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2003 / 2002 / 2001

2003

Stephanie Davenport is a Boston-based consultant focusing on media relations and development for the arts. Her clients include the Boston CyberArts Festival, the Art Interactive Gallery (Cambridge, MA), Parsons School of Design (NYC), and the Ars Electronica Center (Linz, Austria), the latter being the site of her masters thesis case study.

Nadya Direkova is an Associate Producer at LeapFrog Enterprises in Emeryville, CA. She has produced interactive books teaching English, second-grade Math and first-grade Word Games. She continues to develop her research in Language Learning Games through product design and collaboration with teachers and academics. Nadya is an active participant in the MIT Northern California Club. (9/2004)

Robin Hauck is a freelance film critic and director. She writes about films from around the world for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and is in pre-production on a documentary on foster care mothers in Massachusetts.

Susannah Mandel is now packing up to spend a year teaching French middle-schoolers through the government-sponsored "American Assistants in France" program. She plans to figure out what to do with her life while soaking up a little culture along the way. She invites anyone swinging through the region of Lille, France, to contact her: she wants to do as much traveling and have as many guests as possible this year, and she'd be delighted to see you! She will have an essay appearing in the upcoming collection Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, edited by Sherry Turkle, forthcoming from MIT Press. (9/2004)

Heather Miller is a Supervising Editor at Macmillan/McGraw-Hill Education in New York City. She occasionally serves as an educational consultant to UNESCO. (9/2004)

Aswin Punathambekar is now in his second year of Doctoral Studies in the Media & Cultural Studies program at UW-Madison. He spent the summer working on an IT & e-governance project (in the sunny, beachside town of Pondicherry), and doing some preliminary fieldwork in Bangalore towards his dissertation. He also watched every Bollywood release this summer - first day, first show! (9/2004)

Philip Tan is Technologist in Residence in Comparative Media Studies, and Project Manager of the Education Arcade project.

2002

Candis Callison is a doctoral student in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS) at MIT. There, she is continuing some of the work she began in CMS on digital representations of the environment with new research on scientific visualization, climate change, and GPS-related technologies. She is also a new mom and welcomed her daughter, Freya into the world in December 2003.

Anita Chan is currently enrolled in the Ph.D. Program in Science,
Technology, and Society at MIT. As a Masters student at CMS, she studied emergent models of online news construction and exchange on the technology-centered news site, Slashdot (http://web.mit.edu/anita1/www/thesis/Index.html). She is currently
pursuing research on free software activism and discourses of
state/political reform in Latin America. She was a visiting lecturer
in the Communication Department at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City this past summer. And she currently leads the working group on Information Technologies and Self under MIT's Initiative for Technology and Self. Her article "Seeing Software, Seeing States: Free Software Legislation and Visions of Power and Politics in Peru" is forthcoming in the journal Anthropological Quarterly. (9/2004)

Sophie Ormerod is VP Targeting for 121Media in New York. 121 is an online marketing outfit where Sophie manages a team responsible for the algorithmic categorization and recognition of online browsing behavior.

Qi Wang is currently enrolled in the Ph.D program in Critical Studies, Department of Film, Television and Digital Media, School of Theatre, Film and Television, UCLA. Professional goals: film scholar and filmmaker. She is continuing to make documentaries and art films, the most recent of which include Written on the Water, Pink Dots Set to Indian Song in Chinese, and a documentary in progress that is on gay culture in Chongqing, China (temporarily named "Little Devil").

Margaret Weigel writes on arts and culture for WBUR and The Women's Review of Books, and creates digital media projects. She presents her research paper "Paint Guns, Cops and the 21st Century Tagger: Graffiti's Form and Content as Determined by Authoritarian Responses" at the College Art Association's annual meeting in Feb. 04, and will teach as a Visiting Professor at Boston's School of the Museum of Fine Arts for the Spring 2004 semester.

Michelle Woodward is currently the Media Outreach Coordinator and Photo Editor at the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), publishers of Middle East Report, in Washington, DC. Her essay "Between Orientalist Cliches and Images of Modernization: Photographic Practice in the Late Ottoman Era" was published in the winter 2004 issue of the journal History of Photography. She has also been working on several long-term projects, including photographing abandoned industrial sites (several exhibits of hers are upcoming in Baltimore), and continuing research on photographic representations of the Middle East. (9/2004)

2001

Jim Bizzocchi is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Art and Technology at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. He teaches courses in Interactive Narrative, Game Design, and Video Production. His research interests include the emergent aesthetics of high-definition video, issues in interactive narrative, and the use of games and simulations as educational environments. He has recently been awarded a research grant from the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to review existing video post-production tools and make recommendations for further research and development in this area. Jim is producing a series of videos in conjunction with the Banff Centre, and is curating an exhibition of Video Paintings for the New Forms Festival in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is also a member of the Pan-Canadian Simulation and Advanced Gaming Environment research project (SAGE).

After completing CMS, Cynthia Conti was an Adjunct Professor at Clark University in Worcester, MA, where she taught courses in media policy and television culture in the Communication and Culture and Screen Studies Department. She is currently attending New York University, where she is pursuing a PhD in Media Ecology at the Steinhardt School of Education. (9/2004)

David Spitz is an MBA student at Columbia Business School (Class of 2005). He is on leave from his position as a management consultant in Deloitte Consulting's Technology, Media, and Telecommunications practice, where he has worked since graduating from the Comparative Media Studies program in 2001.

Christa Starr attended the Graduate Film School at NYU, and is currently working at Dreamworks, where she says, she makes "way too much money lighting models of a fish that kinda resembles Will Smith in a scary Mr. Limpett sort of way," (9/2004)


Christopher York was Director of Technology for the Metamedia Project at MIT (2001-2002) and on 2002 accepted a position as Researcher for the Perseus Project, a digital library in the Department of Classics at Tufts University. When last contacted he planned to start a Ph.D. program. (Information as of 2002)



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