Featured Undergrads

Born and raised in Kolkata, India, Abhimanyu Das graduated in 2005 with a BA in English from Franklin and Marshall College. Gradually, his interests in new kinds of media texts (such as computer games, graphic novels, and serialized fiction) began to push against the outer limits of proscribed curriculum of his English department. His struggles with core questions about transmedia storytelling, the audiovisual elements of texts and social context of genre narratives led him to develop a secondary concentration in Film Studies, during which he did archival research at the British Film Institute and also read a lot of comics. His relevant professional experience includes writing about film and literature as well as a brief stint in publishing.

At MIT, he hopes to pursue a thesis project that studies “the confluence of post-colonial influences and the effect of globalization on two rapidly expanding media movements, the Indian independent film and the Indian comic book.” He is currently working at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media as an RA. His long-term goal is to be able to make a living as a cultural journalist with the clout to make a few people do more than just smile indulgently while he talks about movies and comics.

Joshua Diaz went from a BA in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College (2004) to working within the computer games industry. His game industry experiences include working in QA at Electronic Arts’ Los Angeles Studio, serving as systems designer for the PlayStation 2 title The Sopranos: Road to Respect, and working as a game designer for DS platform games at Seven Studios. Diaz reports that “the rigorous and interdisciplinary approach [he was taught in the St. John’s “Great Books” program] would later be of great benefit, as I found game design almost always involves negotiating between aesthetic and technological requirements and in translating principles from one field into others.” His academic interests focus on exploring the relationship between video games and cognition, in studying the relations between amateur and professional practitioners, and in developing new ways to talk, think and teach learning.

Kevin Driscoll earned his BA in Visual Art from Assumption College in 2002. He joins CMS after three years teaching Computer Science at Prospect Hill Academy Charter School in Cambridge, MA. There he explored issues of identity management, media production, literacy, hacking, and hip-hop with the consistently brilliant students in grades 6-12. Inspired by a challenging first year in the classroom, Kevin co-founded a non-profit organization called TeachForward (later re-named Developing Curriculum, Inc.) to encourage the sharing and development of high-quality, free learning materials on the web. In addition to his work in education. Kevin is a frequent collaborator with internet-based artist Claire Chanel and a hip-hop dj responsible for Gold Chain and Todo Mundo events. His website can be found at http://kevindriscoll.info.

Colleen Kaman comes to MIT with a strong interest in ethnography and the intersection of media, politics, and democracy. Colleen is an Emmy-nominated journalist and documentary filmmaker whose work has aired on Chicago Public Radio, National Geographic Explorer, Showtime, HBO, NBC, ABC, and CNN. Her professional work has included stories about publicly funded private education, alleged mercy killings in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Europe. She has directed two short films and taught nonfiction filmmaking in India. Colleen has also produced and directed commercial radio, television, and web production for state and federal political campaigns. She holds a B.A. in cultural anthropology from Bates College.

While at CMS, Colleen is working as a researcher with the MIT Center for Future Civic Media. She is also exploring the creation of narrative and identity across media, communication regulation and the role of new technologies in community, and information design.

Before coming to MIT, Ana Domb Krauskopf worked as a journalist, producer and arts manager in her native Costa Rica. Ana’s work has always revolved around the creative industries. In 2003, she collaborated with film historian María Lourdes Cortes to create Cinergia, the first film production fund designed to stimulate media activity in Central America and Cuba, and coordinated the project until June 2007. She has also worked with the Papaya Music label in research, marketing, corporate sales, fundraising, public relations and concert and CD production. In early 2006, she co-produced the Papaya Fest, the first Central American music festival, with Luciano Capelli. This large-scale event involved more than 70 musicians and diverse styles ranging from Belizean rap, to Costa Rican acid jazz and Panamanian pop. Ana’s research interests include alternative distribution and consumption of creative goods and how they relate to the production process.

