We just finished our first week of meeting and getting to know our new team of graduate students here at the Convergence Culture Consortium, and I wanted to take a few minutes tonight to share information about them with the larger community of C3 readers.
As you all know, Geoffrey Long, Ivan Askwith, and Alec Austin have now moved on to their new jobs. Geoff is now communications director for the Program in Comparative Media Studies, while Ivan Askwith works for Big Spaceship and Alec Austin just took a job with EA in Los Angeles.
Eleanor Baird, a student with the MIT Sloan School of Management, remains a part of the C3 team, and she is joined by three new and exciting graduate students in the Program in Comparative Media Studies: Ana Domb Krauskopf, Xiaochang Li, and Lauren Silberman. As part of their duties with C3, the three of them will begin blogging on a weekly basis here on the C3 blog, so we look forward to bringing their perspectives into the Consortium.
Here are the bios for our three new team members:
Ana Domb Krauskopf is a graduate student in MIT's Program in Comparative Media Studies. Before coming to MIT, she worked as a journalist, producer and arts manager in her native Costa Rica. Ana's work has always revolved around the creative industries. In 2003, she collaborated with film historian María Lourdes Cortes to create Cinergia, the first film production fund designed to stimulate media activity in Central America and Cuba, and coordinated the project until June 2007. She has also worked with the Papaya Music label in research, marketing, corporate sales, fundraising, public relations and concert and CD production. In early 2006, she co-produced the Papaya Fest, the first Central American music festival, with Luciano Capelli. This large-scale event involved more than 70 musicians and diverse styles ranging from Belizean rap, to Costa Rican acid jazz and Panamanian pop. Ana's research interests include alternative distribution and consumption of creative goods and how they relate to the production process.
Xiaochang Li is a graduate student in MIT's Program in Comparative Media Studies. Prior to MIT, she received her BA in Comparative Literature from NYU, where her work focused on structuralist and post-structuralist narrative theory, French and East Asian cinema, and the writings of Marcel Proust. While pursuing her undergraduate degree, she explored various facets of media production through internships at Simon & Schuster and Special Ops Media, and as an assistant to writer/director Mark Christopher. After New York, she spent a year in Germany on fellowship through the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange, where she worked with independent film production and distribution firms in Berlin and Saarbrucken. Her current research interests include fan cultures, interactive and transmedia narratives, and sexual performativity and narrative form in fan-generated content.
Lauren Silberman is a graduate student in MIT's Program in Comparative Media Studies. Using commercial sport video games as a model, her core research investigates how sport video games mediate athletes' physical play. She has observed and interviewed numerous professional and college level athletes about their virtual game-play. Other research interests include developing effective business models and strategies for companies in an ever changing media landscape, the link between mental imagery practices employed by actors and athletes in their respective crafts, and the effect Web _.0 is having on our social interactions and public identities. Her research has been published in The Journal of Physical Education and she has presented her research in various forums throughout the United States and abroad. She has worked for NBC and other leading media companies as a researcher and project assistant. Lauren is a native of Bethesda, Md. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she also spent four years as a research assistant in the Games, Learning, and Society program.
