Keynote & Daily Plenaries
Can’t make it to the NAMAC? Join us online. The
University of the Arts on its web radio site (http://www.uarts.edu/radio)
will be streaming live and archiving the Conference's keynote address,
plenary sessions and selected breakout sessions, as well as providing
an opportunity for audio correspondents attending the conference to
download their stories. UArts.Radio is powered by The University's
College of Media and Communication.
Keynote
FREEDOM - Thursday, September 29 at
9:15 am - 10:15 am
A Keynote Conversation: Media and Democracy
Lani Guinier and Nolan Bowie will present a joint keynote address followed by a vigorous conversation on the democratizing power of independent media. How at risk is our ability as independent media arts organizations and makers to continue our history of telling stories and cultivating voices that often go unheard in the mainstream/commercial media culture? How do issues of equal access relate to a full functioning democracy? How can this new media ecology be used to create a brighter future of a strong public media – with new media voices and choices, new technologies that put citizens more in control, and policies that effectively balance public and private interests?
Lani
Guinier
Lani Guinier is a legal scholar and former civil rights lawyer who
specializes in the areas of voting rights law, democratic theory and
practice, educational pedagogy, and social justice with an emphasis
on issues of race, gender and class. In 1998, Guinier was appointed
professor of law at Harvard Law School, becoming the school’s
first black woman tenured professor. She was a professor at the University
of Pennsylvania for 10 years prior to joining the faculty at Harvard
Law School. Her teaching interests range from law and the political
process, professional responsibility, and public interest lawyering
to issues of race, class, gender and social change. She has written
widely on topics related to voting rights, democratic theory, affirmative
action, and legal education, and she coauthored a major study of women
and law school. She came to public attention when she was nominated
by President Bill Clinton in 1993 to head the Civil Rights Division
of the Department of Justice, only to have her name withdrawn without
a confirmation hearing. Professor Guinier turned that incident into
a powerful personal and political memoir, Lift Every Voice: Turning
a Civil Rights Setback into a New Vision of Social Justice. Her work
also has investigated the experiences of women in law school, democratic
theory, educational equity, and issues of race and gender. Her latest
book is The Miner’s Canary (Harvard Press 2002), written with
Gerald Torres, which equates the experience of people of color to
a warning, or “canary,” signaling larger institutional
inequities.
Nolan
Bowie
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 Harvard Information Infrastructure Policy Project
(HIIP) and the Center for Business and Government. From 1986-98, 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 in Philadelphia.
He is a former staff Attorney and Executive Director of Citizens Communications
Center, a public interest law firm and education institution [currently
a Project of the Institute for Public Representation (IPR) of the
Georgetown University Law Center], 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 on the Board of Directors of
Independent Television Service (ITVS), Deep Dish Television Network,
Inc., The Cultural Environment Movement, Inc. (CEM), and Strategies
for Media Literacy, Inc. He writes, teaches and is an advocate for
and about equity and ready access for all too relevant information,
information technology, a viable public sphere, reasonable expectations
of privacy, universal literacy and democratic values in the context
of information and media public policy generally.
FREEDOM-Thursday, September 29 from
2:30 pm - 3:45 pm • Ballroom CDE
Freedom Plenary: Free the Media
Camera phone footage of London terrorist attacks and the blogs of US soldiers in Iraq bring conflicts "over there" home with an immediacy never before imagined. New technologies like these are making it increasingly easy for average Joes and Janes to become filmmakers, storytellers and citizen journalists. Yet these democratizing technologies are running afoul of those forces fighting for increased media consolidation, commercialization and legislation. How does this threaten our ability to access, make and distribute media by the people, for the people? What can the media arts community bring to the table of the growing citizen's movement for media reform? This plenary will spotlight exciting examples of citizen media, ponder what a just media system would look like, and explore how we can create change with the power of our stories.
