Gathering of Digital Storytellers 2006

The bios are coming in for session facilitators. Send us yours and we'll add it!

Camille Turner is a Toronto based media/performance artist and curator. Her inter-cultural community engagements bridge boundaries and explore the social dimensions of technology. She is currently a community art facilitator with the Art Gallery of Ontario, an international collaborator with the Container Project in Jamaica and artist in residence with Central Neighbourhood House where for the past three years has worked with Jennifer LaFontaine to establish a digital storytelling program and a mobile media lab.

Dina Rosen is Assistant Professor at Kean University in Union, New Jersey. She teaches a range of undergraduate and graduate level courses with primary emphasis on grade preschool- fifth grade. Dr. Rosen has a successful track record of professional scholarship. Her work has explored technology-rich strategies for empowering youth through the use of digital stories as a tool for communication, reflection and decision-making. Dr. Rosen is active in professional organizations on the state, national and international levels. She serves on the executive board of the New Jersey Association of Early Childhood Teacher Educators, Vice-President of the Early Childhood SIG of the Society for Instructional Technology in Teacher Education (SITE) and a member of the National Technology Leadership Coalition.

Melanee Grondahl has been teaching English at the college level for nine years. She is currently a Learning Director and Head of the Writing Department for a non-profit program called Year Up, which is based in Boston with other sites in Providence, Cambridge, Washington DC and New York City. After attending a digital storytelling workshop sponsored by Creative Narrations and MassImpact in 2005, she decided to integrate a digital storytelling component into Year Up's existing business writing curriculum.

Aimee Thompson is the founder and director of the Close to Home Domestic Violence Prevention Initiative, a grassroots community organizing effort aimed at changing social norms and preventing family violence by mobilizing networks of family, friends and neighbors in communities. Prior to Close to Home, Aimee worked for Project Harmony, an international non-profit, as the director of their Domestic Violence Community Partnership. Aimee's grass-roots organizing experience includes leading and supervising teams of organizers to improve residents' access to health care and increase the neighborhood's civic participation through door-knocking and the creation of block groups. Aimee has been working with digital stories at Close to Home for the past three years.

Shira Golding, Director of Education and Outreach, Arts Engine
Shira is an activist, filmmaker, graphic designer and musician with a passion for using media as a tool for action and education. She joined Arts Engine in 2002, , where she writes and commissions articles, organizes workshops and screenings around the country, helps independent filmmakers develop their outreach campaigns, and creates resources for teachers and activists. She is cofounder of Shirari Industries and a member of New York Women in Film & Television.


Natasha Freidus is the founder and director of Creative Narrations. Before entering the media field, Natasha worked as an adult educator and organizer for eight years. It was through community building work that she developed her interest in the role of storytelling as a tool for social change. Natasha has conducted workshops in multimedia storytelling for diverse groups throughout the country. Natasha earned her Masters degree in Urban Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she was community media coordinator and a course instructor at The Center for Reflective Community Practice from 2001 to 2003.

Amy L. Hill is a digital storytelling instructor, documentary filmmaker, and public health consultant. Amy’s twelve year history of coordinating community-based women’s health and violence prevention projects led her in 2000 to found the Silence Speaks Digital Storytelling Project, which teaches survivors and witnesses of violence how to create short digital videos of courage and healing and promotes use of these pieces in training, community organizing, and policy advocacy contexts. She continues to coordinate Silence Speaks and other projects focused on health, human rights, community development, and social/economic justice, in her current role as Community Projects Director at the Center for Digital Storytelling.

Heather Pleasants is a writer, ethnographer and Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama. She is the past director of the Sankofa Stories Digital Storytelling Project in Wilmington, Delaware, and is currently working to establish digital storytelling spaces for middle school students in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and the Black Belt region of Alabama and Mississippi. Since completing her first digital story in 2003, she has been engaged in ongoing research that explores how African American women at different stages in their lives use digital storytelling, photo essays and web spaces as tools of personal expression and social change.

