FOE6 - Futures of Entreteniment

Abe Stein is a research associate at the MIT Game Lab and a graduate student in the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. His work focuses on sports fandom and sports media. He is co-editor of the forthcoming book Sports Videogames (Routledge), and his articles and chapters have appeared in Eludamos, Well Played, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, Loading… and James Bond in World and Popular Culture. His current research looks at many aspects of sports videogame culture, ranging from competitive e-sports, to the televisual aesthetics of mainstream sports simulations and independent sports games.
He writes a monthly column for Kill Screen magazine called Boomshakalaka!, exploring topics such as the divide between so-called “geek” and “jock” culture, the surreal aesthetics of classic basketball games, independent sports games, and the problems with mimetic interfaces.
Abe has also worked as a sound designer for television, film and games, and served as audio director for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. He continues to do freelance sound design and composition, and his work can be heard in Slam Bolt Scrappers, Quandary, A Slower Speed of Light, Assy McGee, This is Nollywood, and World of Zoo.

Alec Austin is a game designer and fiction writer based out of the San Francisco Bay Area. He holds a Master’s degree from the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, where he was a researcher with the Convergence Culture Consortium and authored the white papers “Selling Creatively”, “How to Turn Pirates into Loyalists”, and “Playing in Other Worlds”. He is a Futures of Entertainment Fellow.

Alec’s game credits include Command & Conquer 4, the Pokemon TCG Online, the Kaijudo Battle Game, and Kaijudo Online, and he’s worked on a wide range of free-to-play projects throughout his career. His work on the implicit contract between media producers and audiences is referenced in Spreadable Media, his stories have appeared in a variety of online venues, and he handles programming for the Fourth Street Fantasy Convention in Minneapolis. He can be found on Twitter as @AlecChaneAustin.

Alex produces transmedia stories and projects, including the first online games for the NBC Olympics in Torino 2006.  A lifelong Red Sox fan and regular marathon runner, Chisholm is a college and professional sports junkie who thrives on the new ways franchises are creating for fans to engage with content across platforms.  Chisholm is also a Co-Founder and Executive Director of Learning Games Network, a non-profit organization bridging the gap between research and practice in game-based learning.  He has collaborated on product and program development with Microsoft, LeapFrog, NBC Universal, BrainPOP, Federal Reserve Bank-New York, and the Hewlett and Gates Foundations, among others.  He earned a B.S. from Cornell, but only after losing his voice during the Big Red’s win over Penn in November 1988.

Ana Domb Krauskopf is currently creating an Interaction Design School at Veritas University in Costa Rica. Until recently she was the Director of Brand Innovation at Almabrands in Chile. 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 reached at anadomb@gmail.com and found on Twitter @anadk.

Annika Nyberg Frankenhaeuser is the European Broadcasting Union´s first Media Director. After qualifying as an art teacher at the University of Industrial Arts in Helsinki, she began an enduring relationship with the Swedish Language Services of YLE. Several years as a radio reporter were followed by a move into print, working as an editor for a cultural magazine. In 1986 Ms Nyberg Frankenhaeuser moved from radio at YLE to become a TV reporter for the Swedish Language Services, where she climbed through the television ranks to become Head of TV News & Current Affairs. She was appointed Director of Programmes for Radio in 1997, adding the TV and internet portfolios to her responsibilities in 2006. She  took up the position of EUROVISION Media Director in February 2012 and is responsible for EUROVISION content including, TV, radio, news, the Media Lab and the EUROVISION Academy.  Ms Nyberg Frankenhaeuser is bilingual in Swedish and Finnish, and fluent in English and German. She is competent in Danish and Norwegian and has a working knowledge of French and Italian. She has also been President of the World DAB Forum and a board member of Radiodays Europe.

Bas­sam Tariq is an inde­pen­dent producer and filmmaker who has pro­duced fea­ture sto­ries for TIME mag­a­zine, Boing Boing, CBC and Huff­in­g­ton Post.   He is also the co-creator of the viral travel blog 30 Mosques in 30 Days in where him and a friend trav­eled across Amer­ica high­light­ing the lives of Amer­i­can Mus­lims. The project was high­lighted by NPR, BBC, NY Times, and named CNN’s Top News­mak­ers of 2010. In 2012, Bas­sam was selected as one of 25 New Faces of Inde­pen­dent Film by Film­maker Magazine. Bassam is currently finishing  his first feature film, These Birds Walk. A Sundance-funded documentary that follows the lyrical journey of a runaway boy searching for home in Karachi, Pakistan.  He lives in Jackson Heights, New York with his wife and bike.

Ben is the Managing Director of the Creative Lab at Google, a team of misfits (designers, writers, creative technologists, web developers, film editors, producers, creative directors) whose mission is to remind the world what it is they love about Google by making cool stuff that matters.

Prior to joining Google Ben was the Executive Director of Innovation at BBH in New York, responsible for introducing and driving innovation inside BBH in three main areas: new platforms, new partners and new processes. While at BBH, Ben also co-founded BBH Labs (http://bbh-labs.com) in 2008, a more outwardly-focused technology-driven innovation group focused on ensuring the agency was as smart as possible when it came to change.
Previously, back in the UK, Ben was Global Planning Director at BBH London, primarily on British Airways & Google, and prior to that Strategy Director on Volkswagen at BMP DDB.

He is a founder member of the Board of Directors at Boulder Digital Works, and a Fellow with Futures of Entertainment. He has a PhD in the social psychology of ecstasy. He tweets a lot at @malbonnington. He likes cats and polar exploration and lives in Brooklyn.

