ORGANIZED BY:

Steve Seid is video curator at the Pacific Film Archive. He has curated over five hundred programs featuring independent media works created in electronic and digital platforms. Seid has taught courses in media art history and aesthetics at UC Berkeley, San Francisco State University, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the California College of Arts. He also writes on topics concerning video and new media.

PRESENTERS

Kathleen Tyner is the author of Literacy in a Digital World: Teaching and Learning in the Age of Information. Tyner is an education consultant who travels the world to teach about media and new technologies. She was founding director of Strategies for Media Literacy, a San Francisco–based organization that promoted media education through resource development and training; has authored curriculum guidelines for a number of school districts; co-authored Media & You, an activity book for teachers; and is currently a consultant to the National Alliance of Media Arts and Culture regarding their youth media initiatives.

Della Peretti is the coordinator of Developmental Teacher Education, Berkeley's model M.A./Multiple Subject Credential program for preparing elementary school teachers. She spent 19 years in the Oakland Unified School District as an elementary, middle school (French), and resource teacher, as well as a staff developer and program coordinator. Peretti received her Ph.D. in Educational Policy Analysis from the University of California, Berkeley.

Rainey Straus and Katherine Isbister Rainey Straus is the founder and principal designer of Whirligirl Studio, which focuses on web and interactive design. She received her M.F.A. in sculpture from the California College of the Arts, and a B.F.A. in painting from the State University of New York at Purchase. Rainey's work explores desire, technology, and the body. She recently created (with Isbister) the online SimGallery project for Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Katherine Isbister received her Ph.D. from Stanford University, with a focus on the design of interactive characters. She teaches a course called “Designing Characters for Computer Games,” in Stanford's HCI program. Her artwork has been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the MIT Media Lab's Portraits in Cyberspace online gallery. Isbister is the founder of katherine interface, a social and character interface design consultancy.

Marilyn Fabe obtained her Ph.D. in English literature at UC Berkeley. She has been teaching film courses at Berkeley since 1975 and is a founding member of the Film Studies faculty. She was a contributing editor to the MacMillan Films Film Study Extract project in 1976, a pioneering series of booklets that offered film educators models for close textual analyses of film style. Fabe's Art of Film: An Introduction, Perspectives of 100 Years of Film History & Aesthetics was published in 2000, and her next book, Closely Watched Films, is forthcoming in 2004.

Stephen Gong is associate director of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Previously, he served as a program officer in the Media Arts Program at the National Endowment for the Arts, and as the Associate Director of the National Center for Film and Video Preservation at the American Film Institute. He has taught in the Asian American Studies Department and the American Studies Institute at UC Berkeley and at the University of Hawaii, and writes and lectures on film history, preservation, and independent media.

Valerie Soe is an educator and experimental videomaker whose award-winning productions include Mixed Blood, Picturing Oriental Girls: A (Re) Educational Videotape, Black Sheep, and All Orientals Look the Same. Soe has taught media arts production and theory at the high school and college level, including ten years as chair of the Film/Video Department of the California State Summer School for the Arts, an intensive arts program for gifted teenagers. Soe is currently on the faculty of San Francisco State University's Asian American Studies Department.

Joshua Gamson joined the University of San Francisco faculty after nine years of teaching at Yale University. Gamson teaches Sociology of Culture; Sex and Sexualities; Television and Society; and Race, Class, and Gender. He received his Ph.D. (1992) and M.A. (1988) from UC Berkeley, and his B.A. from Swarthmore College (1985). Gamson is the author of Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America and Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity. He is currently studying the impact of ownership consolidation and concentration in gay and lesbian media, and is writing a cultural-history biography of the disco star Sylvester.

Mindy Faber is an award-winning independent video producer, as well as a media curator, and educator. Before teaching Radio/TV at Evanston Township High School in Illinois, Faber served as the director of distribution at Video Machete, a Chicago-based nonprofit organization that helps youth represent their experiences and struggles through video, web, and multimedia production. For over ten years, Faber was the associate director of the Video Data Bank at the Art Institute of Chicago, a renowned resource for video art and alternative media.