Asif Akhtar holds an MA in Politics from the New School for Social Research and a BA in International Studies and Economics from Ohio Wesleyan University. Having grown up in Lahore, Pakistan, Asif’s research interests have come to converge on questions of how recently emerging industries and formats of 24-hour televised news in Pakistan are rapidly collapsing and reshaping spatial-temporal patterns  – affecting the ways in which everyday practices and discourses of politics take place in the context of war and insurgency. Asif is keen on exploring dynamics of visibility, visual culture and representations of violence through ethnographic work, focusing particularly on how circuits of mediated cultural flows feed-back into political events – such as suicide blasts and terrorist attacks – influencing collective memory through nationwide broadcasts. After working on Wall St. and witnessing the mortgage crisis firsthand as a risk analyst from 2006-2008, Asif moved back to conduct research in Pakistan while gaining experience working as a journalist. Covering politics, culture and terrorism in Lahore, he has written for publications like the Guardian and Foreign Policy in addition to several prominent Pakistani print and online publications. Presently he is an active part of the Naked Punch editorial collective, publishing engaged reviews of art, thought and politics from the Third World. Asif also writes fiction and has published short stories and monographs.

Solon's broad interests include the social study, philosophy, and ethics of information technology and digital media. His research examines the implications and ethics of profiling and data mining in such areas as online advertising, political campaigns, clinical medicine, counterterrorism, and finance. Solon has worked with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the Center for Global Communication Studies, the Stanhope Centre for Communication Policy and Research, and the Russell Sage Foundation. He has an MSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics and a BA in Art-Semiotics and International Relations from Brown University. Website

Inês holds a Masters degree in Contemporary Art History from Lisbon’s Universidade Nova and a BA in History and Art History from Universidade de Lisboa. She also studied at the New School for Social Research and at Sorbonne-Paris IV. Her interests are located at the intersection of visual culture and memory studies and their articulation within the history of the Portuguese empire, namely its contemporary “survival forms” and the notions of saudade, ruination, and exile. In addition, she works in film - she co-authored the script for A Vossa Casa (Your Home) (2012) and is currently developing a project, Atlântico Pardo (Dun Atlantic), about the role of slavery and religion in the formation of Southern Atlantic identity. She is the author of Under the Gaze of Shameless Gods: Visual Culture and Contemporary Landscapes (Lisbon: IHA-EAC/Colibri, 2009).

Jamie Berthe's research interests include ethnographic and documentary film, African cinema, postcolonial studies, French colonial history and cultural politics, visual anthropology, and visual culture. Her dissertation - "An Art of Ambivalence: On Jean Rouch, African Cinema, and the Complexities of the (Post)Colonial Encounter" - explores ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch's relationship to French colonial history and African film. Prior to arriving at MCC, Jamie was an undergraduate at The American University in Paris and earned her MA in Cinema Studies from Tisch. She has also completed The Graduate Program in Media and Culture through NYU's Department of Anthropology.  Jamie's dissertation work has received funding from The Georges Lurcy Fellowship Program and The Humanities Initiative at New York University.

Shane's academic work considers the intersections of architecture, urbanism, community, visual culture, and new media, among other areas. Before coming to NYU in 2011, he was the Assistant Curator at Creative Time, an interdisciplinary public art organization based in New York, where he facilitated the realization of numerous site-specific installations, exhibitions, conferences, events, online projects, and publications over the course of four years. Shane received a B.A. in Art Semiotics (in the Department of Modern Culture and Media) from Brown University.

Alex is interested in social, material, and historical approaches to understanding data, particularly computational techniques that deal with language. Previously he has researched the stock ticker and the production of financial data around the turn of the twentieth century. Theoretical and methodological interests include media archaeology and actor-network theory. Alex holds a BA in Comparative Literature from the University of Virginia and an MA in Media Studies from The New School.

