Anna Everett is assistant professor of film and TV history and theory and new media studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara. She is the author of The Revolution will be Digitized: Afrocentricity and the Digital Public Sphere, published in February 2001 in the Facultiet der Letteren Series by the University of Utrecht, Netherlands. Her book Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909-1949 has just been published by Duke University. Everett currently is completing two manuscripts under contract: Digital Diasporas: A Race for Cyberspace for SUNY Press, and Inside the Dark Museum: Black Film Criticism from 1909-1959, an anthology for Duke University Press.

Henry Jenkins is director of the MIT Program in Comparative Media Studies. His books include From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games (1999), The Children's Cultural Reader (1998), What Made Pistachio Nuts: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic (1993), Classical Hollywood Comedy (1994), Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (1992), and the forthcoming The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture. Jenkins testified this year before the U.S. Senate during hearings on media violence that followed the Columbine school shootings.

Tara McPherson is an assistant professor of gender studies and critical studies in USC's School of Cinema-TV whose writing has appeared in numerous journals and edited anthologies. She is co-editor, along with Henry Jenkins and Jane Shattuc, of Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (forthcoming, Duke UP), and is currently completing Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Place and Femininity in the Deep South, also for Duke. McPherson's work on new technologies is included in several anthologies, and she is currently co-editing two collections of essays on new media.

Erika Dalya Muhammad is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University, and a correspondent and segment producer for Oxygen Media's daily show Pure Oxygen. Her work on black hi-tech documents has been published in the volume Struggles for Representation: The African-American Documentary, Indiana University Press [PDF]. Muhammad held curatorial positions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the American Museum of the Moving Image prior to coordinating the Race in Digital Space exhibition at MIT's List Center.

Richard O'Bryant is a doctoral student in the planning support systems group in MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning and a graduate assistant at the Center for Reflective Community Practice. He focuses on information technology and low-income communities, and his dissertation research will take place at a low-income housing development in Roxbury and will analyze residents' use of computer information technology. O'Bryant holds a degree in computer systems engineering from Howard University.

Paula Robinson is the founder of the Institute for Integration of Technology and Education, which helps individuals by empowering community organizations to manage the impact of technology on the economic viability of residents in post-industrial communities. A graduate of the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning's Center for Reflective Community Practice, Robinson formerly worked as interim director of public relations at WFXT Fox 25 in Boston, and was a talk show host with WILD AM 1090 radio.

Graduate Research Assisant

Anita Jean Chan, a first-year graduate student in MIT's Program in Comparative Media Studies, is studying the construction of, and contestation over, raced and gendered identities in digital environments. Working as a journalist prior to coming to MIT, she published articles in The Star-Ledger, The Village Voice, A. Magazine, and The Boston Herald on such subjects as minority e-business entrepreneurship, the use of the Internet in political organizing, and representations of ethnicity in online cartoons.

Contacts

General inquries
Anita Chan, anita1@mit.edu
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Brad Seawell, seawell@mit.edu

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David Spitz, spitz@mit.edu

Press information
Alex Chisholm, alex@mit.edu
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Sarah Wright, swright@mit.edu