Our Bloggers

By Creative Rights: Where are the Artists?
We have 22 bloggers taking part in this week's conversation. They are...

Casey Rae-Hunter
hunter.jpgCommunications Director, Future of Music Coalition. Casey Rae-Hunter is a musician, recording engineer, arts journalist and political communications specialist. His music writing has appeared in Washington City Paper, Dusted, Signal to Noise, Grooves, and Seven Days Newspaper. He attended university for jazz guitar at 16, but spent most of the 1990s toiling in the indie music trenches, fronting and/or playing guitar for a list of bands too long to mention. He made the transition to studio hermit around 2000. Since then, he has mixed and mastered numerous releases in genres ranging from bluegrass to hip-hop. As a music journalist and critic, he has profiled some of the leading figures in both underground and mainstream music, including Antony & the Johnsons, Mike Watt, The Books, Lindsey Buckingham, Animal Collective, Jolie Holland and Built to Spill. Casey serves on the Board of Directors of the Media &Democracy Coalition. He currently writes and records under the moniker The Contrarian.

Tim Quirk
quirk.jpgTim Quirk spent much of the '80s and '90s as the singer and lyricist for the punk-pop band Too Much Joy, before politely easing his way into music journalism and the digital music business. He spent the '00s as part of the senior management team at Rhapsody, an online music service. He's been a regular contributor to popular publications ranging from Raygun to The San Francisco Chronicle, and his critical essays have been published in anthologies such as This is Pop! by the Oxford University Press and Best Music Writing 2010 from Da Capo Press. Tim is currently one half of an electro-pop outfit called Wonderlick. He received a B.A. in communications from Stanford University, and an M.F.A. in Dramatic Writing from New York University.

Molly Sheridan
sheridan_headshot.jpgMolly Sheridan is a writer, broadcaster, and blogger focused primarily on the intersection of new music and contemporary culture. A winner of ASCAP's Deems Taylor Award for music journalism, she is the director of Counterstream Radio and the managing editor of NewMusicBox, both programs of the American Music Center. Sheridan is also the host of Carnegie Hall's Sound Insights podcasts and online artist interviews, and her writing appears in publications such as The Washington Post, Time Out New York, and on her ArtsJournal blog, Mind the Gap.


Alex Shapiro
AlexShapiroHeadshotMed.jpgAlex Shapiro aligns note after note hoping that a few of them might sound good next to each other. Published by Activist Music, her acoustic and electroacoustic works are heard daily in concerts and broadcasts across the U.S. and internationally, and can be found on over twenty commercially released CDs from record labels around the world. Alex advocates for other artists through her speaking appearances, published articles and community involvement. She serves on the Board of Directors of the American Music Center and The MacDowell Colony, and sits on ASCAP's Symphony & Concert Committee and the ASCAP Board of Review. Alex's volunteer activism extends beyond the music world, encompassing three terms she served in the 1990's on the Board of Directors of the ACLU of Southern California, including two years as the 30,000-member affiliate's Vice-president, and chairperson of its State and National Legislative Action Committee. An experienced lobbyist, Alex recently testified on a Federal Communications Commission panel hearing in Washington, D.C. about broadband access and digital rights issues. Alex lives on Washington State's remote San Juan Island, and when she's not composing, she can be found communing with the sea life, as seen on her music and photo-filled blog, www.notesfromthekelp.com and her website, www.alexshapiro.org.

Amalia Deloney, Center for Media Justice

Yolanda Hippensteele
yolanda.pngYolanda Hippensteele works with the Media Democracy Fund (MDF) to engage philanthropy in communications policy. MDF is a collaborative grant making program that partners with funders from the arts and diverse interest areas to make grants to protect and promote the public's rights in the digital era. Yolanda has over 10 years' experience as a strategist and organizer in media policy, independent media, and the arts. She was a founding staffer and Outreach Director of the national media policy organization Free Press, where she also directed four productions of the National Conference for Media Reform. She has worked with the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture, Arts and Democracy Project, Alternet.org, and the D.C. public affairs firm DDB Issues & Advocacy. Yolanda lives and plays in Oakland, CA.

Brian Newman
briannewman.jpgBrian Newman is a consultant focusing on business development projects in the entertainment and cultural industries as well as helping filmmakers, artists and organizations to distribute content and connect with audiences through innovative uses of new technology. Brian was most recently CEO of the Tribeca Film Institute, and has served as executive director of Renew Media and IMAGE Film & Video. Follow him at www.springboardmedia.blogspot.com or @bnewman01



David Dombrosky
dombrosky.jpgDavid Dombrosky is the Executive Director of the Center for Arts Management and Technology, an applied research center at Carnegie Mellon University investigating ways in which technology can improve and enhance the practice of arts management. David spearheads the research and content development for Technology in the Arts and has presented technology workshops and panels for a number of regional and national arts convenings. Additionally, he teaches a course on U.S. cultural policy and advocacy for Carnegie Mellon's Master of Arts Management program. In 2007, David received the Emerging Leader Award from Americans for the Arts.