Wendy is an educator, advocate, and researcher committed to advancing 
media education in the service of civic engagement. She is interested in 
the potential for social change through young people's participation in 
the new media landscape, as well as the impact of social media, mobile 
technologies, and global cultural flows on issues of transnational 
identity and the political economy of communication. In her hometown of 
Vancouver, Wendy has served diverse learning communities by way of 
workshop facilitation, professional development, curriculum design, 
programming, consultation, and special projects. Her collaborators 
include the Vancouver Board of Education, Pacific Cinémathèque Film 
Institute, Museum of Vancouver, and Pearson Canada. She has also 
conducted fieldwork on urban school reform in the New York City public 
school system and her research as a scholar-practitioner has been 
presented at international conferences. Wendy earned a BA in 
Communication with a minor in Publishing from Simon Fraser University 
and an MA in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University. 
She has studied abroad in London, Hong Kong, and Beijing, and traveled 
to over 100 cities in North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and 
the Middle East.

Song's primary research interest is in the practices and production photojournalism. She is currently focusing that research towards photographic archives and the way in which they serve as a supplement to experience. She is also interested in the way in which photographic archives create notions of national identity, citizenship, and conversely, exclusion.

Patrick received a BA in Digital Video from Bennington College in Bennington, VT. He moved to New York and began producing performance work about modern information culture. He studies Web Culture and Internet Memes, as well as the challenges of archiving and analyzing the ephemeral culture of the World Wide Web. He has performed or presented at NYU, Columbia, Yale, the CUNY Grad Center, and ROFLcon. Patrick is from Atlanta and now lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.  

Hatim's primary research and teaching interests lay at the intersection of visual culture studies, Middle East media studies, critical theory, science and technology studies, and cultural geography. His dissertation examines the spatiality of contemporary satellite media through a history of the mapping and re-assembling of Beirut. He previously worked in advertising in the Middle East. He earned his BA in Psychology from Rutgers University, and his MA from NYU at this department.

Kouross is an independent journalist and documentary filmmaker and living in New York. He is currently on the Board of the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association and a member of the Big Noise Film collective with whom he was covered topics as varied as Iran's 2008 Parliamentary elections and the case of Louisiana's Jena 6. Kouross' work have appeared on on MTV, Current TV, Aljazeerah English and Press TV covering Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and the United States. His documentary for MTV on the lives of American soldiers and young Iraqis after the American invasion won the Edward Murrow Prize for best Television documentary in 2005. Alongside reporting and filmmaking, Kouross continues to follow his passion for teaching. Having taught at the New England Institute of Art and the School of Visual Arts in the past few years, he was also the teaching artist at Art in General Gallery in New York where he helped produce a short documentary on the repercussions of September 11 on New York's Chinatown with Pace High School in Downtown Manhattan.

Jessica’s academic and artistic work focuses on the relationships among emerging digital and virtual technologies, sound, creative labor and process, and problems of control, surveillance, communication, censorship, and violence. She is interested particularly in workers’ rights, value(s), and economics with relation to contemporary creative production and the dissolution of the artistic object in the post-digital age. She also is interested in sound, speech, and psychology, as techniques for healing and for violence, especially in the context of contemporary warfare. Jessica holds a BA in music from Columbia, a MA in Experimental Music/Composition from Wesleyan, and a MFA in Intermedia Art from Bard. She has taught sound art, physical computing, and interactive art at Temple University and The New School. Her pieces have been performed, installed, and exhibited internationally at galleries, museums, concert halls, public parks, city streets, tiny closets, boats, the New York City subways, and the internet, and have received awards from NYSCA, the LMCC, Meet the Composer, and the Experimental Television Center, among others. She frequently thinks that art and teaching can and must serve a civic purpose. She lived the first sixteen years of her life in a very quiet town in rural Massachusetts, and the following sixteen in a very noisy neighborhood in upper Manhattan. Website - Photo by Arthur Moeller.

Jacob's research focuses on new and digital media, art and technology, queer theory, and media archaeology. His dissertation project is titled Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics, and it investigates the early history of computer graphics and the role they play in the move toward new forms of simulation and object oriented design. Using a media archaeological approach, the project describes a fundamental transformation in the way we understand and interface with technical objects, beginning with the development of 3D object simulation in the early 1960s. Jacob is currently the Life Member's Fellow in electrical history for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), as well as a Lemelson Fellow at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. In the past he has held fellowships with the Association of Computing Machinery, the National Science Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. Jacob is also currently a staff writer for the art and technology organization Rhizome at the New Museum for Contemporary Art in New York City, where he writes on contemporary art and technology.