She believes that business can and will play a major role in creating a better world. She has worked with businesses for four decades who have successfully done so BY building great businesses, not working on social responsibility as a program. In great businesses, responsibility is in the DNA, with everyone owning it as part of his or her job. Current approaches of “doing less harm” and copying best practices gives way to a living systems view that makes all stakeholders more vital, viable and able to regenerate themselves, without tradeoffs.

To that end, Carol has been leading major consulting change efforts in both Fortune 500 and new-economy businesses for more than 30 years. Her client list includes long-term relationships with Colgate Europe and Africa and DuPont Canada, US, Asia and Europe. She also works with new-economy companies like Intel, Agilent and leaders of corporate responsibility such as Seventh Generation.

Her book, The Responsible Business: Reimagining Sustainability and Success is Winner of: International Titles Book Awards (General Business); Top 15 at CNBC Biz Books, and Top Five 800CEOREAD (Gen. Business). Plus Winner Cover Design for Non-Fiction by International Titles Book Awards. She was named to Top 100 Thought Leaders in Trustworthy Business Behavior – 2012.

Carol has published dozens of works in 10 languages, including a series of articles in Executive Excellence, Stephen Covey’s newsletter; is a guest blogger for Stanford Social Innovation Review, CNBC and many others; plus her own blog at www.carolsanford.com/blog

Christopher Weaver received his SM from MIT and was the initial Daltry Scholar at Wesleyan University, where he earned dual Masters Degrees in Japanese and Computer Science and a CAS Doctoral Degree in Japanese and Physics. The former Director of Technology Forecasting for ABC and Chief Engineer to the Subcommittee on Communications for the US Congress, he founded Bethesda Softworks, a leading software entertainment company that is credited with the development of physics-based, realtime sports sims and created the original  John Madden Football for Electronic Arts as well as the The Elder Scrolls role playing series. An adviser to both government and industry, he is a technology columnist for Edge Magazine and holds patents in interactive media and broadband communications dealing with seminal telecommunications engineering. He currently teaches in the CMS program and is the Industry Liaison for the MIT GameLab.

Colin Maclay is the Managing Director of the Berkman Center, where he is privileged to work in diverse capacities with its faculty, staff, fellows and extended community to realize its ambitious goals. His broad aim is to effectively and appropriately integrate information and communication technologies (ICTs) with social and economic development, focusing on the changes Internet technologies foster in society, policy and institutions. Both as Co-founder of the Information Technologies Group at Harvard’s Center for International Development and at Berkman, Maclay’s research has paired hands-on multi stakeholder collaborations with the generation of data that reveal trends, challenges and opportunities for the integration of ICTs in developing world communities.

Colin has worked extensively in India, Latin America and at the international level on ICT policy for the underserved, developing and implementing research projects on topics including rural ICT access, ICTs in education, entrepreneurship, telecommunications infrastructure and policy, electronic government, and IT Enabled Services. He has a particular interest in leveraging universities’ unique capacity to engage in varied ICT policy and impact research and dialogue, and conduct technology research and development. Outside Harvard, he is a fellow at the University of Washington’s Center for Internet Studies, Chairman of the Sports for Development Foundation, and Advisor to the World Computer Exchange. Colin’s studies have taken him to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and Northeastern University.

Currently the Director of the AT&T AdWorks Lab, David Polinchock has been exploring emerging technologies for 20 years, starting with virtual reality in 1990. He continues to explore emerging technologies that enable companies to create more compelling, authentic and relevant brand experiences.  His work has won major awards, including 2 Gold Pencils and his in-cinema work was called “one of the best ideas in the world” by Brandweek.  He is also a leading voice in the conversation on the socialization of place and the exploration of how digital technologies will impact the physical space.  David has been very fortunate to have the chance to travel with his daughter Sydney, who helps him remember that the most important experiences are the ones you share with people you love.

An experienced musician, broadcaster and digital media influencer, Derrick N. Ashong (DNA) has carved out a unique niche as an expert in bridging the gap between old and new media. He has been invited to speak & perform at prestigious institutions including Harvard Business School, Wharton, MIT & Stanford, and has hosted and moderated events for influencers and heads of state including Nobel Laureates Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as Gilberto Gil, Ted Turner, Tommy Hilfiger, Bob Geldof, Queen Rania of Jordan, and former President Bill Clinton at the Club de Madrid. His interviews have ranged from celebrities like John Legend, Jimmi Cliff and supermodel Alek Wek, to environmentalist Jane Goodall, senior advisor to President Obama David Axelrod, and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

Derrick’s career in media and entertainment has included appearances on networks like CNN, BET, MTV Africa, NPR and BBC Worldservice, as well as print media including the New York Times, Boston Globe and Fast Company. He made his Hollywood debut as a supporting actor in Steven Spielberg’s Amistad and has worked with multi-platinum record producers.

DNA was host of The Derrick Ashong Experience on SIRIUS XM’s Oprah Radio and helmed the inaugural year of Al Jazeera English’s cutting-edge, social media TV show The Stream, which was nominated for an Emmy. He is leader of the critically-acclaimed Afropolitan band Soulfège, which has charted on both sides of the Atlantic and won the 2008 Billboard Songwriting Contest for Best Hip Hop Song. He has lectured on five continents on the use of media and technology as tools for human development, including talks for the UN Foundation, London School of Economics, King’s College (Cambridge), the Reconciliation Forum in Washington, D.C., the UN Alliance of Civilizations and before UK Parliament on the subject of “The Obama Generation.” He has had fellowships with the Paul & Daisy Soros Foundation, TED and the Americas Business Council (*abc Foundation) and is a member of the African Leadership Network. Born in Accra, Ghana, the Harvard-educated talent was raised in Brooklyn, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and New Jersey.