Malkia
Amala Cyril is a 30-year-old queer black writer, organizer and
media strategist. A working-class Brooklyn native, who has worked
with racial and economic justice youth, community, and activist groups
in the Bay Area for the past nine years. As Director of the Youth
Media Council and co-founder of the Media Justice Network, Malkia's
goals are to build the strategic communications capacity of the progressive
movement to move a racial/economic justice agenda, and to build the
power of youth and other marginalized communities to hold corporate
media accountable for biased content and policy.
Pete
Tridish was a member of the founding collective of Radio Mutiny,
91.3 FM in Philadelphia. In 1996, He was an organizer for the station's
demonstrations at Benjamin Franklin's Printing Press and the Liberty
Bell; on both occasions the station broadcast in open defiance of
the FCCs’ unfair rules that prohibit low power community broadcasting.
He was the organizer and speaker for the Radio Mutiny tour of 25 cities
from January to March of 1998, and undertook another 20-city tour
in February 1999 with the Prometheus Radio Project. He worked on the
first two microradio conferences on the East Coast and has organized
radio barnraisings in 5 communities around the United States. He sat
on the committee that sponsored the crucial Broadcast Signal Labs
study, which proved to the FCC that LPFM would not cause interference.
Tridish has helped to build a number of low power radio stations,
and provided advice to hundreds. He has done radio trainings in Guatemala,
Colombia, Nepal, Canada and Tanzania.
Spencer
Nakasako is an award winning filmmaker who for 15 years has been
working with Southeast Asian communities of Oakland and San Francisco,
training at risk refugee youth to make films about their lives. His
films include the National Emmy Award winning documentary a.k.a. Don
Bonus, Kelly Loves Tony and Refugee, winner of the Inspirational Film
Award at the Hamptons International Film Festival. He wrote the screenplay
and co-directed Life is Cheap But Toilet Paper is Expensive, with
Wayne Wang, and was one of the producers on School Colors, a documentary
for Frontline about the 1994 graduating class at Berkeley High School.
Moderator: 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. His primary policy
concerns are issues of equity and access to information and information
technology for all people, including those whose voices are too often
underrepresented in policymaking proceedings, procedures, and discussions.
CREATIVITY - Friday, September
29 from
9:00 am - 10:15 am • Ballroom CDE
Creativity Plenary: Creative Re-processed
Media is on the move everywhere you look these days – from
cell phones and the Web to gym monitors and nightclub walls. Do these
new "venues" mean opportunities to reach new audiences or
just new ways to turn off media-saturated citizens? This plenary will
explore how independent filmmakers, artists and exhibitors navigate
crowded media environments, conceive of projects for increasingly
fragmented audiences, and evaluate success. Tune in for inspired approaches
to creative methods of community-based art creation, independent feature
film production, and film and video
exhibition.
Lisa
Cortés, SVP Production, Lee Daniels Entertainment - Lisa
is known for her creativity in developing and producing highly successful
projects that cross over genres, inventively weaving music and narrative
in a variety of media. Lisa began her tenure with Lee Daniels during
production of the Academy Award winning feature, Monster’s Ball. She
served as Co-Producer on The Woodsman and, most recently, as Producer
on Lee Daniels’ directorial debut Shadowboxer. As head of production,
she is responsible for finding and developing new projects and directors.
This fall she’ll be producing the feature, Tennessee. Lisa also produced
the 2004 Sundance selection, Prashant Bhargava’s, Sangam. Her multifaceted
career began as a member of the original team that founded Russell
Simmons' Def Jam Records. For a decade she served as Vice President
of Artist and Repertoire for Mercury Records, where she signed the
seminal rap group Black Sheep. During her tenure, she produced several
Grammy-nominated albums and founded Loose Cannon Records. A graduate
of Yale University, she serves on the New York boards of City at Peace
and Trajal Harrell Dance Style.
Chrissie
Iles became the Whitney’s curator of film and video in 1997.