Yoav holds a BA in philosophy and history (cum laude) and an MA in philosophy from Tel Aviv University, where he focused on critical theory and phenomenology. In his master's thesis, Yoav closely examined Hegel’s political philosophy, while uncovering inconsistencies in his contention that the modern state facilitates the realization of human freedom. His current research interests include critical theory (especially Marxist and neo-Marxist theory), grassroots protest movements, and the role of new media technologies—at the present moment—in reshaping governance, capitalism, and political agency.

Kari holds a BA from University California, Berkeley in the field of Art History and an MA from NYU in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication. Her dissertation, “Making Brooklyn Local,” is a discourse analysis and ethnographic study of what has been called “The Brooklyn Food Movement” with particular attention to localism, craft, aesthetics, community networks, nostalgia, entrepreneurialism, and the branding of Brooklyn. Her research and teaching interests include visual culture, critical theory, advertising and consumer culture, food studies, and urban studies.

Jen Heuson is a scholar, traveler, and media artist currently pursuing her PhD in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. Her work critically engages the mediated production, consumption, and circulation of knowledge, culture, memory, sentiment, and identity during travel, both real and imagined. Specifically, she is interested in exploring links between experience, sensation, sentiment, and liveness or everydayness, on one hand, and mediated histories, epistemologies, and politics, on the other. Jen's work engages these questions through traditional academic forms (conference, journal, thesis) and through various multimedia inquiries (sound ethnography, film documentary, tourist performance). Her award-winning films have screened internationally at venues as diverse as FLEX Fest, Big Muddy, Black Maria, and the Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival. Her dissertation investigates tourist soundscapes in the Black Hills of South Dakota, exploring the acoustic aspects of historical, cultural, and national pedagogy and performance. Jen holds an MA in Film and Television Studies and an MA in Philosophy and Cultural Analysis, both from the University of Amsterdam. For more about Jen and her collaborative work with partner Kevin T. Allen, visit smallgauge.org.

Matthew Hockenberry is a media historian and technologist whose work focuses on media structure and materiality. His dissertation works within infrastructural approaches to media studies and at the intersection of paperwork studies and telecommunication to develop a history of logistics, tracing the impact of media forms and material practices on decentralized production throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Matthew holds degrees in Logic & Computation and Human Computer Interaction, and he received a Masters of Science from the MIT Media Lab for his work on computational models of place. As a visiting scientist with the MIT Center for Civic Media and Tangible Media Group he developed Sourcemap, a collaborative platform for mapping supply chains and sharing "where things come from." Most recently, he was selected for a 2012 Lemelson Center Fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution, where he conducted research at the National Museum of American History. Matthew's work has appeared in academic journals and the popular press. He writes often on the state of global supply and the worldwide apparatus of production, and he tweets at @hockendougal. 

Francis holds a BA in Classics from Peterhouse, Cambridge, and an MA in Sociocultural Anthropologyfrom the University of California, Davis. He is interested in how people build personal, social and political futures around emerging technologies, particularly “open hardware” 3D printing and wireless mesh networking. His work includes theoretical approaches to topics including digital fabrication and computational design, cryptosystems and IP, combined with ethnographic work with the cultura libre movement in Argentina. Prior to his graduate studies, Francis worked as a VJ and video producer for over five years, and, more recently, with indigenous tourism projects in the Peruvian Amazon.

Diana Kamin’s broad research interests include the critical intersections of art and technology in the postwar period and the evolving practices of preserving, documenting, and viewing art through digital media. She spent five years in the exhibitions and curatorial departments at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she facilitated numerous exhibitions of postwar and contemporary art while working on permanent collection research and displays and serving as a member of the Website Collection Subcommittee after the relaunch of the Whitney’s website in 2009. Publications include contributions to 2010: Whitney Biennial, Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection, Maurizio Cattelan: All, andJay DeFeo: A Retrospective. She holds a BA cum laude in Art History from Georgetown University.