Lan Xuan Le, who has BAs in both Biology and Asian Studies from Swarthmore College (2004) and a Masters in Public Health from Boston University (2007), has been part of the “games for health movement,” conducting a qualitative study and co-authoring a white paper for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation on the use of games to combat childhood obesity. She also has a strong interest in the globalization of media and the construction of alternative understandings of what it means to be Asian and Asian-American through popular culture, an interest which led her to design, research and execute a library exhibition of anime and manga for Swarthmore’s McCabe Library. She wrote an undergraduate thesis on problematic gender and sexual representations in Japanese popular culture with a particular focus on Card Captor Sakura, a paper which won the Swarthmore College Asian Studies Program’s top writing prize.

Xiaochang Li completed a BA at New York University in 2006, where she wrote an undergraduate thesis on narrative structure in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time while also exploring various aspects of media production through internships in film production, publishing, and web design and advertising. She then spent the interim year in Germany on fellowship through the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange, where she spent her time working with independent film production firms in Berlin and Saarbrücken and going 220km per hour on the autobahn.

Her current research interests include the emergence of narrative forms in the digital landscape that shift our understanding of, and interaction with, the structure of texts and the relationships of gender and sexual performativity between Eastern and Western media through the lens of fan-generated content. In the future, she hopes to see Roland Barthes resurrected from the dead to author a book about YouTube that consists entirely of a series of semi-related Cat Macros.

Jason Rockwood studied communication theory and video games as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research there explored the social and psychological demographics of gay video game players. Currently, he is interested in understanding the functioning of real estate markets in virtual economies. Jason has been quoted in magazines such as Details, Salon.com, Kotaku, Joystiq and The Advocate. He lives in Cambridge with his dog, Nibbles.

Talieh Rohani studied filmmaking at Soureh University in Tehran, Iran, before going on to do a BFA in Image Arts/Film Studies at Ryerson University in Toronto and to pursue an MFA in Cinema Studies at San Francisco State University. She has directed four short films and worked, variously, as a director, art director and production designer, cinematographer and editor. She is interested in the emergence post-revolutionary popular culture in lives of young Iranian women and in the larger impact of technology on the development of a new global imagination. She sees CMS as a place to broaden and strengthen the ideas and skills that she hopes to bring back to her flimmaking practice.

Lauren Silberman graduated with a BA in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she also spent four years as a research assistant in the Games, Learning, and Society program. Using commercial sport video games as a model, her core research investigates how sport video games mediate athletes’ physical play. She has observed and interviewed numerous professional and college level athletes about their virtual game-play. Other research interests include developing effective business models and strategies for companies in an ever changing media landscape and understanding the effect Web _.0 is having on our social interactions and public identities. Her research has been published in The Journal of Physical Education and she has presented her research in various forums throughout the United States and abroad. She has worked for NBC and other leading media companies as a researcher and project assistant.

Lana grew up on a houseboat in Miami, Florida. She is interested in the social life of consumer goods. Her thesis centers around the consumption of counterfeit luxury items. At CMS, she is part of the Project New Media Literacies research group and is currently developing a Teachers' Strategy Guide on cultural geography and new media.

She graduated in 2002 from the University of Florida, where she studied English and wrote an honors thesis about sex and advertising in James Joyce's Ulysses. After graduation, she taught high school English in Houston, Texas, with TeachForAmerica. Since then, she's worked in nonprofit development and autism education and research. She also is a freelance ethnographic consumer researcher and has worked with Flamingo International for clients such P&G, L'Oreal, Diageo, and Samsung.

Whitney Anne Trettien, who holds a B.A. in both English and Philosophy from Hood College (2007), spent her time as an undergraduate studying early English literature, continental and post-modern philosophy, as well as Latin, Old English, and Ancient Greek. Outside the classroom, she wrote extensively for online indie rock publications, edited webzines, and designed clothing for her internet company Moonslush. Unexpected commonalities between her academic research and the online communities she was involved with sparked her ongoing interest in the relationship between early oral narratives and the so-called “secondary orality” produced in digital culture.

Trettien is also a Truman Scholar and a political activist, having worked with the Green Party, Amnesty International, Women in Black, ACORN, and the Pro-Literacy Council, among other groups. She recently edited an anthology of stories, poems, photography, and artwork from the American peace movement entitled Cost of Freedom, which was published by Howling Dog Press in 2007.

