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Curtis Wong is manager of the Microsoft Next Media Research Group, whose focus spans the linear and interactive media spectrum from television, broadband, and gaming to emerging media forms. The author of more than 20 patents pending in such areas as interactive television, media browsing, visualization, design, and mobile computing, Wong was previously Director of Intel Productions. At Intel, he was responsible for creating next generation content such as the Virtual Van Gogh Museum Tour; ArtMuseum.net, one of the first Web-based, broadband art exhibition networks; and the Whitney's American Century Exhibition. Wong was also the General Manager and Executive Producer of Corbis Productions, the digital image company started by Bill Gates, where he created a series of award winning CD-ROMs on subjects such as *A Passion for Art*, *FDR*, *Critical Mass*, and *Leonardo Da Vinci*. Prior to Corbis he was an interactive-documentary producer for the Criterion Collection, producing some of the first feature films on laserdiscs and multimedia CD-ROMs for the Voyager Company. Wongs work in interactive media has won many design and industry awards, including New York Film Festival Gold Medals, the ID Magazine Annual Design Award of Excellence, and Communication Arts Interactive award of Excellence. His collaboration with WGBH Interactive on the broadband-enhanced documentary *Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy*, won a 2002 Academy Award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts and was nominated for the first Interactive TV Emmy. He is currently working with WGBH *Frontline* on an enhanced broadband documentary for television/web scheduled to air in Summer 2006.

Miri Navasky is an award-winning documentary filmmaker who began her career in television when she joined FRONTLINE in 1991. While on staff, she worked on numerous films, including The Killer at Thurston High (2000), which she co-produced with Karen O'Connor. This 90-minute film examined the life of a 15-year-old school shooter in Oregon and won the Banff award for best social/political documentary. In 2000, Navasky formed an independent production company, Mead Street Films, and continued her work with O'Connor producing films for FRONTLINE, including: A Crime of Insanity (2002), an in-depth investigation into the criminal case of a 26-year-old paranoid schizophrenic who killed himself behind bars; and The New Asylums (2005), an intimate and powerful portrait of the hundreds of thousands of mentally ill people incarcerated in jails and prisons across America. The film was nominated for an Emmy Award, earned the 2006 Robert F. Kennedy Grand Prize Award for Journalism and won the Excellence in Journalism Award from the National Commission on Correctional Health Care, marking the first time a television program received the award. In 2006, Navasky and O'Connor produced Living Old, a disturbing look at what it really means to grow old in contemporary America. O'Connor and Navasky's most recent production, The Undertaking, is a powerful and moving exploration of death and dying told through the perspective of writer/poet Thomas Lynch, an undertaker in Central Michigan whose family has cared for the dead for three generations. The film aired on PBS in the fall of 2007 and won an Emmy Award.

Dava Sobel has spent her entire professional life writing. Beginning fresh out of college as a technical writer for IBM, she moved quickly into journalism in January of 1970, just in time for the first Earth Day. Her two all-time favorite full-time jobs were as science writer for the *Cornell University News Bureau*, where her beat included everything from astronomy to veterinary medicine, and staff reporter in the Science News department of *The New York Times*, covering psychology and psychiatry. For twenty years she wrote freelance for numerous magazines, most notably *Harvard Magazine*, *Omni*, *Science Digest*, and *Discover*, as well as *Audubon, Life*, and *The New Yorker*. Sobel saw her first total solar eclipse in 1991, as a columnist with *Travel Holiday*, and attended Space Camp for an article in a retirement magazine called "New Choices". Sobel was born in 1947 in the Bronx.

Will Holton is associate professor of sociology at Northeastern University. He graduated from Vanderbilt University in 164, majoring in sociology with a minor in history, and then earned two degrees in sociology at Boston University, an M.S. in 1966 and a Ph.D. in 1972. He joined the faculty at Northeastern University in 193, where his teaching and research focus on neighborhood change, group relations, poverty, and political issues in Boston. Since 1975 he has taught the popular "Sociology of Boston" course, for which he has prepared a text, "Discovering Boston: A Social Perspective on the City." From 1984 to 2000 he operated "Discovering Boston Walking Tours." In 1986 Holton delivered a series of N.E.H. lectures titled "The Social History of the South End" at the South End Branch of the Boston Public Library. His current major research focuses on the motivations for the massive project that filled the 850-acre Back Bay marsh in Boston in the nineteenth century. Holton is president of The Partnership of the Historic Bostons, a nonprofit organization that educates the public about its historical legacy from the town of Boston, England. [Source: http://books.google.com/books?id=Qg\_uLLXLY5kC&pg=PA260&lpg=PA260&dq=Wilfred+E.+Holton&source=bl&ots=oErqiO1HO7&sig=bLD5qr3xK29Y7\_3uT\_pOY-dmTkU&hl=en&ei=DidPTKjVFYGynAeklI3WBw&sa=X&oi=book\_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CCMQ6AEwBjgK#v=onepage&q=Wilfred%20E.%20Holton&f=false]

Zoe Trodd is a fellow at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in the Center for the Study of the American South. She has a PhD from Harvard University's History of American Civilization department and a BA/MA from Cambridge University in English Literature. She researches and teaches American protest literature, especially the literature of civil rights, anti-lynching and abolitionism.

Adoyo Owuor is the Founder and Executive Director of Zamani Foundation. She received her BA from the University of California, Davis where she concentrated on Italian Literature, Music Composition and Art.

Doric Wilson was one of the first playwrights at NYC's legendary Caffe Cino, his comedy *And He Made A Her* opening there in 1961, with Jane Lowry and Paxton Whitehead in the leads. Other Cino productions followed, including *Now She Dances!*, *Babel Babel Little Tower* and *Pretty People*. He received his early theater training under Lorraine Larson, apprenticed with Dorothy Seeburger and the Richland Players (WA), and studied briefly at the Drama Department of the University of Washington until he was asked to leave after he initiated a one person protest against anti-gay shootings at a nearby park. Doric Wilson's plays *Street Theater*, *The West Street Gang*, *Forever After* and *A Perfect Relationship* became staples of the emerging Gay Theater circuit, widely performed here and abroad and winning numerous honors, including The Villager and Chambers-Blackwell best play citations. In 1994 Wilson received the first Robert Chesley Award for Lifetime Achievement in Gay Theatre. He is a member of The Dramatist Guild and the Evette Society. He is currently working on two new plays, *An Object of Affection* and *Saints on a Secret Mission*.