Ella holds a BA in English Linguistics and Communication & Journalism and an MA in Communication, with specialization in Communication as Culture: Cinema, Media, Text from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Past projects focused on Holocaust tattoos, horror films and Viennese Actionism. Ella's current research interests include intersections of philosophy and technology, history of media, cybernetics and biopolitics.

Tamara’s work examines what happens to your digital assets after you die and why this matters.  Digital estate planning websites allow social networking site users to concretize and control otherwise ephemeral forms of personhood, passing image management rights on to kin members. Unpaid labor on the part of Facebook users, for example, produces a profit for the company, but also does something for the users great enough to make countless hours of free labor worth it, to the point where individuals wish to archive and preserve their digital remains even after they die. How are we to define value in a post-Fordist economy, and what do affective investments on the part of immaterial laborers produce? Before completing her MA in social sciences at the University of Chicago and moving to Brooklyn, Tamara earned a BA in anthropology from a cornfield in Ohio (aka Kenyon College). Tamara’s broader interests include affective labor, networks, digital archives, technology and the occult, social media, and vintage clothes. 

Liz received her MS in Culture and Society from the London School of Economics and her BA in Communication and Spanish and Latin American Literature from the George Washington University. Her research focuses on housing, urban redevelopment, and visual culture. Related interests include race, postcolonialism, and translation. Liz is a member of the Superstorm Research Lab, a group working on climate change, inequality, and governance. koslov@nyu.edu

With a background in community organizing and commercial advertising, Kavita's academic interests reside at the intersection of grassroots political movements, persuasion campaigns, design, and cultural production. Kavita received her undergraduate degree in Sociology from Emory University in Atlanta, and moved to Brooklyn in 2003 to start a graduate program at NYU under the advisement of Stephen Duncombe. She received her MA in Interdisciplinary Studies with a focus on the role of spectacular culture within contemporary social justice movements in the United States. Her current interests and work center on the role of grassroots cultural activity in urban public spaces.

Jason hails from Western Massachusetts. He holds a BA in philosophy from the University of Southern California and an MA in film studies from Columbia University. Jason's primary research interests include: new theories of labor immaterial, cybernetic); attention economies; attention deficit disorders; cinematic and post-cinematic modes of production; new media affects; technics and tools; object oriented philosophy; contemporary Continental philosophy (esp. Agamben and Stiegler); video games; and hip hop.

Xiaochang holds B.A. in Comparative Literature from NYU, where she acquired an uncharisteristically thorough acquaintance with the work of Marcel Proust while moonlighting in the Computer Science department. She received her S.M. In Comparative Media Studies at MIT, with research focused on the circulation of East Asian television drama online and how participatory digital practices and the increased visibility of audience-driven transnational media flows complicate existing models of diaporic audienceship, publics, and cultural negotiation in an increasingly global media landscape. While at MIT, she was a core researcher at the Convergence Culture Consortium, a research group working to foster collaboration and knowledge-exchange between academia and the media industries. She remains a consulting researcher with the Consortium and is Fellow with Futures of Entertainment, a network of researchers and practicioners across academia, media, technology, and advertising. Prior to joining MCC, she worked at a Digital Brand Strategist at Weber Shandwick, the world’s largest PR agency, where she worked on digital and global communications strategy with clients such as PepsiCo and Samsung. Her current interests broadly include location-based and context-aware technologies, public space and history, metadata, and the critical geographies of virtual space. She has a well developed sense of programmer envy, and spends an unlikely amount of time thinking about how to apply agile development and rapid prototyping to academic research. She blogs at Canarytrap.net and can be found on twitter @Xiaochang

BA in Communications, University of Iowa; MFA in Film, Bard College. Lana's recent work emerges from the interrelation between current events and residues of the past, highlighting the contingency of memory and the haunting of daily life by the specter of socio-political inequities. Media criticism, feminism, psychoanalysis, and race and gender studies inform her investigation into the ethics of representation. Her films have shown at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum, among other venues. She has contributed to publications including Cabinet, Rethinking Marxism, and Considering Forgiveness, published by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. A recipient of awards from the Fulbright Foundation, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and Jerome Foundation, among others, she has taught at the Massachusetts College of Art, City College of New York, and is currently faculty in the MFA in Visual Arts program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. 