Dorian Electra is a singer, songwriter, filmmaker, and visual artist, best known for her music videos about economics. Dorian has discovered that writing songs allows her to test her knowledge about the subjects she’s passionate about while communicating them to others in a fun and engaging way. She has written songs about math, quantum physics, and teeth-brushing — her most popular is a love song to dead, Austrian economist, Friedrich Hayek, which gained unexpected popularity on YouTube in 2010. Her rap music video ”WE GOT IT 4 CHEAP” is about supply and demand, and ”Roll With the Flow” explores the definition of “wealth,” and the problems of trying to centrally plan an economy.

Dorian is a recipient of the Moving Picture Institute’s (MPI) 2012 Fellowship Program, supporting her upcoming pop-music video, “FA$T CA$H,” about the dangers of central banks’ expansionary monetary policy.

Additionally, Dorian is the creator of PARTY MILK and her own clothing line, DOUCHE$WAG.
She is pursuing a Liberal Arts degree at Shimer College, a Great Books school in Chicago.
She can be reached at DorianElectra@gmail.com as well as her Facebook Page and Twitter @DORIANELECTRA

Ed Fries created his first video games for the Atari 800 in the early 1980s. He joined Microsoft in 1986, and spent the next ten years as one of the early developers of Excel and Word. He left the Office team to pursue his passion for interactive entertainment and created Microsoft Game Studios. Over the next eight years he grew the team from 50 people to over 1200, published more than 100 games including more than a dozen million+ sellers, co-founded the Xbox project, and made Microsoft one of the leaders in the video game business. In 2004, Ed retired from his Microsoft Vice President job to continue his work in the video game business as board member, advisor and consultant to a broad range of publishers, independent game developers, and media companies. In 2007 Ed launched his own startup, FigurePrints, an innovative company that uses 3D color printing technology to bring video game characters to life. In the summer of 2010 Ed released “Halo 2600”, a “demake” of the Halo video game series for the Atari 2600.

Eden Medina is Associate Professor of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research explores the social, political, and historical dimensions of information technology and she teaches courses on social informatics, information ethics, social studies of technology, and geography of technology.

Medina is the author of Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (MIT Press, 2011). Her book shows how political projects shape the design, function, and use of computer systems, how computers have been used historically to bring about structural changes in society, and how futuristic technological systems can be made from technologies that are far from cutting edge. She is now co-editing a book on the social study of science and technology in Latin America, which is under advance contract with MIT Press.

Medina has received grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, American Council for Learned Societies, and Mellon Foundation. She is the recipient of the Outstanding Junior Faculty Award from Indiana University, Bloomington and the IEEE Life Member’s Prize in Electrical History. She recently received a New Directions Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation to pursue her next research project on information technology and human rights law.

Medina received her Ph.D. from MIT in the History and Social Study of Science and Technology and holds a degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University. She can be found on Twitter @edenmedina.

I keep a personal website at www.edenmedina.com and a website for my book at www.cyberneticrevolutionaries.com

Emily is a journalist, author, and consultant. She is the author of Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us (Free Press 2009), a book about the state of the customer experience. Emily decided to write Your Call Is (Not That) Important to Us while waiting on hold one day in her freezing cold house, only to argue on the phone for hours with customer service at a home warranty company before convincing someone to come fix her broken furnace. She is also a consultant with Peppercomm, a strategic communications firm in New York, working to help companies better connect with and understand their audiences. Emily regularly speaks at conferences and in the news media about customer service, marketing, social media and journalism, and is on the advisory board for SocialMediaToday.com.

She is also author of Our Mothers’ War (Free Press 2004), and was a longtime contributor to The New York Times. Emily has written for Time, The Washington Post, The International Herald Tribune, Newsweek,Smithsonian Magazine, and other publications.

Born in White Plains, New York, Emily grew up in Memphis. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin – Madison with a degree in English literature, and received a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University. She has lived in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and London, but currently lives in Memphis.

Fadzi Makanda is a Business Development manager in the New York office for iROKO Partners, where she leads the development and execution of iROKO’s U.S. Ad Sales strategy. She graduated from Harvard Business School in June 2012, where she engaged in project work with e-commerce and digital media start-ups including a YouTube original programming channel and a fashion site, LookMazing. She also interned at Pure Growth Partners, a fund that incubates and launches innovative brands in consumer packaged goods, media, and luxury goods. Prior to Harvard, Fadzi worked in Institutional Sales at Credit Suisse, where she developed experience driving and managing relationships with strategic partners. She received her BA in English from Princeton in 2007. FInd more at www.irokopartners.com.

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.

Heather Hendershot is Professor of Film and Media Studies in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. She has held fellowships at Vassar College, New York University, and Princeton University; she has also received a Guggenheim fellowship.

Hendershot’s research centers on conservative media and political movements. She is particularly interested in the complicated relationship between “extremist” and “mainstream” conservatism and in how that relationship is negotiated by conservative media. Hendershot’s courses emphasize the interplay between industrial, economic, and regulatory concerns and how those concerns affect what we see on the screen (big or little). In the network era, for example, how did TV writer-producers negotiate creative efforts within an industry that often demanded repetition rather than innovation? What are the limits of innovation within our own post-network era?

Hendershot is the editor of Nickelodeon Nation: The History, Politics, and Economics of America’s Only TV Channel for Kids (2004) and the author of Saturday Morning Censors: Television Regulation before the V-Chip (1998), Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture (2004), and What’s Fair on the Air? Cold War Right-Wing Media and the Public Interest (2011). She is also the editor of Cinema Journal, the official publication of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Hendershot is currently researching a book on William F. Buckley Jr.’s Firing Line. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Rochester and her BA from Yale 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 Culture 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.