Nettrice Gaskins
nettrice.jpgAs an artist my work explores the intersection of art, technology, and community, as well as my heritage and the effects of capitalism/colonialism unified into a common theme of identity, double-consciousness, and transcendence on the 2D picture plane, or within immersive 3D and 4D space. In the real and virtual worlds my work is about extending notions of the inter-medial by breaking down the boundaries between various art forms in radical ways. In fact I choose not to distinguish my work in one area or space. In Second Life, as the avatar Nettrice Beattie, I have created several immersive and artistic installations for teaching, collaboration, and learning, on both the high school and college levels. I received a BFA in Computer Graphics, with Honors, from Pratt Institute and an MFA in Art & Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. This Fall I am enrolling in the Digital Media PhD program at Georgia Institute of Technology.

Vicki Callahan
Vcallahan.jpgVicki Callahan is an Associate Professor in the Peck School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she founded and designed the theory/practice program, Conceptual Studies in Media Arts Production. This year she was a visiting scholar at USC's Institute for Multimedia Literacy. At the IML in collaboration with Robert Greenwald's Brave New Educators initiative, she piloted a course that investigated the possibilities for remix aesthetics within a documentary context using as its core text, Rethink Afghanistan. She is also the author of Zones of Anxiety: Movement, Musidora, and the Crime Serials of Louis Feuillade (Wayne State UP, 2004) and the editor for the recent collection, Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History (Wayne State UP 2010). She is the author/organizer of the Feminism 3.0 website and with Lina Srivastava she co-authors the site Transmedia Activism. Her interests in silent cinema, feminist theory, and digital media intersect around questions of emergent/disruptive technologies, new modes of writing, social justice, and alternative or counter narrative forms.

Nathaniel James
njames head shot.jpgNathaniel James is currently consulting the Mozilla Foundation on their new Drumbeat initiative (www.drumbeat.org), focusing on developing and implementing local to global community engagement strategies. Nathan's career spans 10 years of nonprofit administration, advocacy, community organizing, outreach and recruitment, field operations, and social research. Nathan works with a wide range of innovative organizations and individuals who share a vision of a 21st century communications system that facilitates vibrant democratic participation, equitable access, and the fullest development of human creative potential. He has worked with OneWebDay, the Media and Democracy Coalition, Fieldworks, MoveOn, Grassroots Campaigns, Inc., the Fund for Public Interest Research, Microsoft, and Greenpeace International. He currently serves on the Board of Directors for the National Alliance for Media Art and Culture.

Clay Lord
clasylord.jpgClay oversees the marketing, advertising, audience engagement and research activities for Theatre Bay Area, the largest regional theatre services organization in the country. In that capacity, he oversees the San Francisco Bay Area's Free Night of Theater, the Bay Area Big List, and the DataPoint research program, and sits on the oversight and advisory committees for ATHENA and Project Audience. He's also deeply involved in the development of the Bay Area Cultural Asset Map, and is currently working with researchers at WolfBrown to develop an online technology to make surveying of audiences for both intrinsic impact assessment and general satisfaction more standardized, easier, and more accessible. He writes a monthly column and occasional articles for Theatre Bay Area magazine, blogs at the Theatre Bay Area Chatterbox (blog.theatrebayarea.org) and can also be found at facebook.com/theatrebayarea and @claytonlord.

Justin L. Karr
justinkarr.jpgJustin L. Karr is the Director of Technology Programs for Fractured tlas, a national non-profit arts service organization. He leads its oftware development and technology service projects and fixes printers. Prior to joining Fractured Atlas, he worked for Jujamcyn Theaters as a theatre Manager and Director of Marketing Technology and for Micromuse, Inc. as a software test lead. He is a member of ATPAM and a graduate of Hampshire College (BA) and Columbia University (MFA).

Ian David Moss
ianmoss.jpgAs Research Director for Fractured Atlas, Ian David Moss is overseeing pilot phase development of the Bay Area Cultural Asset Map, a project of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation that seeks to illuminate who is making art in the San Francisco Bay Area, who is engaging with it, where it's happening, and how it's made possible. Since 2007, he has also been the author of the acclaimed arts policy blog Createquity, which he began writing as a first-year MBA student at the Yale School of Management. Prior to business school, he was Development Manager for the American Music Center. He is a composer and choral singer and founded two first-of-their-kind performing ensembles in New York City: a hybrid electric chamber ensemble/experimental rock band that commissioned works by classical composers for rock instruments (Capital M), and a choral collective dedicated to the music of living composers (C4). Ian is a member of the Americans for the Arts Emerging Leader Council, and his forthcoming article with consultant Daniel Reid, "Audiences at the Gate: Re-Inventing Arts Philanthropy through Guided Crowdsourcing," will be published in Edward P. Clapp's 20UNDER40 anthology in December 2010.