Will works on digital games, but only sort of. His current project is to understand the  relation between game design practice (generously conceived), skill acquisition processes, and the politics of skill in the context of post-industrial capitalism. He approaches these issues through a set of objects skirting the boundaries of what counts as a digital game—such as music and image production apps for mobile devices, one-off responsive environments built in research-creation labs, and indie games that renew and reinvent the tradition of 3D simulation handed down to us since the Quake engine. The philosophies and histories that work to comprise these objects include phenomenology and process philosophy, theories of post-industrial capitalism, art’s histories of perception, the history of cognitive science and systems theory, and a hodgepodge of methods useful for the fine-grained description of technical objects. While completing his MA in Art History through McGill’s department of Art History and Communication Studies, Will worked on Husserlian phenomenology of time consciousness, Conterstrike 1.6, and The Night Journey under the supervision of Christine Ross. His BA is in Comp Lit and Philosophy: University of Western Ontario, London, ON.  

Paul's research interests focus on culture and consumption – the ways in which culture is consumed, the ways in which consumption becomes culture, and, particularly, the technologies that mediate cultural production and consumption. Before pursuing his PhD, Paul spent 10 years working in communications across five countries and several industries, including information technology, telecommunications, and international development. Paul holds undergraduate degrees in mathematics (thesis " Applications of Moving Mesh Methods to 2D Orthogonal Grid Generation") and Spanish literature (theses "Vispera del gozo: Hacia una lectura posmoderna / posfeminista de la vanguardia española," and "Amores de segunda mano: Disidencia sexual/textual en los cuentos de Enrique Serna"), with honors in both.

Ben’s research deals with infrastructure networks, landscape and mediation. His recent work looks at underwater dredging and sediment management technologies in relation to the so-called Anthropocene. In addition to scholarly writing, he also produces short video documentaries. Prior to joining MCC, Ben worked in web strategy for Lambda Legal, an LGBT civil rights organization. He earned his MA in Media Studies at The New School and his bachelors in English Literature from Ohio University's Honors Tutorial College.

Beza is a doctoral candidate broadly interested in the ways in which individuals and institutions act on suffering bodies. In particular, his research examines how stand-up comedy in the biomedicalization era is employed as a practice of care. He is interested in how the organization of biosocial communities and notions of biological citizenship are manifest through the logics of performance and comedy. Beza holds an MA in Afro-American Studies from UCLA and a BA in Comparative Literature from USC.

Nadja holds a BA in History and Human Rights from Bard College. Before pursuing her doctoral degree she worked as a media analyst and researcher for the International Center of Photography's collection of Art Workers Coalition posters. Nadja's broad interests include visual culture, affect studies, theories of temporality, and critical historiography. Nadja's dissertation research addresses the relationship between the aesthetic and political neo avant-garde in 1960s and 1970s New York. Focusing on groups who ultimately rejected the art world in favor of a militant engagement with the real, Nadja argues that the renewed availability of this history in the present illuminates a contemporary desire to articulate a politics beyond mediation.

Tim's primary interest is research into evolving forms of journalism and news dissemination and their ramifications for media literacy, media politics and the public sphere. His studies are broadly informed by a background in philosophy and a 20-year career as a journalist that has spanned both print and digital forms of the field. He holds an MA in Media Studies from The New School, where he incorporated digital media theories into a sociology of news that included interviews with news professionals and observations of journalists in newsrooms. This research reflects his interest in ways philosophy, field theory, cybernetics and actor-network theory can intersect with sociologies of news that further illuminate the historical, political and cultural trajectories of information networks.

