PhD Candidate Profiles

Naomi Angel
Naomi has worked in South Africa, Japan, and Canada as a researcher, producer, journalist and teacher. She holds a BA in Psychology from the University of British Columbia and completed her MA in Media Studies at Concordia University. Her current research focuses on cultural memory and processes of memorialization, and she is a Memory and Memorialization Fellow (NYU/CNRS) for 2010/2011. website

Inês Barreiros
Inês holds a BA in History and Art History from the University of Lisbon and an MA in Contemporary Art History from the New University of Lisbon (the latter with a fellowship from Portugal's Foundation for Science and Technology). She first exiled herself from her previous subjects and pursued a more interdisciplinary approach in her MA thesis, "Under the Gaze of Shameless Gods": Visual Culture and Contemporary Landscapes, published in Portugal in 2009, which incorporated Postcolonial theory, Cultural Studies, and Critical Studies. She also studied at the Sorbonne-Paris IV (1999-2000) and at The New School for Social Research (2008-2009). Her current interests lie in the domains of sensory ethnography and visual culture as ways to explore the cultural pattern and subjective spaces of Portugal's contemporary imaginary. 

Solon Barocas
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: solon.barocas.org. 

Jamie Berthe
Having completed her undergraduate work at the American University of Paris (in Philosophy and Film Studies), Jamie went on to pursue an MA in Cinema Studies at Tisch/NYU. Some of her many research interests include the cinema of Jean Rouch, ethnographic and documentary film, the Nigerian video film industry (Nollywood), visual epistemology, and theories of the archive.

Shane Brennan
Shane spent four years on the curatorial and programming team at the interdisciplinary public art organization Creative Time (creativetime.org) in New York. In this role, he facilitated the realization of numerous site-specific installations, exhibitions, conferences, events, online projects, and publications. Shane holds an honors BA in Art-Semiotics (in the department of Modern Culture and Media) from Brown University and was a visiting student at Goldsmiths College in London. His general interests include the intersecting areas of visual media, contemporary art, participation, public space, and networked culture. Shane hails from Seattle, Washington and now lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Kate Brideau email
Kate's work focuses on image, language, and the points where these two systems meet and diverge. She studies critical theory, visual culture, philosophy of language, and aesthetics. Her current research looks at the shapes of book typography in order to examine the possibilities of non-unilinear means of representation and thought. She cares a good deal about the kinds of tools and machines we use to understand the world around us, and thinks you should too. Kate has a BA in English from Ohio Wesleyan University, and an AM in Humanities from the University of Chicago. She is the assistant editor of The Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education, self-publishes a zine titled Everything Quantizes, and is a competitive pétanque player.

Wendy Chen

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 Chong
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.

Cynthia Conti
MS, Comparative Media Studies, MIT; BA, Communications and Culture, Screen Studies, Clark University. Cynthia’s research focuses on the microradio movement, radio history and broadcast regulations. Before entering the Ph.D. program, she taught courses in video production, communications and media studies at several schools and colleges in the Boston area.

Patrick Davison
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 El-Hibri email
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 Esmaeli
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.

May Farah
After completing a BA in Communication at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada and an MA in Sociology at the American University of Beirut, May was a Beirut-based journalist for over a decade. Her exposure to a number of issues while living and working in Beirut have carried over to her current research, which is situated at the intersections of Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Anthropology, and Middle East Studies with a particular emphasis on theories of diaspora, nationalism, and the transnational and global media.

Jessica Feldman
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 Gaboury
Jacob holds a BA in Spanish Literature from the University of Puget Sound and an MA in Cinema Studies from New York University. His interests include new and digital media, art and technology, queer theory, and media history. His work is particularly concerned with technological breakdown and failure, unintended network consequences, and non-normative uses of technology. Jacob is also a staff writer for the art and technology organization Rhizome at the New Museum for Contemporary Art in New York City, and has previously worked at the Museum of the Moving Image and the Seattle Art Museum.

