Staff

A 2002 graduate from the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, VA, he received his Bachelor of Arts with a Literary & Cultural Studies concentration in Postmodern Literature, 'Cyberpunk' Science Fiction, and Contemporary Japanese Literature in Translation. His previous professional experience was as a Desktop and Lab Systems Technician for Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. The ending to Shadow of the Collossus made him cry.

Dr. Kurt Fendt is Research Director in Foreign Languages and Literatures and the Comparative Media Studies Graduate Program (CMS). He is Director of the HyperStudio, a development laboratory for educational media projects in the humanities and co-Principal Investigator and Manager of the d'Arbeloff-funded Metamedia project. He has held Visiting Professorships at the University of Cologne, the Technical University of Aachen (both Germany), and the University of Klagenfurt, Austria; he was also Visiting Scientist at the Fraunhofer Institut in Sankt Augustin, Germany. His work includes the conceptualization and implementation of multimedia applications for the humanities, with a special focus on foreign-language and culture education, interaction design, and research on hypertext and narrative theory. Since 2005, he has been organizing the MIT Short Film Festival.

Fendt teaches several courses in the CMS Graduate Program, in Foreign Languages and Literatures, and the Literature Section. He is co- Director of "Berliner sehen", a collaborative hypermedia learning environment for German Studies, the on-line collaboration space for educators "Berliner sehen Exchange", and co-author of the French interactive narrative A la rencontre de Philippe (CD-ROM version). Before coming to MIT in 1993, Fendt was Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Bern in Switzerland, where he established the Media Learning Center for the Humanities and earned his Ph.D. in modern German literature with a thesis on hypertext and text theory in 1993 after having completed his MA at the University of Munich, Germany.

Generoso Fierro (Gene) is the Outreach Coordinator for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, and works closely with our visiting scholars and research affiliates. Currently, Generoso is the membership director of the MIT radio station WMBR, where he is the longtime DJ of the program Generoso's Bovine Ska and Rocksteady. The show concentrates on the music of Jamaica prior to reggae (mento, ska and rocksteady) and has been on the air since 1997. A filmmaker and avid film fan, Gene recently finished a documentary on the legendary Jamaican guitarist Nearlin "Lynn" Taitt.

Scot Osterweil leads several Education Arcade projects promoting learning in math, literacy, history, science and foreign language. Formerly the Senior Designer at TERC, a research & development center devoted to math and science education, he designed Zoombinis Island Odyssey, winner of the 2003 Bologna New Media Prize, and the most recent game in the Zoombinis line of products (Riverdeep/TLC). He is the creator of the Zoombinis, and with Chris Hancock he co-designed the multi-award winning Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, and its first sequel, Zoombinis Mountain Rescue. He is the also the designer of the games Switchback and Yoiks!.

Scot's other software designs included work on InspireData (Inspiration Software). He has participated in research on the role of computer games in learning, and on the use of video in data collection and representation. He previously worked in television, on the production of Public Television's Frontline, Evening at Pops, and American Playhouse, and as an animator on a wide range of programs. He is a graduate of Yale College with a degree in Theater Studies.

Douglas Purdy is the Manager of the Humanities Film Office. He is also the teaching assistant for Kung Fu Cinema: Transnational Perspectives. Purdy has been a DJ at WZBC's Beyond the QE2: Future Funk Radio, one of Boston's longest-running dance shows. He has completed a horror novel and is currently plodding through the second. His most recent publication was in the small press anthology, Vivisections.

Brad Seawell coordinates the MIT Communications Forum and helps to promote and organize some CMS public events including the media-in-transition conferences. He is associate editor of the media-in-transition anthologies Rethinking New Media: The Aesthetics of Transition and Democracy and New Media. Prior to working at MIT, he was an editor at Banker & Tradesman, a business weekly based in Boston.

Prior to working for CMS, Becky Shepardson was an administrative assistant for the Computer Science and AI Lab at MIT. She continues to work part-time as an editorial assistant for the theoretical computer science journal Information and Computation.  Becky holds a master’s degree in Applied Linguistics from Boston University.

Philip Tan is the executive director for the US operations of the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, a game research initiative hosted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is concurrently a project manager for the Media Development Authority (MDA) of Singapore.

He has served as a member of the steering committee of the Singapore chapter of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) and worked closely with Singapore game developers to launch industry-wide initiatives and administer content development grants as an assistant manager in the Animation & Games Industry Development section of MDA. He has produced and designed PC online games at The Education Arcade, a research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that studied and created educational games. He complements a Master's degree in Comparative Media Studies with work in Boston's School of Museum of Fine Arts, the MIT Media Lab, WMBR 88.1FM and the MIT Assassins' Guild, the latter awarding him the title of "Master Assassin" for his live-action roleplaying game designs. He also founded a DJ crew at MIT.

Jessica Tatlock joined CMS in July 2009 after working as Project Associate at Project New Media Literacies. She spent the previous year coordinating the Internet Safety Technical Task Force at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Prior to Harvard, Jessica worked for more than a decade in Boston's youth development and education fields, developing programs, tools and resources for practitioners working in a wide range of settings. As NML Project Associate, Jessica manages the details behind the scenes at NML. She has an M.Ed in Cultural Diversity and Curriculum Reform from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and lives in Brookline with her two school-aged children.

Anna’s background combines community work, youth work, education and new media production. Working with Henry Jenkins, Provost Professor at the University of Southern California and former Principal Investigator at the Center for Future Civic Media, Anna will conduct research on the ways in which participatory culture environments support the kinds of social deliberation, debate, and advocacy practices that allow entry into a shared public discourse.

Most recently, Anna worked as Creative Manager for project New Media Literacies (NML) at MIT's Comparative Media Studies (CMS). She led the production and development of innovative educational materials informed by a deep understanding of the ways youth interact with and produce media.

Prior to working at MIT, Anna developed new media curriculum and taught multimedia production at after school programs and at the college level. An independent video artist, Anna has shown her experimental shorts in festivals internationally. She received her B.A. magna cum laude in Art & Art History from Colgate University, and her MFA in Film & Video from Massachusetts College of Art.

A native of Washington, DC, Andrew holds a B.A. in Communication from Wake Forest University and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Emerson College. He worked previously in higher education publishing at Houghton Mifflin and at the Feinstein International Center, a humanitarianism research center at Tufts University.

In his all-too spare time, he is the fiction editor for Identity Theory and maintains his blog at fungibleconvictions.com.

As the program manager for CMS, Sarah Wolozin manages the financial, research, and personnel administration as well as development and outreach for the program. Before arriving at CMS, she produced documentaries and websites for PBS and cable for over ten years on topics ranging from African-American arts to the American healthcare system.