Jamie Scheu is the Associate Director of the Content Department at Hill Holliday, a Boston-based advertising agency. He provides account strategy across the agency’s content clients, including global brands such as Staples and PUMA. He previously led digital marketing for a global healthcare company, with responsibilities that included content, social, mobile, and direct marketing, and analytics. Prior to that, he was a founding partner of a marketing startup that built social applications for PUMA, Monster, and truTV.

Jason Falls is an author, speaker and CEO, the latter of Social Media Explorer, a digital marketing agency and information products company. From client strategies to industry research reports to SME’s signature Explore events, Falls spearheads efforts to bridge the gap between professional communicators and business owners and the strategic use of digital marketing and technology. An award-winning social media strategist and widely read industry pundit, Falls has been noted as a top influencer in the social technology and marketing space by Forbes, Entrepreneur, Advertising Age and others. He is the co-author of two books: No Bullshit Social Media: The All-Business, No-Hype Guide To Social Media Marketing (Que 2011); and The Rebel’s Guide To Email Marketing (Que 2012).

Jena oversees the enterprise and investigations unit at ESPN.com, where she plans, assigns, edits and produces online stories and long-form cross-platform features in collaboration with “Outside the Lines,” “E:60” and ESPN The Magazine. She has won two Sports Emmys and been nominated for four additional Sports Emmys for her work as coordinating producer of online content for ESPN.com.

Jena started her journalism career in 1988 as a summer intern at The Omaha World-Herald. Since then, she’s spent more than 22 years in newspaper and online journalism. Before joining ESPN in 2006, she was an assistant sports editor at The Charlotte Observer, where she coordinated the NFL, NBA and enterprise coverage and oversaw the night sports desk operation. She also spent a year as the Charlotte 49ers men’s and women’s basketball beat writer. Prior to Charlotte, she held several reporting and editing positions in news and sports at The Omaha World-Herald. She also spent a year and a half as a reporter at The Anniston Star.

Jena is a member of the ESPN Editorial Board; the Association for Women in Sports Media; Investigative Reporters and Editors; and the Online News Association. She’s a past president of the Omaha Press Club, where she was chairwoman of publications, education and finance committees, a writer and cast member for the Press Club Show and member of the Omaha Press Club Journalism Education Inc. board of directors. She was a 1992 Fellow at the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism, University of Maryland College of Journalism, studying race, class and ethnicity.

Jena holds a master of science degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a bachelor of arts degree in political science from the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where she was a captain and starter for the women’s basketball team. She lives in West Hartford, Conn., with her dog, Maddie.

Jessica Clark is the media strategist at the Association of Independents in Radio (AIR), focusing on Localore—a CPB-funded production supporting multiplatform innovation teams at 10 public stations around the country, designed to extend public media from the air to the screen to the street. Follow her coverage of the project on Twitter at @airmedia.

An internationally recognized expert on the transformation of journalism and storytelling, Jessica directed the Future of Public Media initiative at American University’s Center for Social Media from 2007-2011. For that project, she wrote regularly about emerging trends for PBS MediaShift, and co-organized the Beyond Broadcast and Public Media Camp conferences—national events aimed at opening up public media to makers, developers and citizens. She also served as a Knight Media Policy fellow at the New America Foundation from 2010-2011.

Jessica has co-authored several influential publications, including Spreading the Zing, Public Media 2.0, Social Justice Documentary: Designing for Impact, Mapping Digital Media: United States, and Beyond the Echo Chamber (New Press, 2010). She regularly serves as a media source—for outlets including ABC, NBC, PBS, Newsweek, Voice of America, SXSW and local NPR stations—on issues related to high-impact media, telecom policy and the future of news. She holds an MA in Social Science from the University of Chicago.

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.

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 Culture, 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.

Juan Devis is a Public Media artist and producer, whose work crosses across platforms – video, film, interactive media and gaming. His work, regardless of the medium is often produced collaboratively allowing for a greater exchange of ideas in the production of media and art.

Devis is currently in director of program development and production for the largest independent television station in the United States, KCET. In this capacity, Devis has had to develop strategic partnerships with funders, organizations and independent production houses to ensure a new slate of content, securing funds and maintaining an editorial vision and cohesiveness for the station’s new mission. Devis has also charted the stations’ new Arts and Culture initiative, ARTBOUND, consisting of a television series, an online networked cultural hub and the creation programmatic partnerships with cultural institutions in Los Angeles. In addition, Devis has spear headed a new slate of series that are either in production or development, some of the include DEPARTURES, the EMMY nominated LIVE @ THE FORD among others.

For over a decade, Devis has worked with a number of non-profit organizations and media arts institutions in Los Angeles serving as producer, director, educator and board member. Some of these include:

The City Project (Board of Directors 2010/present)
Outpost for Contemporary Art (Board of Directors 2009/present)
PBS World (Advisory Board 2009)
LA Freewaves (Board President 2002-08)
OnRamp Arts (Board of Directors 2000-2003)
Center for Innovative Education (Advisory Board 2003-08)
Latinart (Advisory Board 2004/Present)
KAOS Network
Plaza de la Raza
Community Arts Partnership

Devis’ film, Television, and interactive work has been screened and exhibited across the world. In the press, Juan Devis was presented as a major “influencer” in Los Angeles by the LA Weekly news publication, and his transmedia series Departures was celebrated by the New York Times as a new twist on public media; has won the Japan Prize, the National Arts Journalism award and many others. Devis has received numerous grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Macarthur Foundation, Boeing, DCA, County Arts Commission, Adobe, the Ford Foundation, NHK, the United Nations, among others and was the recipient of the Arnon Milchan Award for his film The Petty Curse of Having this Body.