Elizabeth received her BA degree in Psychology from New York University and her MA degree in the area of Psychology and the Arts from Drexel University. Her research interests include visual culture, media history, representations of gender, class, and race within mass media, and the impact of communication technology on space, privacy, family, and work-life balance. Her dissertation, “(Home)work and the Bedroom-Study: The Spatialization of Media Technology, Work and Private Life” investigates the socioeconomic significance of the introduction of communication technology into the home, and argues that the integration of this technology and changing concepts of work and family transformed private spaces within the home into multi-purpose public spaces (particularly the bedroom/home office).

Aaron has an MA in Modern History and Literature from Drew University. His primary research interest is the intersection of metaphysics and media theory, with particular focus on phenomenology, Actor Network Theory, and the sub-varieties of speculative realism.

Kyle received his BA from UC Berkeley where he majored in Film Studies and specialized in gaming theory. He is specifically interested in game design and storytelling aesthetics, games as a communicative tool, and comparative studies involving games, film, and literature. He hopes to primarily focus on theory and eventually actualize his theoretical work in a game of his own.

Magdalena conducts interdisciplinary research in the fields of cultural studies, urbanism, and prostitution. Her doctoral work looks at the intersection of urban design and the sex industry in the Amsterdam Red Light District.She is interested in the connection between the development of marginal regions in cities and contemporary media and urban design. She holds a BA from the University of Toronto and a Master's Degree from the University of Amsterdam. Magdalena has published various papers on urban gentrification and development, and consults as a researcher at the Institute without Boundaries, in Toronto, where she works to apply academic principles to real-world urban challenges.

Scott's research and teaching interests include media studies, historiography, cultural memory, science and technology studies, and cultural studies.  His dissertation explores the visual culture of Alzheimer's disease, focusing in particular on the historical intersections of cognition, age, and bioethics. Scott previously worked in film and radio production and as a curator and programmer in festivals and museums. He earned his BA in Art History from Williams College and his MA in Communication Studies from UNC Chapel Hill.

James is interested in the craftsman as an American archetype and the social and economic tensions in which D.I.Y. craft and culture producers operate in the larger culture of capitalism. More broadly, he is interested in America's cultural history as a reflection of its changing political economy, as well as issues of performance and the built environment. These academic interests arise from 10 years work as a theater artist in NYC. James is founder and co-artistic director of the National Theater of the United States of America, an experimental collaborative with whom he writes, designs, performs and produces plays. The NTUSA has been recognized with an OBIE for Design and a Spalding Gray Award for innovative writing and production. He also works as a performer, carpenter and stage technician. James holds a B.S. in film from Boston University, studied classical theater at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic art and recently received his MA in Media, Culture, and Communication from NYU.

Luke Stark is a third-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University; his research focuses on the history and philosophy of digital media technology and its role in regulating the everyday affective and emotional lives of users and publics. A native of Toronto, Canada, Luke holds an Honours BA in History & English and an MA in History, both from the University of Toronto; he has been generously funded by the Canadian Millennium Scholarship Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Government of Ontario. Luke's work engages with the changing dynamics of privacy and security in digital network environments; he is a Student Fellow at the NYU School of Law's Information Law Institute (ILI), a member of the ILI's Privacy Research Group and a Principal with PRGLabs. Luke is a Research Assistant for the National Science Foundation's Values in Design in the Future Internet Architecture project, headed by Helen Nissenbaum, and a member of the New York University Graduate Forum beginning in the fall of 2012. Some of Luke's other teaching and research interests include the mediation of national security crises, disasters and emergencies; critical theories of political economy and new media; and the intellectual underpinnings of speculative fiction. Luke's academic pursuits have been complimented by work in Issues Management and Strategic Communications Planning for the Ontario Ministries of Health and Long-Term Care and Natural Resources; other highlights from an eclectic résumé include sleep-away camp counsellor, forest ranger, and ranch hand. 