Travis Hall
Travis received his undergraduate degree in International Relations and master's degree in International Communication from American University in Washington, DC. His research interests include biometrics, critical theory, bureaucracy, moral norms and the media, Science and Technology Studies, truth production, and bodies.

Kari Hensley
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.

Jennifer Heuson
Jen Heuson is a scholar, traveler, and media artist currently pursuing her Ph.D. 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
A Western Pennsylvanian, Matthew received undergraduate degrees in Logic & Computation and Human Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University. Since then, he's lived in Cambridge where he received his M.S. from the Media Arts & Sciences program at MIT's Media Laboratory. As a visiting scientist at the Center For Future Civic Media and Tangible Media Group at MIT, he has explored issues at the intersection of community, media and technology. This work led to the development of Sourcemap, a publishing platform for supply chains and their social and environmental impacts - work which has received articles in the popular press, appeared in academic proceedings and received international awards and honors. His current research focus includes sustainability, civic media, web culture and the impact and evolution of web technologies and tools.

Robert Jones
Robert earned an M.F.A. in Screenwriting from San Diego State University and a B.A. in English and Philosophy from Indiana University. His dissertation explores the videogame subculture of Machinima, the use of video game technologies by gamers to create animated films. As an instance of fan-produced media, Machinima offers an insight into the new ways that gamers perform culture. He is also interested in how the videogame medium is currently being utilized as a means of political activism. His work has appeared in the journal Popular Communication as well as the edited volumes Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet and Media Literacy: A Reader. In addition to teaching at NYU he also teaches a course on Videogame Culture at the New School. His website covers issues in the gaming world and reviews machinima films. He is a musician, digital filmmaker, life-long gamer, and T-shirt junkie.

Marissa Kantor Dennis
Marissa Kantor Dennis is finishing a Ph.D. in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. She works mainly in the medical humanities, with a particular interest in the subtleties of language and culture in the clinical encounter. Other interests include psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and performance. She received her B.A. in American Studies from Yale, her M.A. in Cultural Reporting and Criticism from NYU, and another M.A. in Cultural Studies from the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar in Ecuador, where she studied on a Fulbright. Marissa is also a candidate at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR-IPA).

Tamara Kneese
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. 

Elizabeth Koslov email
Liz is originally from Ithaca, New York. Her research interests include cultural dimensions of urban planning, policy and economics; critical theory; public space; home, housing and migration; and language, narrative and translation. She earned a B.A. in Communication and Hispanic Languages & Literatures at the George Washington University and an M.Sc. in Culture & Society from the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Kavita Kulkarni
With a background in both social justice organizing and commercial advertising, Kavita's interests and experiences in media range from the grassroots to the political to multi-million dollar ad campaigns that hit on a global scale. Having received her undergraduate degree in Sociology from Emory University in Atlanta, Kavita moved to Brooklyn in 2003 to start her graduate program at the Gallatin School at NYU, under the advisement of Stephen Duncombe. She graduated with a Master's in Interdisciplinary Studies with a focus on the role of spectacular culture within contemporary social justice movements in the U.S. From 2006 to 2010, Kavita worked on the "media side" of the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather, specializing in digital media for the second most recognized brand in the globe. Kavita's hopes to further her graduate studies at NYU with a focus on visual culture and politics.

Jason LaRiviere
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 Li
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

Lana Lin
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. 

Max Liboiron
Max Liboiron's dissertation describes how 21st century plastic pollution, in the form of ocean plastics and persistant plastic chemicals that accumulate in human tissue, defy 20th century models of pollution. Her artistic work focuses on trash as a site of intersection for environmentalisms, capitalism, consumerism, and participation. Max is an author on the Discard Studies Blog and coordinates NYU's Green Grants Program. She received her BFA with distinction, with a minor in biology, from Mount Allison University, NB, Canada, and her MFA with a certificate of cultural studies from SUNY Stony Brook, NY.