Lara Lee, Chief Innovation and Operating Officer, Continuum, Named a “Master of Innovation” by BusinessWeek in 2006, Lara is an accomplished Fortune 500 executive, corporate intrapraneur and seasoned consultant to senior leaders from startups to the C-suite. For over 20 years she’s combined techniques from cultural studies, design, and business strategy to take brands into new markets, capitalize on untapped opportunities and create experiences worth sharing – always beginning with a focus on deeply understanding people and their unmet needs. Lara has worked hands-on with clients from GE and FedEx to the San Diego Zoo to identify growth opportunities and build new business. Previously, as VP and division head at Harley-Davidson, she built an $80 million operation that monetized brand-building experiences, incubated new businesses and delivered 20% operating margin while attracting new female, minority and under-35 customers. Over 15 years at Harley, she created a rider training business to fill the customer pipeline, built a museum to serve as a self-funding marketing machine, pioneered online community engagement and direct-to-consumer retailing, turned cost centers into money-makers and set the foundation to double international sales at the $6 billion company.

In her hybrid role at Continuum – as Chief Innovation and Operating Officer – Lara navigates on a daily basis the essential challenges faced by all our clients. How do you decide between investing in new capabilities to drive future growth versus maximizing the productivity of the existing business model? How do you develop new offerings without cannibalizing your core? When is it time to prune a legacy product and redirect resources toward new market opportunities? And how do you get people on board with necessary change when reputations, relationships and emotional investments are on the line? Today, Lara applies her extensive corporate and consulting experience to counsel teams helping clients such as American Express, BBVA, Holiday Inn and Procter & Gamble make innovation real. She is a frequent speaker on topics including business model innovation, corporate intrapraneurship, growth strategy and branded communities, and her perspectives have been featured in The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and Business Insider.

Lauren Bird is the Creative Media Coordinator for the Harry Potter Alliance (HPA), a 501c3 that uses parallels from the Harry Potter books to educate and mobilize youth toward civic engagement. She works closely with much of the organization to create visual media that communicates the HPA’s mission and campaigns to the public. Over her more than two years at the organization, she has increasingly assisted with the strategic planning behind campaigns, particularly those focused on themes of equality. In addition to her overarching responsibilities, Lauren also films weekly video blogs on the HPA’s YouTube channel, discussing topics across the fandom spectrum, from voting rights to fanfiction.

Lauren is an Assistant Editor for the upcoming documentary, Documented, which investigates how social media is transforming the experience of coming out as an undocumented American. In addition, she produces a transmedia webseries called @College, contributes to the blog ThisPopCulture, and creates independent videos on YouTube.

She received her Bachelor’s degree in Comparative Literature from the College of Arts and Science at New York University, where she focused on Documentary Filmmaking and Cinema Studies. She also briefly studied at Southwestern University and Universiteit van Amsterdam.

Lauren currently lives in New York City and can be found on Twitter @laurenthebird.

Laurie Dean Baird is an innovative thought leader in the media and entertainment industry focusing on emerging technology, social practices and business models in the changing media landscape. She has over 20 years of experience in corporate strategy, business development and R&D in digital media and frequently speaks on the changing industry. She has provided technology insights to ESPN, Public Media International and the Time Warner family, including Turner Broadcasting, HBO, Warner Brothers, Time Inc, AOL and Time Warner Cable. She is a research fellow at the Futures of Entertainment and a strategic consultant at the Georgia Tech – Institute for People and Technology. Areas of interest include: media synergies, audience engagement, digital media, social media, transmedia, two screen and companion applications, interactive viewing, personalization, data analytics, cloud services and future of storytelling. Baird advises several domestic and international organizations. She is a board member of the MIT College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences and the Georgia Tech GVU Center. She was named one of the Most Powerful Women in Cable Technology by WICT and CableFax Magazine and named a finalist for Women in Technology – Woman of the Year. Baird earned a BS in physics and BA is sociology from St. Lawrence University, and a SM (MBA) from the MIT Sloan School of Management. She can be followed on Twitter @LawD.

Louisa Stein is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Culture at Middlebury College. Before coming to Middlebury, she headed the Critical Studies Area of the Television, Film, and New Media department at San Diego State University.

Louisa is co-editor of the 2008 collection Teen Television: Essays on Programming and Fandom with Sharon Marie Ross. The collection that explores the multifaceted terrain of teen television programming. Her currently in-progress book project, Millennial Media, explores the construct of the millennial generation in contemporary transmedia culture.

Her work explores audience engagement in transmedia culture, with emphasis on questions of gender and generation. Louisa’s 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 Flow TV anthology. She focuses on both official and unofficial transmedia storytelling, ranging from the fan-authored Mad Men Twitter network to the CW Network’s deployment of Second Life as a transmedia extension of the TV program Gossip Girl.

Louisa received her Ph.D. from NYU’s Department of Cinema Studies in 2006. She writes at transmedia. She can be reached atlouisas@middlebury.edu and found on Twitter @l_e_s.

Mansi is co-founder and managing editor at Brown Paper Bag. During her four years in India, she has collaborated and consulted on several lifestyle initiatives including restaurants, stores and start-ups, and has written for numerous publications including The Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, CNNGo, Elle and Vogue. She is the author of a book about Mumbai, to be published in December 2012.
Brown Paper Bag (www.bpbweekend.com) is a pan-India lifestyle website and cultural influencer. Every city has its secrets – from how to run the smartest scams to where to get the best street food, hidden gems that are closely guarded and rarely shared. Brown Paper Bag exposes and tests these, uncovering food, shopping, events and under-the-radar services in Mumbai and Delhi. With an ever-expanding loyal readership of the coveted 18 – 40 year old urbanite, bpb has been featured in numerous press outlets, including CNBC, Vogue, ELLE, CNNGo.com and more.