Her blog is at http://blog.whitneyannetrettien.com.

Jason Begy graduated from Canisius College in Buffalo where he earned a BA in English (2004) and spent much of his time working for Canisius' Department of Information Technology Services. Begy's undergraduate thesis argued that the rules and mechanics of chess and go were a reflection of the religious traditions of Catholicism and Buddhism, respectively. In 2008, Begy completed an MS in Technical Communication at Northeastern University in Boston, where his coursework focused on information design for the Web and information architecture for internal corporate and university networks. He looks forward to continuing his work in games by focusing on abstraction and emergent game play.

Audubon Dougherty studied writing at Emerson College before transferring to Smith College to complete a degree in anthropology with a focus on visual culture (2002). This led her to the field of human rights, where she traveled to Southeast Asia in 2006 as a blogger and photographer to assess disaster relief projects assisting tsunami survivors. In 2007, she returned to Thailand to provide new media training for an organization serving Burmese migrants and undocumented workers. As a communications specialist for a labor union, she helped develop a new media program which utilized e-communication, streaming video and mobile messaging to organize 22,000 home care workers in Massachusetts. These professional experiences inspired her to pursue graduate study at CMS, where she plans to research the ways grassroots organizations can use accessible media tools to expand their online outreach, harness advocacy capabilities and communicate more effectively with their constituencies. Outside of work, Dougherty formed her own video production collective, producing and directing films for exhibition at festivals and on the web. Her website is at tapioca.tv.

Madeleine Elish pursued extensive research in contemporary art practices, anthropology of technology and critical theory as an undergraduate at Columbia University (BA 2006). Beyond her coursework, she directed and acted in theater productions, curated art shows and taught in an after-school arts program. An internship during college turned into a job at the Whitney Museum of American Art where she wrote essays and curriculum guides based on the museum's art collection and published on the Whitney's website for students and teachers. Since graduating, Elish has also worked for the contemporary art gallery Gavin Brown's enterprise, NPR's On the Media, and most recently, worked as an editor for various websites published by Rodale. At CMS, her research revolves around the intersection of vision, perception, aesthetics and ethics, centering around the ways that new media alter the way we see the world.

Florence Gallez was a Moscow-based journalist for eight years, most recently as a freelance producer for CNN's Moscow Bureau. She has covered Russian politics, economy and culture for a variety of print, broadcast and electronic media organizations, including The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Moscow Times, and the U.S. publisher Bureau of National Affairs. She has also reported for the BBC World Service in Budapest and for the Russian daily Segodnya in London. These experiences have left her with a strong interest in understanding and circumventing various forms of government censorship of the news. At MIT she plans to develop a secure online space for media professionals and their audience to collaborate on news stories reporting and writing, which could be replicated in a variety of offline spaces in order to optimize flexibility and interference-free access.

She holds a BA in English and Russian from the University of London and a MSc in journalism from Boston University, with additional course work completed at Harvard University.

A lifelong Prince fan with an interest in copyright and cyber rights, she has covered Russia’s IP issues and legislation for BNA’s Patent, Trademark & Copyright Journal, and in her spare time she dreams of creating the “ultimate Prince music distribution system.”

Madeline Flourish Klink co-founded one of the largest Harry Potter fan fiction sites, FictionAlley.org, a project which was nominated for a Webby in 2004 and a Prix Ars Electronica award in 2005. She was one of the young fan fiction writers interviewed for Convergence Culture, already identified as a key writer and editor while still in high school. Her undergraduate career focused on the classics and religion, interests that she learned to combine with her growing fascination with digital media and fan culture. She earned a BA in religion from Reed College in 2008, where her undergraduate thesis explored the question: Can one have a Catholic religious experience in virtual reality? The project ultimately centered on religious communities within Second Life. At MIT, Klink looks forward to returning to her long-standing interests in education and fan culture. Her personal website is at madelineklink.com.