Her exhibitions at the Whitney include the 2004 Biennial (co-curated
with Shamim M. Momin and Debra Singer) and Into the Light: The Projected
Image in American Art 1964-1977, a major survey of moving image installations
that was named best theme show of 2001 by the International Association
of Art Critics. Iles has written numerous catalogue texts, and is
writing a book on art and film for the Phaidon Press series Themes
and Movements. She received a Bachelor of Arts from Bristol University
and did graduate studies at City University, London. She is an adjunct
professor at Columbia University, and is on the faculty of the Center
for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and external examiner for the
Curatorial Course at Goldsmith's College, London. She was a juror
for the 2003 Turner Prize.
Pepón Osorio is best known for large-scale installations,
mixing aspects of his Puerto Rican and New York experiences, his work
emphasizes social justice, cultural history, and identity. Originally
from Puerto Rico, he moved to the South Bronx in 1975 and now lives
in Philadelphia, PA. Osorio’s work is represented in major collection
across the United States, including the Whitney Museum of American
Art, El Museo del Barrio, Museo de Puerto Rico, the National Museum
of American Art, and the Walker Arts among others. He was the first
artist in residence for the Philadelphia Department of Human Service
which culminated in the Institute for Contemporary Arts in Philadelphia
Trials and Turbulence: Pepón Osorio, An Artist in Residence
at DHS. He is the recipient of an Alpert Award in the Arts-Visual
Arts, 1999 and a John D. and Catherine T. McArthur Foundation Fellowship.
Osorio was most recently featured in the PBS Art21, Artist of the
21st Century documentary.
Moderator: Carrie Rickey, a Philadelphia Inquirer film critic since 1986, received her bachelor's degree in literature and a master's degree in art and film history from the University of California, San Diego. After stints as an art critic and film critic, she joined The Inquirer. Her essays are collected in many anthologies, includingThe A List, The American Century, The Triumph of Feminist Art and The Rolling Stone History of Rock 'n' Roll.
RISK- Saturday, October 1 from 9:00
am - 10:15 am
Ballroom CDE
Risk Plenary: Risky Business
How much risk are you willing to take? Has fear of legal action or political retribution kept filmmakers from telling stories and exhibitors from showing them? This plenary assembles three daring tales of media arts risk-taking – from reporting in a war zone and hoaxing the World Trade Organization and mainstream media outlets to testing the waters of fair use. How can artists and organizations best evaluate risk when we're ready to take a creative plunge? And just how endangered are our rights as media artists and activists to comment, criticize, quote and create?
This plenary is sponsored by Temple University’s School of Communication and Theater. (Temple Logo)
Patricia
Aufderheide is a professor in the School of Communication at American
University in Washington, D.C., and the director of the Center for
Social Media there. She is the author most recently of The Daily
Planet: A Critic on the Capitalist Culture Beat (University of
Minnesota Press, 2000), and of Communications Policy in the Public
Interest: The Telecommunications Act of 1996 (Guilford Press,
1999), and she is the editor of Beyond PC: Toward a Politics of
Understanding (Graywolf Press). She has been a Fulbright and
John Simon Guggenheim fellow and has served as a juror at the Sundance
Film Festival among others. Aufderheide is a prolific cultural journalist,
policy analyst, and editor on media and society and has received numerous
journalism and scholarly awards. She has advocated for universal service
telephone policies for the United Church of Christ and has consulted
on media issues for the Benton, Rockefeller, Ford and MacArthur foundations,
as well as a variety of public television organizations.
Mike Bonnano of the Yes Men
Mike Bonanno is a founding member of The Yes Men, a group of imposters
and corporate infiltrators who made a name for themselves by impersonating
the World Trade Organization. Prior to that, he dabbled in other kinds
of creative political mischief, such as creating the Barbie Liberation
Organization, which has been featured in news media around the world.
In his day job, he teaches art at a university in upstate New York.
May Ying Welsh
May Ying is a journalist and award winning cinematographer. Over the
past 8 years she has worked for CNN, Al Jazeera and Channel News Asia
as a cameraman, editor, producer and reporter. She covered the US
invasion of Iraq and Shock and Awe from ground zero in Baghdad with
daily reports from the besieged Iraqi capital. She went on to work
as a producer and reporter for Al-Jazeera living and working in Baghdad’s
“red zone” throughout the occupation of Iraq. She has
worked in every aspect of the business in difficult conditions around
the world- she reported from the devastated beaches of Khao Lak within
hours of the tsunami disaster, edited stories out of an abandoned
train in Grozny under mortar attack, worked as a sound technician
in Belgrade under US bombing, and documented the liberation of Israeli-run
prisons in Southern Lebanon.