Before starting Brown Paper Bag, Mansi held several PR and media-related positions, and was Director of Public Affairs at LEAP, an education-based NGO in New York. She holds a Masters degree from New York University.

Maria Popova (@brainpicker) is the founder and editor of Brain Pickings, an inventory of cross-disciplinary knowledge. She has written for Wired UK, The Atlantic, Nieman Journalism Lab, and Design Observer, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow.

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.

Mike Monello is partner and executive creative director at Campfire, a New York-based marketing agency that product launches and perception changes throughs storytelling. He helps drive creative development for all of Campfire’s project and has won top honors at the One Show, Clio, Mixx, ad:Tech, and Addy awards. Mike has led panels at South by Southwest Interactive and spoken at the Futures of Entertainment conference. He is considered a leading voice on transmedia storytelling.

At Campfire, Mike’s work has included a wide range of companies, including Verizon, HBO, Audi, HP, Pontiac, the USA Network, Warner Brothers, Discovery Channel, and Sega.

Prior to co-founding Campfire, Mike was co-creator of The Blair Witch Project, the 1999 film which changed the way marketers approached the Internet as a promotional vehicle. He also worked for the Florida Film Festival for five years, doing everything from selling tickets to acting as program director.

Mike holds a Bachelor’s degree in Motion Picture Technology from the University of Central Florida. He posts at The Electric Eden on Posterous. Mike can be reached at mmonello@campfirenyc.comand found on Twitter @mikemonello.

Nolan Bowie is a Senior Fellow and Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, where he is affiliated with The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, the Belfer Center for Science and Technology, and is a Fellow Emeritus with the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School. He hasalso worked with the Harvard Information Infrastructure Policy Project (HIIP). Prior to joining Harvard in 1998, Nolan was an Associate Professor of Communications in the Department of Broadcasting, Mass Media and Telecommunications (BTMM), School of Communications and Theater (SCAT) at Temple University, from 1986-1998.

Professor Bowie is a former Executive Director of Citizens Communications Center, a public interest law firm and education institution, 1974-81. He has served both as an Assistant Special Prosecutor with the Watergate Special Prosecution Force and Assistant Attorney General, Civil Rights Bureau, New York State Department of Law. He has been active on a number of advisory panels and boards for a variety of organizations. These include the U. S. Congress’ Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), The National Academies (regarding digital divide and digital democracy issues), the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), National Telecommunication and Information Administration (NTIA), and the Aspen institute, among others.

Nolan is currently a Board member of the National Center on Adult Literacy (NCAL/ILI), The Center for International Media Action (CIMA), Mirror on Race, and a Board member and Treasurer of BirdsFly Social Enterprise, Inc., as well as an Advisor to the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, Center for Media Democracy, and The Media Channel, and a member of the Steering Committee of The Boston Foundation’s Initiative on the New Economy and How Technology Can Empower Individuals and Communities. He was Chairman of the Organizing Committee of the 7th Telecommunications Policy Research Conference (TPRC) and a member of the U.S. Delegation to the World Administrative Radio Conference (WARC-79). He has been on the Board of Directors of Independent Television Service (ITVS), Deep Dish Television Network, Inc., Cultural Environment Movement, Inc. (CEM), and Strategies for Media Literacy, Inc. and other nonprofit organizations.

He writes, lectures and teaches about new information and media policies, regulations and issues of public policy concerning the emerging Information Society. He is an advocate for social, political and economic equity, equality, fairness and justice, particularly as these issues relate to communication and information public policy. Professor Bowie currently teaches courses titled: New Media & Democracy and 2020 Vision & Information Policy: Considering the Public Interest.

In his capacity as Senior Director of Interactive Media for the Boston Celtics, Peter Stringer is responsible for crafting the team’s interactive and social media strategy. He joined the team as Internet Operations Manager in November 2005.

Stringer overhauled Celtics.com in the summer of 2010, integrating video and social media content for a more interactive and engaging fan experience.  Celtics.com was recognized as a top team website at the NBA’s annual marketing meetings in 2007, and over the past four seasons, Celtics.com has consistently ranked among the top three trafficked team websites in the NBA.

Stringer launched and cultivated the Celtics’ social media channels over the past two seasons, building an audience of over 6.7 million ”Likes” on Facebook (currently the third-largest audience among North American professional sports teams) and over 680,000 followers on Twitter.  The team also delivers behind-the-scenes footage and exclusive video content to both Celtics.com and YouTube. The team’s “Pin It to Win It” contest on Pinterest is believed to be a first in professional sports on the emerging social media platform.

In 2009, Stringer conceptualized and developed GameTimeLive, an interactive game-tracking and blogging experience that combines up-to-the-second stats and scores with a live fan blog and Twitter feed.  GameTimeLive was met with wild success and drew more than 50,000 unique fans to Celtics.com during the epic triple-overtime Game 6 tilt vs. the Chicago Bulls in the 2009 postseason. He also conceptualized and managed the development of Celtics 3-Point Play, a first-of-its-kind Facebook application that allowed Celtics fans to predict statistics for their favorite players while collecting valuable fan data for the team’s marketing efforts.

Stringer has served as a panelist at and presenter at digital marketing conferences around the United States as well as abroad. He also writes content for the team’s digital channels and fan magazine.  A 1998 graduate of Boston University with a Bachelor’s degree in Print Journalism, Stringer currently resides in Boston, MA.

Ralph Simon is acknowledged as one of the founders of the modern mobile entertainment industry. Over the last 15 years, he has been a prominent global mobile trailblazer and innovator, helping grow the mobile entertainment and content industry, and playing a central role in its impact and presence worldwide.
Simon heads the London-based Mobilium International, which provides high-level strategic advice and guidance to mobile handset makers, telco operators, technology companies, media companies, movie studio & TV networks, global music artists, ad agency groups, brands, and platform providers around the world. Specifically, Simon recommends unique, practical ways to expand a company’s mobile business and achieve profitability by growing revenues and maximizing impact from the use and distribution of mobile entertainment content, mobile music, messaging, mobile media technology and applications.

