Forum Network

Karen Pittman is the Executive Director of the Forum for Youth Investment in Washington, DC. She is a sociologist and recognized leader in youth development.

Carol Becker is Professor of the Arts and Dean of the School of the Arts at Columbia University. She is the author of several books and numerous articles. Her books include: The Invisible Drama: Women and the Anxiety of Change (with numerous foreign editions), Zones of Contention: Essays on Art, Institutions and Anxiety, Surpassing the Spectacle: Global Transformations and the Changing Politics of Art. She is also the editor of The Subversive Imagination: Essays on Art, Artists, and Social Responsibility. Her most recent collection of essays: Thinking in Place: Art, Action, and Cultural Production.

Richard "Dick" J. Deasy has been the director of the Arts Education Partnership since its founding. He has led AEP's efforts to produce seminal reports and research studies that demonstrate the positive impact of the arts on students, schools and communities and that provide guidance to policy-makers and practitioners on how to create that impact. He co-authored the book, *Third Space: When Learning Matters *with Lauren M. Stevenson. He also commissioned and edited AEP's compendium of studies, *Critical Links: Learning in the Arts and Student Academic and Social Development.* Prior to assuming the leadership of AEP, Deasy has been a senior official in two state departments of education, responsible for the areas of curriculum, instruction, assessment and legislative relations. He has also served as chief executive of an international and cultural exchange organization, and was an award-winning journalist. Deasy has also taught at the secondary and university levels.

MacQuarrie is a general assignment reporter for the *Boston Globe* "City & Region" section. In 1999, MacQuarrie won a prize for Writing and Reporting from the National Headliner Awards. In addition, he was an embedded reporter during the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Marilyn Richardson, principal of African-Americana Consultants, is a writer and lecturer on African-American history and culture. Richardson has taught at several institutions including Harvard University, Boston University and MIT and has served as curator of Boston's Museum of Afro-American History and the African Meeting House. She is the editor of *Maria W. Stewart: America's First Black Woman Political Writer *(1987) and the author of *Black Women and Religion: A Bibliography* (1980).

George Packer is a staff writer for *The New Yorker* and the author, most recently, of *The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq*. That book, which traced America's entry into the Iraq war and the subsequent troubled occupation, won the Overseas Press Club's 2005 Cornelius Ryan Award and the Helen Bernstein Book Award of the New York Public Library, was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, and was named by *The New York Times* as one of the ten best books of the 2005. Packer has published two other works of non-fiction, *The Village of Waiting*, (1988), a memoir about his years in the Peace Corps in West Africa, and *Blood of the Liberals* (2000), a three-generational political history, which won the 2001 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He has also published two novels, *The Half Man *(1991) and *Central Square*(1998), and was the editor of *The Fight Is for Democracy: Winning the War of Ideas in America and the World* (2003). His articles, essays, and reviews on foreign affairs, American politics, and literature have appeared in *The New York Times Magazine*, *Harper's*, *Dissent*, and other publications. He received the 2006 Edward Weintal Prize for Diplomatic Reporting from Georgetown and his magazine reporting has won three Overseas Press Club awards. He was a 2001-2 Guggenheim fellow and has taught writing at Harvard, Bennington, and Columbia. He lives in Brooklyn.

Laura Secor, a journalist, has written on Iran for* The New Yorker*, *The New York Times Magazine*, and *The New Republic*. She has been a staff editor of *The New York Times* 0p-Ed page, a reporter for the *Boston Globe*, acting executive editor of *The American Prospect*, and a senior editor and writer for *Lingua Franca*. While at the Cullman Center, she will be working on a book about the movement for democratic reform in Iran.