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  • William R. Grant is director of *Science*, *Nature* and *History* programs at WNET in New York, the flagship of the US public television system. He joined WNET in 1995 after 12 years at WGBH in Boston, where he was managing editor of *Frontline*, and then, for 10 years, executive editor of *Nova*. At WGBH he also served as executive producer of *Living Against the Odds* and *Made In America?* At WNET he is in charge of one of public television's largest documentary production departments which brings to national broadcast an average of 40 hours of programs a year in the areas of natural history, science, history, business, travel and other topics. While at WNET he has also been executive producer of *Innovation* and *Going Places*, two PBS anthology series, and numerous mini-series, including *America on Wheels*, *Savage Skies*, *Savage Earth*, *Savage Seas*, *Knife to The Heart*, *Stephen Hawking's Universe*, *On the Trail Of Mark Twain*, *The American President*, *In Search of Ancient Ireland*, *The Rise And Fall of Jim Crow*, *Slavery and the Making Of America*, *African American Lives*, *Oprah's Roots: An African American Lives Special*, *African American Lives 2*, *The Ascent Of Money*, and *Looking For Lincoln*. He has been responsible, as executive in charge of production, for *Nature*, one of public television's most watched continuing series, and the mini-series *Savage Planet*, *Secrets of the Dead,** Secrets of the Pharaohs*, *Warship*, *Warplane*, *Africa*, *DNA*, *1900 House*, *Frontier House*, *Manor House*, *Colonial House*, *Texas Ranch House*, *The Secret Life of the Brain*, *The Mysterious Human Heart*, and *The Supreme Court*. Prior to joining WGBH in 1983, he was for 14 years a reporter and editor at two of the nation's largest daily newspapers -- *The Detroit Free Press* and *The San Francisco Chronicle*, where his work won numerous awards.
  • In his 20 years of work in public television, Stephen Ives has established himself as one of the nation's leading independent documentary directors. His landmark series The West was seen by more than 38 million people nationwide during its national PBS premiere in the fall of 1996, making it one of the most watched PBS programs of all time. Ives' documentary film *Lindbergh*, a portrait of the reluctant American hero Charles A. Lindbergh, premiered the third season of *American Experience* series on PBS in 1990. *The Los Angeles Times* called the film "a powerful slice of history. . . an engrossing study of a complex figure." In 1987, Ives began a decade-long collaboration with filmmaker Ken Burns, as a co-producer of a history of the United States Congress, and as a consulting producer on the groundbreaking series, *The Civil War* and *Baseball*. After the premiere of *The West*, Ives turned his attention towards contemporary films, producing a profile of the innovative Cornerstone Theater Company, which aired on HBO in the fall of 1999, and *Amato: a love affair with opera*, a portrait of the world's smallest opera company which aired nationally on PBS in 2001 and earned Ives a nomination from The Director's Guild of America for Outstanding Directorial Achievement. His profile of the 1930's thoroughbred Seabiscuit, which aired on *American Experience* in April 2003, won a prime-time Emmy award, and his PBS series, *Reporting America at War*, about American war correspondents was described by *The Los Angeles Times* as "television that matters...a visual document of power and clarity." Since 2003, he has directed four films for American Experience: *Seabiscuit*, *Las Vegas*, *New Orleans*, and *Kit Carson*. His film on the assassination of Martin Luther King and the manhunt for James Earl Ray, based on the book by best-selling author Hampton Sides, wrapped production last summer.
  • Martin Hyun was born in 1979 in Krefeld, Germany. After a professional career in the German Ice-Hockey League (DEL), he went on to study political science in the USA (St. Michael's College, VT) and Belgium. After doing a PhD on migrant workers he committed himself to working for various immigrant organizations and projects, among others, the Intercultural Dialogue Europe, the Bertelsmann Foundation's Leadership Program for Managers from Immigrant Organizations or the German Federal President's Forum on Demographic Change. In 2008 he published his first book: *Lautlos-Ja Sprachlos-Nein: Grenzganger zwischen Deutschland und Korea* (*Soundless-Yes, Speechless: No. Border Crossings Between Germany and Korea*). It is based on his own expierence and deals with the integration of Korean guest-workers in Germany -- a book that is equally moving as it is informative, a highly acclaimed debut work of Martin Hyun. Among immigrants in Germany, the Koreans are a relatively unknown minority, often confused with Chinese or Japanese immigrants. Martin Hyun describes the typical stereotypes he's confronted with (kamikaze, rice eaters) and analyzes why Koreans are so exemplary in integrating into German society. Mr. Hyun has - for the first time - given voice to the feelings of these wanderers between the two worlds of Korea and Germany who tend to have been somewhat overlooked by society due to their inconspicuousness. Martin Hyun ist Sohn koreanischer Gastarbeiter und wurde 1979 in Krefeld geboren. Heute ist er Wahlberliner, nach er Politik bzw. International Relations an der englischen Universitt von Kent zu Canterbury und am St. Michael s College, im US-Bundesstaat Vermont studierte. Martin Hyun geht auf die typischen Klischees ein, mit denen er konfrontert wurde: "Schlitzaugen, Reisfresser, Kamikaze" und analysiert, warum gerade die Deutsch-Koreaner als Musterbeispiel vorbildlicher Integration gelten. Der ehemalige Integrationsbotschafter und Politikwissenschaftler hat sein Grenzgngertum jetzt zum Thema eines Buches gemacht, indem er mit scharfem Blick und viel Humor seine eigene und die Situation seiner Landsleute beschreibt: ist ein politisches Sachbuch mit Integrationsthematik.