Moderator: Thomas Poole
Thomas Poole has been the executive director Pittsburgh Community
Television (PCTV) since 2002. He was part of the video artist collective
Not Channel Zero (NCZ) which produced a politically oriented public
affairs show. NCZ was part of the 1992 Whitney Biennial and is the
only collective of artist to receive a Rockefeller Foundation Media
Arts Fellowship. He was an associate producer of PBS series Positive:
Life with HIV (1993-1994) and segment producer with NCZ of Signal
to Noise. Poole also managed The Nuyorican Poetry Café’s (1994 –
1996) video program, directed media youth program YO-TV at Educational
Video Center (1995-1998) and the media distribution company Deep Dish
TV (1998-2002).
Deep Focus -Thursday, September 29
at
12:30 pm - 2:00 pm • Ballroom CDE
Interactive Roundtable Luncheon
Over lunch, the author of Deep Focus, Andrew Blau, Practitioner at Global Business Network, will be joined by Cara Mertes, Executive Director of P.O.V./American Documentary and Ted Sarandos, Chief Content Officer of Netflix. They will share their thoughts inspired by this topical survey of the field and discuss their partnership, which offers award-winning independent films and documentaries to Netflix customers as part of Netflix regular distribution.
Andrew
Blau, a scenario practitioner at Global Business Network, focuses
on changes in the media and information landscape, as well as the
forces changing philanthropy in the United States. Once an independent
media maker himself, Blau has spent nearly 20 years analyzing media,
the Internet, telecommunications networks and digital technologies.
He is best known for his work helping foundations and nonprofits develop
strategies that recognize the trends and pressures of the information
age and their effects on public interest values. He also analyzed
Federal and state communications and Internet policy for leading public
interest groups, and as a member of the Association of Independent
Video and Filmmakers Advocacy Committee, he contributed to the strategy
to establish the Independent Television Service. He is the board of
directors president of WITNESS and has served in leadership roles
at media-oriented nonprofits including the Alliance for Community
Media and Manhattan Neighborhood Network.
Cara
Mertes is the Currently the Executive Director of P.O.V./American
Documentary, Inc (www.amdoc.org).
She is also an award-winning filmmaker, writer, consultant and programmer
whose work has been featured widely in museums, festivals, PBS and
internationally. Since joining P.O.V. in 2000, she has received three
Primetime News and Documentary Emmy’s, two Peabody and two duPont-Columbia
Awards as Executive Producer for P.O.V. in addition to five other
Emmy nominations. She spearheaded the groundbreaking co-production
partnership with ABC News/Nightline for the broadcast of Two Towns
of Jasper, and has also launched a series of new initiatives expanding
the public media mandate of P.O.V./American Documentary. Mertes is
Contributing Editor for The Independent and the Producer/Director
for an NEH supported film entitled Catching the Shadow, about women
and photography ca. 1900.
Ted
Sarandos, Netflix Chief Content Officer, has led content acquisition
for web-based subscription rental service since 2000. With more than
20 years’ experience in home entertainment, Ted brought to Netflix
strong relationships with film and television content providers of
all sizes. A pioneer in content acquisition financing, he is realizing
his vision of using the Internet to improve distribution and enjoyment
of home entertainment. At Netflix, he oversees more than $300 million
in annual DVD purchases and strategically manages relationships with
studios, networks, film makers and producers. Ted has enabled distribution
for awarding winning social documentaries and specialty films through
Netflix and to the broader DVD market through unique deals with filmmakers,
ThinkFilm, New Market, HBO, PBS, IFC, P.O.V., Sundance Channel and
others. He ensures that the 50,000-title Netflix DVD library satisfies
more than three million members.