Cheryl Crow graduated Magna Cum Laude from Vassar College in 2004, where she studied ethnographic film, media linguistics, and developmental psychology. During the past year, she’s volunteered and worked for Bridges to Understanding, a nonprofit that connects youth around the world through the creation and sharing of digital stories. In addition to fulfilling communication and grant-writing capacities, she has recently been excited to get more hands-on experience with the storytelling process from the ground up.

Josh Schachter works as a freelance photographer, visual storytelling teacher and consultant in Tucson. Josh’s images have been published internationally in books, magazines, newspapers, annual reports and other formats in publications ranging from the New York Times to the Navajo Times. Josh has trained youth, community groups and teachers throughout the US to explore and photograph issues in their lives and communities. Josh is the founder of the photography and digital storytelling programs at the Tucson-based nonprofit, Voices Inc., where he currently works as a guest artist on a digital storytelling project on the San Xavier Reservation. Through his work Josh had developed a passion for using photography as a path toward personal and community transformation.

Barbara Ganley is a lecturer in English, and the Director of The Project for Integrated Expression at Middlebury College. An active implementer of new media and social software into literature and writing classrooms as a way for students to ground their learning within place, community and self, her special interests include digital storytelling as a means of academic discourse and experiential learning, and integrated web technologies as a vehicle for expression, community-building, and student-centered learning. She's an active edublogger, and can be found on bgblogging.

JaModi Robinson is the President of Digital Expressions, a video production
company with heavy interest in storytelling. Has worked with various organizations throughout Boston over the past few years in conjunction with MassImpact and Creative Narrations. His goal is to link
creativity and technology through independent producing and teaching. His
work with digital storytelling stresses needs for individual expression and
personal growth.

Vanessa Pabon is the Director of TOLD, Telling Our Legacies Digitally, in the North End of Springfield. TOLD has opened a community digital storytelling lab where the community has a space to share their stories with either a digital story or through music. Vanessa is also a graphic artist/web designer, and has her own business, Your Name In Bytes.

Diane Dew has been with the Center for Accessible Technology for four years, managing the office. She has been a life-long photographer, has been studying photography seriously for six years, and started creating digital stories 3 years ago. Recently she’s been volunteering with the CITTI Project, helping to create a digital story about the organization.

Jen Gilomen is a media producer and instructor at the Bay Area Video Coalition in San Francisco, where she manages a program called the Digital Storytelling Institute, helping California-based nonprofits use technology to tell stories for social change. Jen's recent documentary “In My Shoes: Stories of Youth with LGBT Parents” won the Audience Award for Best Short at the 2005 Frameline Film Festival, and went on to screen at several other festivals across the U.S.

Lisa Dush is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in the midst of writing a dissertation on digital storytelling. Her research project follows one organization as its employees try to transfer the skills they learned at a 3-day workshop back into their home organization. Lisa also teaches writing, literature, and digital composition courses to college students.

Sheela Sethuraman has over 9 years of experience as an educational technologist, applying her training in engineering, multimedia and instructional design to create products for students with special needs especially those with learning difficulties, low vision and for whom English is a second language. In her previous role as Director of Technology at CAST, a leading R&D organization credited with creating the ‘Universal Design for Learning’ framework, Ms. Sethuraman oversaw the technical development of numerous products including speech-enabled web browser, digital repository of learning materials, graphic organizers, writing tools and literacy software for struggling readers.

Danielle Martin is a first year VISTA with the CTC VISTA Project at the Community Technology & Media Program at UMass Boston, tasked to be the priority area curriculum coordinator as well as the Assistant Editor of the Community Technology Review . So far, this year she has focused on resources for CTC VISTAS and conducted several digital storytelling trainings for both adults and youth. Her background is in after-school multimedia programs for youth, instructional design for web-based trainings, and fundraising and development. She was previously the Technology Director at the Charlestown Boys & Girls Club (MA) Computer Clubhouse and a MIT Media Lab IDEAS Institute Fellow.