As founder and Chairman Emeritus of the influential Mobile Entertainment Forum – Americas (MEF), the global voice of the international mobile entertainment industry, he works to raise industry standards and identify mobile revenue opportunities. Simon acts as a high-level advisor to a variety of entertainment and technology companies that understand the importance of producing cross-platform mobile entertainment content to reach the over 4.5 billion mobile subscribers worldwide.

Prior to his leadership in the mobile entertainment industry, Simon co-founded the Zomba Group of music companies (and record label Jive Records) in London in the 1970s, building it into the music industry’s leading independent music company. In the early ’90s, he came to the US as Executive Vice President of Capitol Records and Blue Note Records in Hollywood and started EMI Music’s global New Media division.

Rekha Murthy is Director of Projects + Partnerships at Public Radio Exchange (PRX) [link: http://www.prx.org], where she helps public media stations and producers grow their audiences and earn revenue on established and emerging digital platforms. She has opened up pathways to digital download sales for independent producers and network programs. As part of PRX’s award-winning Apps team, Rekha has helped set new standards for public media’s mobile design and adoption with apps including the Public Radio Player, KCRW Music Mine, Radiolab, and This American Life.

Before PRX, Rekha was a usability researcher and UX designer for web and mobile, with clients ranging from startups to large organizations including France Telecom, Bank of America, and IEEE. Her public radio career began at NPR, first at NPR.org and later as a producer for “All Things Considered.”

Rekha received her Masters from MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program, where she spent many hours on the streets of Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, exploring how people use physical, public spaces to communicate. The resulting thesis is “Street Media: Ambient Messages in an Urban Space”.

He is co-author of the forthcoming Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture 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 daughters Emma and Harper. He writes regularly for Fast Company. Sam can be found on Twitter @Sam_Ford.

Sangita is the Research Director of Henry Jenkins’ Media Activism & Participatory Politics (MAPP) project based at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at USC. She is a Czech/Nepali international development specialist, filmmaker, media scholar, and dancer with extensive interdisciplinary qualitative research experience. She holds a Ph.D. from UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures, and a MSc. degree from MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program where she focused on popular culture, new media and globalization. She also earned a MSc. in Development Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). While at LSE, her work focused on the educational communication components of international development interventions. Her work has appeared in several scholarly journals and her book on Bollywood dance and globalization (Is It All About Hips?) was published by SAGE Publications in 2011.

Sasha Costanza-Chock is a researcher and mediamaker who works on civic media, the political economy of communication, and the transnational movement for media justice and communication rights. He is currently Assistant Professor of Civic Media at MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program (http://cms.mit.edu). He has been a part of the Independent Media Center network (http://indymedia.org), the Allied Media Conference (http://alliedmedia.org), and VozMob (http://vozmob.net), among other projects. Sasha is a recent transplant to the Boston area from Los Angeles, where he worked with grassroots immigrant rights organizations to help build stronger popular communication strategies. For more info see http://schock.cc.

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

T Bone Burnett’s 40 years of experience in music and entertainment have earned him an unparalleled reputation as a first-rate innovative artist, songwriter, producer, performer, concert producer, record company owner and artists’ advocate. Burnett’s highly sought-after involvement in music, film, television and stage projects is marked by his uncanny ability to successfully combine his unique artistic sensibilities with massive commercial appeal. He is a champion for artistic freedom and independence, and a driving force in the elevation of our popular culture.

Burnett is a 12-time Grammy Award winner, earning numerous statues in 2009 — including Album of the Year and Record of the Year — for his production work on Raising Sand, the worldwide smash album from Robert Plant and Alison Krauss. That same year, he was also awarded a Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album for his work on B.B. King’sOne Kind Favor. He received two Grammys in 2011 for his work on the music for the film Crazy Heart, in the categories of Best Song Written For Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media, for “The Weary Kind” and Best Compilation Soundtrack Album. He previously earned five Grammys for his work on the 8-times Platinum release, O Brother Where Art Thou? , which also spawned two highly successful national concert tours. Further Grammys followed for his work on the platinum soundtrack to the Johnny Cash biopic, Walk The Line, and the platinum Tony Bennett / k.d. lang duets album, A Wonderful World.

T Bone has most recently served as Executive Music Producer for television series Nashville and for box-office blockbuster The Hunger Games, for which he also produced its companion album that entered the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart at #1 and was certified Gold within mere weeks of its release. He is currently collaborating with Joel Coen and Ethan Coen on their music-packed film Inside Llewyn Davis, in which a young singer-songwriter navigates New York’s folk music scene during the early 1960s. He is Musical Director for Ghost Brothers Of Darkland County, a theatrical collaboration with musician John Mellencamp and author Stephen King set in the fictional town of Lake Belle Reve, Mississippi that has recently opened at Atlanta’s acclaimed Alliance Theatre to rave reviews and record-setting ticket sales. He produced Lisa Marie Presley’s forthcoming Storm & Grace album and is currently producing album projects for Elton John and Diana Krall.

T Bone produced the award-winning and critically acclaimed hit filmCrazy Heart, starring Jeff Bridges, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Colin Farrell and Robert Duvall, which was the surprise box-office hit of 2010. He also composed the film’s score and co-wrote many of its original songs, including “The Weary Kind,” which earned T Bone and co-writer, Ryan Bingham, an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award (in addition to the above-mentioned Grammy Awards) in 2010. T Bone’s work on that film also garnered him awards from the Broadcast Film Critics Association (Best Original Song for “The Weary Kind”), as well as numerous other critics organizations throughout the U.S. He was nominated for an Academy Award in 2004, along with Elvis Costello, in the category of Best Original Song for “The Scarlet Tide” from the film, Cold Mountain. For his work on that film, Burnett also earned the BAFTAs Anthony Asquith Award for Achievement in Film Music.