Marty Kaplan
martyk.jpgMarty Kaplan holds the Norman Lear Chair in Entertainment, Media and Society at the USC Annenberg School, where he was associate dean for ten years. He is the founding director of the school's Norman Lear Center (http://www.learcenter.org), whose mission is to study and shape the impact of media and entertainment on society. He was Vice President Walter Mondale's chief speechwriter and deputy campaign manager of Mondale's presidential bid. He worked at Walt Disney Studios for 12 years, where he was first a feature films vice president and then a screenwriter/producer. His movie credits include "The Distinguished Gentleman," starring Eddie Murphy, and the film adaptation of Michael Frayn's "Noises Off." A summa cum laude in molecular biology from Harvard College, where he was president of The Harvard Lampoon, he won a First in English as a Marshall Scholar at Cambridge University, and he holds a Ph.D. from Stanford in modern thought and literature.

Lynne Conner
lynneconner.jpgLynne Conner is a cultural historian, cultural policy consultant and Chair of the Theater and Dance Department at Colby College. Her current research interests and consulting projects are focused on studying both the history and contemporary status of audience behavior and psychology. She has given scores of talks on topics in the cultural policy field, including keynote and panels lectures at the Salzburg Global Seminar, Toronto Creative Trust, National Performing Arts Convention, Wallace Foundation, International Society of Performing Arts Presenters, Boston Foundation/Massachusetts Cultural Council, Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, Southwest Arts Conference, Grantmakers in the Arts, Dance USA, and the American Symphony Orchestra League, among others. Her audience studies publications include a chapter in Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America's Cultural Life, co-edited by Steven Tepper and Bill Ivey (Routledge, 2008), Project Brief: The Arts Experience Initiative (available at www.heinz.org), and an essay on the subject in the Grantmakers in the Arts Reader (Winter 2004). She is currently working on We the Audience: Strategies for 21st Century Audience Engagement, a book based on two theories: 1) that the audience's pleasure is deeply tied up with the opportunity to interpret the meaning and value of a work of art; and 2) that over the course of the 20th century audiences lost access to the interpretive process, resulting in a lack of real, committed interest in the serious arts.

Bill Ivey
05ivey.jpgBill Ivey was the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts from 1998 through 2001, was director of the Country Music Foundation from 1971 to 1998, and was twice elected Chairman of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. He presently serves as founding director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University.



Chris Mackie
chrismackie.jpgChristopher J. Mackie has more than 20 years' experience as nonprofit administrator, consultant, educator, funder, and technologist. Most recently, he partnered with Ira Fuchs to lead one of the world's largest philanthropic funding programs focused on open information technologies, for The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Mackie's work at Mellon helped tens of thousands of nonprofits worldwide in the arts, higher education, and cultural heritage, and tens of millions of their patrons and other stakeholders every day, to save money while improving mission-performance. He is a sought-after consultant, speaker, and teacher on topics relating to the improvement and mission-alignment of nonprofit enterprise information systems.

Jean Cook
jeancook.jpgJean Cook is a musician, producer and Director of Programs for Future of Music Coalition (FMC), a national nonprofit that works to improve the lives of musicians through research, education and advocacy on policy issues that directly impact the ability of musicians to make a living and reach audiences. She is a founder and director of Anti Social Music, a New York-based new music collective, and currently records and tours with Ida/Elizabeth Mitchell, Jon Langford, and Beauty Pill.

Helen DeMichiel
helen.jpgHELEN DE MICHIEL is the Co-Director of THE NATIONAL ALLLIANCE FOR MEDIA ARTS AND CULTURE, a national membership network that works with more than 350 public interest media and arts organizations to navigate the changing media ecology and create a vibrant and diverse independent media sphere. Helen has built NAMAC's programs in cultural and media policy, leadership development, and digital technology planning.



Esther Robinson
Esther Robinson II.jpgEsther Robinson is the founder of ArtHome (www.ArtHome.org) an entrepreneurial nonprofit that helps artists build assets and equity through financial literacy, homeownership, self-sufficiency and the responsible use of credit. Robinson is also an award-winning filmmaker and producer. Chosen as one of Filmmaker Magazine's "25 to Watch" in 2006, her critically acclaimed directorial debut "A Walk into the Sea: Danny Williams and The Warhol Factory" took top prizes at The Berlin, Tribeca and Chicago film festivals. A Walk into the Sea is available in the US on The Sundance Channel, DVD, Netflix and I-tunes. Other producing projects include the film The Canal Street Madam by Cameron Yates, Home Page, by acclaimed filmmaker Doug Block; the first ever digital satellite release of a film (The Last Broadcast) to 5 cities; and the award winning PBS series Alive From Off Center. Esther also served as the director of film/video and Performing Arts for the Creative Capital Foundation (1999-2006).

Douglas McLennan 
McLennan.JPGis an arts journalist and the founder and editor of ArtsJournal.com.


July 18, 2010 3:16 PM | | Comments (0) |

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This Blog Arts and culture are a cornerstone of American society. But arts and culture workers are often left out of important policy conversations concerning technology and creative rights even though the outcomes will have a profound impact on our world. Is it benign neglect? Or did we... more

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