Hillary Kolos completed a BFA at Tisch School of the Arts, NYU and worked in after-school programs, including one at the School of the Future, where she co-taught a high school filmmaking class. After graduating from college in 2002, she worked at a not-for-profit production company that produces documentaries on current issues in education for PBS. Seeking more experience in the classroom, she then worked as a media educator in New York City schools. She currently works as a media mentor for Adobe, advising teachers on how to incorporate media into their curricula. She was inspired to return to graduate school after reading the white paper produced by Project NML for the MacArthur Foundation. She has expressed a desire to do thesis work focused on efforts by Katie Salen to develop a game-design based high school in New York. In the future, she hopes to work as a consultant to help teachers incorporate new media literacy skills into their classrooms.

Michelle Moon Lee holds a BA in computer science and architectural studies from Brown University (2005). Her projects include "Brackets: Imagined and Real Architecture in the Han, Tang, and Liao Dynasties" with accompanying 3-D models which examines traditional Chinese architectural elements over time, a website focused on the history of pirates and junks in the South China Sea, an architectural history game for 4th-grade girls, and a research tool and serious game produced by Georgia Tech's Tennenbaum Institute. Her extracurricular interests include theatre, feminist and queer activism, and publishing. Recently, she worked on an augmented reality performance of "Woyzeck" and remediated the piece as an interactive Flash game. Lee is currently a prospective member of Quilted, a web design and development cooperative that works with social change and nonprofit organizations. Her research focus at CMS is educational and social awareness-related gaming, specifically the ways in which games can be used to explore and support social initiatives, issues, and problems. Her portfolio can be found at michellemoonlee.com.

Elliot Pinkus earned an undergraduate degree in information science at Cornell (BA 2008) which allowed him to focus on game design and development courses. He was a member of Cornell's first Experimental Game Play Project. He has created and implemented a game-design curriculum for Ithaca Middle School and High School students. For the past two summers, Pinkus has worked as a game designer contributing to the work of The Education Arcade - with a primary focus on designing puzzles for the game Labyrinth. He also consulted with one of the GAMBIT teams whose work was enmeshed with The Education Arcade. Beyond games, he has a strong interest in creative writing and narrative writing, including a growing fascination with how the visual storytelling strategies of comics and television create emotional engagement. His writing includes a discussion of Lawrence Lessig's views on how copyright laws impact cultural production.

Nick Seaver graduated with a BA in interdisciplinary literature from Yale (2007). As an undergraduate, his interest in sonic media led him to research the relationship between the technology of sound reproduction and social conceptions of "noise," drawing on sources such as David Bowie, Dada sound poems, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, and Brian Eno. His academic work is supplemented by experiments in computer-aided composition (using sampling and remixing methods inspired by Eno and minimalist composers such as Steve Reich) and dance music DJing (including a party based on Antonioni's Blow-Up). In addition to his work in sonic media, Nick has a longstanding interest in the history of the book, which led him to spend a year training full-time as a hand bookbinder. What draws Seaver to the CMS program is a structuralist fascination with the mechanisms of media transmission and the politics and poetics of sampling. His research interests include memetics, data sonification, copies, originals, and noisy failures. His website can be found at nickseaver.net.

Sheila Murphy Seles studied television and popular culture at Middlebury College (BA 2005), completing a senior thesis project centered on Absolutely Fabulous. She did an internship with the writers of The Shield in Los Angeles, getting a first-hand glimpse of how television gets produced. "I had the chance to see several episodes of The Shield's fifth season from beginning to end; I sat in on brainstorming in the writer's room, edits and table reads; I spent a considerable amount of time on set during filming; I watched the editors shape that raw footage into director's cuts, final cuts, and episode promos; and I got a rudimentary education in post- production, from sound mixing to color timing, during visits to studios around LA," Seles reports. All of this has given her a strong interest in the creative industries and the intersection between fan cultures and queer activism, including an interest in the ways that The Rocky Horror Picture Show's participatory culture provided a site of political empowerment in 1970s New York and the contemporary production and digital distribution of queer media content.