Paul Melton
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.

Beza Merid
Beza's primary research interest is the performance of stand-up comedy as it relates to discourses of pain and vulnerability, the body, cultural memory, the performance space and the interactional nature of the comic performance. His work also concerns the various media of comic performance through time, with particular interest in how a given medium articulates or disrupts the transmission of affect, the process of identification and the ritual of laughter. Beza earned his MA in Afro-American Studies from UCLA, and his BA in Comparative Literature from USC.

Nadja Millner-Larsen
Nadja holds a BA in History and Human Rights from Bard College. Before pursuing her doctoral degree she worked at as a media analyst and a 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.
 
Wazhmah Osman
Wazhmah's broad area of interest is cultural contestations as they manifest into politically charged debates in mediated public spheres. More specifically, her research looks at the politics of represe ntation and visual culture around issues and imagery pertaining to "The War On Terror" and "Afghan Wo m e n" and how they reverberate globally. Her dissertation "Thinking Outside the Box: Television and Gender in the Afghan Culture Wars" takes a media ethnographic approach to studying how the Post 9/11  mediascape of Afghanistan is constituting gender subjectivities in the daily lives of  Afghans. Wazhmah earned a Masters in Near Eastern Studies also from New York University (Thesis: "Contentious Births: Modernity and Gender Rights in Afghanistan") and two BAs in English and Film from Rutgers University. She has also completed the innovative Graduate Program in Culture and Media through NYU Anthropology. She travels frequently between Kabul and NYC.

Elizabeth Patton
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 vernacular architecture, urban spaces, politics of tourism, visual culture and discourses on sexuality, gender, public/private and identity.

Aaron Pedinotti
Aaron has an M.A. 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.

Matthew Powers
Broadly, Matt's research interests include the sociology of news, comparative media and the public sphere. At present, his dissertation research considers the changing character of foreign news production, focusing on the information production practices of NGOs.

Kyle Rentschler
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 Sabat email
Magdalena is a doctoral candidate with the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She has a BA from the University of Toronto and an MA from the University of Amsterdam. Her early academic training was in the fields of visual arts and cultural studies. Her research interests include visual studies, the body and urban space, specifically, architecture in city margins.

Jessica Shimmin
Jessica's dissertation explores the production of "safe space" by examining the ideologies, everyday practices, and social resources that professionals at a Massachusetts domestic violence non-profit draw upon to create a culturally meaningful transitional place for battered women. Research and teaching interests include space and place; gender; public and private; violence and safety; ethnography.

Scott Selberg email
Scott's research and teaching interests include visual culture, critical theory, cultural memory, science and technology studies, and cultural studies. His dissertation explores the visual culture of
Alzheimer's disease, focusing in particular on the intersections of cognition, age, and bioethics. Scott also has a background in film and radio production and as a curator and programmer at film festivals and museums. He earned his BA in Art History from Williams College and his MA in Communication Studies (with emphasis on media and cultural studies) from UNC Chapel Hill.

James Stanley
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 M.A. in Media, Culture, and Communication from NYU.

Luke Stark
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 Stonbely
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.

Rachelle Sussman
Rachelle's research focuses on the circulation of discourses and images of Africa within American culture through the lens of philanthropy. Other research interests include the branding of social activism; gendered representations in the media; gender, media and sport; and culture jamming. She also has an interest in the experiences of students of color in higher education, and has directed minority recruitment for Sarah Lawrence College's Office of Admissions as well as served as Co-Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Scholars Program at New York University. MA, Women's History, Sarah Lawrence College; BA, Political Science/Women's Studies, University of Vermont.

Jennifer E. Telesca
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.

Carlin Wing
Carlin received her AB 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.

Tim Wood
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 email
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 M.A. in Media, Culture and Communication from NYU, as well as a B.A. in Media Studies, also from NYU.

Ekin Yasin
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 M.A 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.