  • Xeni Jardin is a tech culture journalist. She is a partner, contributor, and co-editor of the award winning blog Boing Boing. She is executive producer and host of the Webby-honored program Boing Boing Video (formerly Boing Boing TV). She also contributes to broadcast, online, and print venues including *Wired* and NPR.
  • Dean Jansen is the outreach director for the Participatory Culture Foundation (or PCF), which works to build a fairer, more open, and more democratic media space. PCF is also a founder of the Open Video Alliance, a coalition of organizations, companies, and individuals that are working to create open tools, workflows, and licensing systems for online video.
  • Dr. Danielle Ofri, author of *Singular Intimacies,* is an attending physician at Bellevue and the cofounder and editor-in-chief of *The Bellevue Literary Review*. She is currently a regular contributor to *The Los Angeles Times* and *The New England Journal of Medicine*.
  • Robert Darnton is a former professor of European History at Princeton University, and current Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and director of the Harvard University Library. The founder of the Gutenberg-e program, he is the author of many books, including most recently George Washington's False Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century, as well as the 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award–winning The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Prerevolutionary France. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
  • John F. Callahan is Morgan S. Odell Professor of Humanities at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. His writings include a novel, *A Man You Could Love*. He is the editor of the Modern Library edition of *The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison* and is the literary executor of Ralph Ellison's estate.
  • Adam Bradley, a Harvard PhD, is an associate professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is the author of the forthcoming *Ralph Ellison–in–Progress*, a critical study of Ellison’s unfinished second novel. Professor Bradley is also the co-editor of the forthcoming *Yale Anthology of Rap* (2010), and the author of *The Book of Rhyme: The Poetics of Hip Hop*.
  • Fred Barzyk is President of Creative Television Associates, Inc., a Boston-based television production company. He has produced and directed television programs for PBS, HBO, NBC, ABC, and CBS. He was awarded the Venice Film Award in 1985 for best Television Director Worldwide for his HBO drama, Countdown to Looking Glass. Other awards include two ACE awards, three national EMMY'S, and a Peabody Award for the drama Tender Places. Mr. Barzyk is also noted for his experimental work - the first double channel TV drama (two home TV's and two broadcast channels were needed for viewing), the first interactive TV drama for Qube, and the first Video Art work. He was the director of the WGBH New Television Workshop for more than 10 years. Many of the artists and video works associated with the Workshop are now part of the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum, Museum of Modern Art, and several museums in Europe and the Pacific. Two retrospectives of his video work have been presented by the DeCordova Museum of Art in 1997 and the Haggerty Museum of Art, 2001.
  • Rebecca Skloot is an award-winning writer, and a contributing editor at *Popular Science* magazine. She has worked as a correspondent for NPR's *RadioLab* and PBS's *Nova ScienceNOW*, and her writing appears in *The New York Times Magazine, Discover, Columbia Journalism Review, Prevention,* and many others. Her work has also been anthologized in several textbooks and essay collections, including *The Best Food Writing, Norton's The Best Creative Nonfiction, and Women's Best Friend: Women Writers on the Dogs in Their Lives*. Skloot served for eight years on the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle, where she was a vice president and judge for their yearly book awards. In 2006, she launched "Critical Mass", the blog of the National Book Critics Circle. She now runs "Culture Dish", her blog on science, life, and writing, which is hosted by* Seed Magazine*.
  • George Fifield is a new media curator, a writer about art and technology, and teacher. He is the founding director of Boston Cyberarts Inc., a nonprofit arts organization, which produces the Boston Cyberarts Festival. This international biennial Festival of artists working in new technologies involves numerous exhibitions of visual arts; music, dance, and theatrical performances; film and video presentations and symposia at numerous arts and educational organizations throughout Massachusetts. He is also an independent curator of New Media with numerous projects here and abroad. His most recent exhibition was "Act React: Interactive Installation Art" at the Milwaukee Art Museum from October 2008 to January 2009. For 13 years until 2006, Fifield was Curator of New Media at the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, MA. He continues to work with the DeCordova on a number of projects. He is adjunct faculty at Rhode Island of Design's Digital and Media graduate program. He was executive co-producer, along with Fred Barzyk, of *The Electronic Canvas*, a hour-long documentary on the history of the media arts that aired on PBS in 2000. Fifield writes on a variety of media, technology and art topics for numerous publications. In 2006, Fifield was honored with the First Annual Special Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Boston Arts Community by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) Boston Chapter. In 2007, the Boston Cyberarts Festival was honored with the Commonwealth Award by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the category of Creative Economy. Photo courtesy of Chehalis Hegner.