Sarah is currently writing a dissertation on the evolution of mainstream political news in light of changes to politics, academia, and technology. Sarah's academic interests include political communication, sociology of news, sociology of knowledge, and methods/methodology. Her academic background includes a BA in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MA in mass communication from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Jennifer is a doctoral student in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. She serves as a research assistant for the Institute for Public Knowledge (IPK) at NYU, where she participates in research and programming on human rights, humanitarian action, and the visual practices related to these interventions. Her dissertation focuses on the way oceanic space is governed, and the way publics perceive of and mobilize in response to crises at sea. Prior to joining MCC, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa with departmental honors in history from the University of Richmond. She holds a MA in Law and Society from NYU, and, from the University of Connecticut (Storrs), with distinction a MA in Cultural Anthropology and a Graduate Certificate in Women's Studies.

Daniel’s main research interests are organized around US public diplomacy, media development, and social movements, particularly in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. He completed an MA in Communication and Culture and a Graduate Diploma in International and Security Studies at York University in Toronto, where he was a graduate fellow at the Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights, Crime, and Security for 2011–12. His MA thesis examined the role of the U.S. state in shaping the Afghan media environment since 2001. Other research interests include the militarization of public culture, video game studies, affect theory, and postcolonial theory. Daniel received a BA in English Literature from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.

Carlin received her BA in Visual and Environmental Studies and Social Anthropology from Harvard and her MFA in Photography and Media from CalArts. Her recent work has focused on bringing together three disciplines-photography, anthropology and athletics-to address colonial histories, globalization and the potential for individual bodies to assert agency within overdetermined structures. She has presented photography, video, installation, performance, writing and lectures in national and international contexts. Recently, she contributed an article to Art Lies, organized "Bizarre Animals: An Evening of Contemporary Art Interventions at the Harvard Museum of Natural History," and exhibited at Anthony Greaney, Boston. She has taught at Harvard, Vanderbilt and Watkins College of Art, Design and Film and is currently developing a proposal for a collaborative MFA program for Vanderbilt, Watkins and Tennessee State University. - Photo by Slobodan Dimitrov.

Shari is working through the relation between media studies and psychoanalysis. Her research considers how conceptual metaphors of mediation reveal the cultural anxieties and fantasies of communication. Human-computer interaction is a primary focus of her work, which is informed by theories of influence, desire, and delusion. Her academic interests include the intellectual history of media theory and the cultural histories of cinema and television. While working as a digital media producer for nonprofit clients in Washington, DC, she edited digital video and designed the information architecture of websites in open-source content management systems. Shari received her B.A. in Political Communication and Film Studies from The George Washington University and (will receive) her M.A. in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University.

Tim’s research interests include the politics of media regulation, comparative media studies, and the history of communications policy. His current work focuses on the recent proliferation of media watchdog organizations and their place in the political economy of media. Tim holds a BA in Communications Studies from the University of Calgary and an MA in the Humanities from the University of Chicago.

Robert Wosnitzer is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. His current research interests include political economy and financialization, cultural economy, media representations of finance, and the socio-technological assemblages within the circuits of finance. He is currently working on his dissertation, "Desk, Firm, God, Country: Proprietary Trading and the Speculative Ethos of Financial Culture," a social history of proprietary trading at US investment banks. Robert is also a research scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge, where he is a founding member, with Arjun Appadurai and Ben Lee, of the Cultures of Finance Working Group, and is a member of the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (JWTC).  Prior to joining NYU, Robert worked in the field of debt capital markets for over a decade, where he traded and placed debt instruments with institutional clients. He holds an MA in Media, Culture and Communication from NYU, as well as a BA in Media Studies, also from NYU.

Ekin grew up in Istanbul, Turkey. She has a B.S. in Foreign Service with a concentration in Culture and Politics from Georgetown University. She also completed an M.A in Near Eastern Studies at New York University and another MA in Anthropology from Columbia University. Ekin's academic interests are located in the fields of Linguistics, Semiotics, Philosophy and Media Studies. Her non-academic interests consist of gastronomy, visual and written products of science-fiction genre, early examples of Turkish cinema, the life and works of Marcel Proust.

Hannah M. Zeavin graduated from Yale University with a BA in American Studies. Her academic interests include psychoanalytic theory, history of medicine, military history, and gender studies. She has conducted research in Cambodia, Viet Nam, and Eastern Europe. She is the poetry editor for Cousin Corinne’s Reminder in Brooklyn, NY.