due to be released in 2012.Timo also directs short films, music videos and ads. He is always interested in finding new ways of working within the film industry and believes that the Internet can provide various and interesting possibilities to replace traditional production models.

William Uricchio  is Professor and Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and Professor of Comparative Media History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He is also a Futures of Entertainment Fellow.

He has held visiting professorships at China University of Science and Technology, Stockholm University, the Freie Universität Berlin, and Philips Universität Marburg.

His work focuses on comparative national constructions of media, trans-national content flows, and the ways that media are drawn upon for identity purposes in European and U.S. cultural settings. His broader research, supported by Guggenheim, Fulbright and Humboldt research awards, considers the interactions of media technologies and cultural practices, and their role in (re-) constructing representation, knowledge and publics. His current work takes up these issues by considering the role of algorithms in cultural production, processes of collaboration and the formation of collective identity.

Xiaochang Li is a doctoral student in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communications at New York University, where her present interests broadly sit at the confluence of location-based and context-aware technologies, data and metadata, and globalization and cultural geography.

On the academic side, prior to joining NYU, she received her Master’s degree from the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, where her research focused on the transnational circulation of East Asian television drama online and its impact on existing models of diaporic audienceship, publics, and cultural negotiation in an increasing global media landscape. She was also part of the core research team of the Convergence Culture Consortium research project. With Henry Jenkins and Ana Domb, she is co-author of “If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead: Creating Value in a Spreadable Marketplace ,” the  white paper which inspired the forthcoming NYU Press book Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Society by Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. She also wrote the white paper “More than Money Can Buy: Locating Value in Spreadable Media” for the Consortium.

On the industry side, Xiaochang was a Digital Brand Strategist at Weber Shandwick, one of the world’s leading PR and communications agencies, where she worked on digital and global communications strategy with clients such as PepsiCo and Samsung. Xiaochang blogs about the intersections of digital media, globalization, and consumer culture at Canary Trap.  She can be found on Twitter @xiaochang