Burnett’s work as an in-demand music producer spans three decades and has resulted in some of music’s biggest-selling and most critically-lauded releases. Recent music productions include bestseller The Union from Elton John and Leon Russell, which received universal critical raves and became the highest charting album for either artist in more than two decades; Low Country Blues from Gregg Allman, which became the artist’s first Top 5 album, and garnered countless critical kudos, including a Grammy nomination for Best Traditional Blues Album; Willie Nelson’s Grammy-nominated Country Music; Steve Earle’s Grammy-nominated I’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive; Elvis Costello’s National Ransom and Women & Country from Jakob Dylan. Other major productions spanning Burnett’s career include best-selling albums from Counting Crows, The Wallflowers, Los Lobos, Cassandra Wilson, Roy Orbison and Ralph Stanley.

T Bone’s first major foray into film was his 1999 collaboration with the Coen Brothers on The Big Lebowski, for which he served as “Musical Archivist.” He has since served as Executive Music Producer on numerous films, including Across The Universe, the aforementionedWalk The Line (for which he also composed its score) and The Divine Secrets Of The Ya-Ya Sisterhood. He also conceived and staged The Speaking Clock Revue in October 2010 that resulted in three special shows to benefit arts and music education programs in U.S. public schools.

Associate Professor in Comparative Media Studies at MIT

T.L. Taylor is Associate Professor in Comparative Media Studies at MIT and currently a Visiting Researcher with the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England. She is a qualitative sociologist who has been working in the field of internet and game studies for nearly two decades. Her work focuses on the interrelation between culture, social practice, and technology in online leisure environments. She has spoken and written on topics such as network play and social life, values in design, intellectual property, co-creative practices, avatars, and gender & gaming. Her most recent work has focused on the professionalization of computer game play, examining the developing scene of high-end competitive play, spectatorship, and the growing institutionalization of e-sports.

Her book about professional computer gaming, Raising the Stakes:E-Sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming (MIT Press, 2012) has just been published. She is also the author of Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (MIT Press, 2006) which used her multi-year ethnography of EverQuest to explore issues related to massively multiplayer online games. Her co-authored Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method (Princeton University Press) will be out September 2012. More information about her work, as well as copies of many of her articles, can be found on her website.

Ted Hovet is professor of film studies and composition at Western Kentucky University. He has recently published on early film exhibition, pedagogy, and film adaptation. He has published in Pedagogy, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, Literary London, and The Quarterly Review of Film and Video, as well as the 2010 collection Undergraduate Research in English Studies, edited by Laurie Grobman and Joyce Kinkead.

Ted’s current project is entitled “Framing Motion: Containing the Image in Early Cinema and Beyond.” He researches the emergence of the screen as the “default” site for image display in the late nineteenth century and the continued dominance of this method of display across various media today. He is also investigating the pedagogical issues involved in the introduction of new technologies into educational settings and the application of concepts of fair use in the classroom.

Ted received his Ph.D. from Duke University. He can be reached at ted.hovet@wku.edu.

Senior VP Strategic Insights & Research of Viacom Media Networks. As one of Brandweek Magazine’s ‘Marketers of the Year’, Mr. Cunningham’s leadership in the Viacom Media Networks’ Strategic Insights and Research Group is focused on the avid pursuit and activation of unique approaches to uncovering and translating emotional connections into real business-building opportunities across the brands and content experiences of VMN on all screens.  In his role, Mr. Cunningham has oversight for consumer-led facets of key consumer and external marketing partnerships.

His most recent accomplishments include leading the company’s efforts in establishing frameworks of measurement of fast-changing TV viewing experiences, breaking new ground with market-leading, insight-rich multi-mode immersions and analysis on  the new content viewing experiences and co-authoring innovative landmark research on the future state of education.

Prior to his current Corp role, Todd was responsible for all aspects of Research & Strategic Planning for MTV, the World’s Most Valuable Media Brand (Interbrand/Business Week).  He started his career at Whittle Communications, then trained in Account Planning at Chiat/Day in Los Angeles, bringing that discipline to Converse on Boston, which was followed by Brand Planning and Consulting that brought Todd to NYC with Sterling Brands where his team was responsible for the naming of AquaFina water.

Todd has a B.S. in Economics from the University of Tennessee.

Walter Somol uses 18+ years of professional experience, including 10+ years in the video game industry, to run Tech Community Outreach out of Microsoft’s New England Research and Development Center (NERD). Walter’s role at NERD is to help grow and foster the tech community in the greater Boston area working with startups, accelerators, VCs, angels, students, universities and tech organizations. Prior to returning to his hometown of Boston, Walter spent 5+ years in Redmond, managing one of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business Development and Publishing teams. Walter’s role in IEB included structuring and negotiating complex strategic partnerships, P&L management, evaluating new business models (online, digital and retail), growing our online business via Xbox LIVE, publishing & distributing new video games and developing and fostering long-term relationships with partners. Walter has worked with many of the top tier Xbox 360, PC, online and mobile publishers and developers. Prior to Microsoft, Walter served as Director of Business Development/Business Affairs at Atari, focusing on game publishing and marketing support. Previously, he represented developers, creatives and licensors in providing their content to entertainment companies and protecting their intellectual property. An avid gamer, Walter began in the interactive business by working on total conversion for Quake 3, building some of the more popular levels and creating and animating character models.

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