Committee Bios


Anne Bray is an artist and Executive Director of L.A. Freewaves, a media arts organization and festival in Los Angeles. She developed the concept of the multicultural network based on exchange and the media arts in 1989 and has continued to see the organization through the technological, social and aesthetic changes of the 1990s. Her educational experience includes photography history at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, new technology art in Boston and new genres at University of California, Los Angeles (MFA, 1985), giving her the conceptual framework to posit media arts as public art. She continues to exhibit her own work as temporary installations in public sites combining personal and social positions via video, audio and 3-d screens.

Steve Dietz is a serial platform creator. He is the Founder and Executive Director of Northern Lights. He was the Founding Director of the biennial 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge in 2006 and is currently Artistic Director of its producing organization, ZERO1: the Art and Technology Network. He is the former Curator of New Media at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he founded the New Media Initiatives department in 1996, the online art Gallery 9 and digital art study collection. He also co-founded, with the Minneapolis Instite of Arts the award-winning educational site ArtsConnectEd, and the artist community site mnartists.org with the McKnight Foundation. Dietz founded one of the earliest, museum-based, independent new media programs at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 1992. He has organized and curated numerous new media art exhibitions, including Beyond Interface: net art and Art on the Net; Database Imaginary, with Anthony Kiendl and Sarah Cook; and Fair Assembly, web-based projects for Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, with Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour. Dietz speaks and writes extensively about new media, and his interviews and writings have appeared in Parkett, Artforum, Flash Art, Public Art Review, Else/Where and Intelligent Agent; and in publications from MIT Press, University of California Press, and Princeton University Press. Many of his writings are online. He has taught about curating and digital art at California College of the Arts, Carleton College, the University of Minnesota, and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Sean Dockray is an artist and writer. For the past 3 years he has been a director of TELIC Arts Exchange, a space in Chinatown, Los Angeles, producing a critical engagement with new media and culture. TELIC often distorts curatorial conventions to create experimental exhibitions, scenarios, and projects that occasionally throw its own institutional identity into question. Some of these include The Fundraising Show, The Public School, Games for 5 Joysticks, Super Society of the Spectacle Sunday, Joshua Callaghan’s Horrorshow, and Jordan Crandall’s SHOWING. Dockray’s video and sculpture has been shown at Gigantic Art Space in New York, the Cheekwood Museum in Nashville, and the Turtle Bay Museum in Redding. His publications include Volume, Cabinet, and Bidoun, writing about topics such as radio architecture, funeral homes, race riots, miniatures and traffic control.

Martha Carrer Cruz Gabriel: Professor and leader of the e-learning program Widening Boarders at University Anhembi Morumbi. Professor of the postgraduate program at Unicentro Belas Artes de São Paulo. Curator of Upgrade! São Paulo. Reviewer for LEA Leonardo Electronic Almanac in 2005. Author of articles and speaker in conferences about art, technology and marketing in USA, Europe and Asia, including SIGGRAPH, ISEA, Consciousness Reframed, FILE, ELO, HighEdWeb, among others. Received two Best of Conference Presentation Awards in USA. Engineer, postgraduate in Marketing, postgraduate in Graphics Design and Master’s Degree in Art. Artist participating of several international electronic art exhibitions, awarded for her researches and artworks in the field of new media art. Researcher pursuing her doctorate degree at University of São Paulo focusing on voice interfaces and emergent technologies in electronic art. Author of the book Search Marketing Optimization and co-author of the book Executive MBA. Director of technology at NMD – New Media Developers.

Jo-Anne Green is Co-Director of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. She blogs at Networked_Performance and Networked_Music_Review. She was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. After graduating from the University of the Witwatersrand with a BFA Honors in Printmaking and Art History, she emigrated to the United States in 1983. Green volunteered for a Fund for a Free South Africa (FreeSA) from 1985 to 1992; there, she co-founded Cultural Resistance to educate the American public about apartheid through the art and culture of South Africa. She lived in New Mexico from 1997 to 2001 where she was instrumental in starting an artist-in-residence program at the University of New Mexico’s High Performance Computing Center; she later worked for the College of Fine Arts’ Art Technology Center and Arts of the Americas Institute. Green has a MFA in Visual Art, and a MS in Arts Administration. She has exhibited her paintings, one-of-a-kind artist’s books, and installations in South Africa, Boston and New York.

Geert Lovink, founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures, is a Dutch-Australian media theorist and critic. He holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne and in 2003 was at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland. In 2004 Lovink was appointed as Research Professor at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam and Associate Professor at University of Amsterdam. He is the founder of Internet projects such as nettime and fibreculture. His recent book titles are Dark Fiber (2002), Uncanny Networks (2002) and My First Recession (2003). In 2005-06 he was a fellow at the WissenschaftskollegBerlin Institute for Advanced Study where he finished his third volume on critical Internet culture, Zero Comments (2007), also translated into Italian and German.

Nick Montfort is assistant professor of digital media in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania, earning a Ph.D. in computer and information science, after earning masters degrees in media arts and sciences from MIT and in creative writing from Boston University. The digital media projects Montfort has undertaken include the blog Grand Text Auto, where he and five others write about computer narrative, poetry, games, and art; ppg-256, a 256-character poetry generator; Ream, a 500-page poem written on one day; Mystery House Taken Over, a collaborative “occupation” of a classic game; Implementation, a novel on stickers written with Scott Rettberg; The Ed Report, a serialized novel written with William Gillespie; and several works of interactive fiction: Book and Volume, Ad Verbum, and Winchester’s Nightmare: A Novel Machine. Montfort edited The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1 (with N. Katherine Hayles, Stephanie Strickland, and Scott Rettberg, ELO, 2006) and The New Media Reader (with Noah Wardrip-Fruin, MIT Press, 2003). He wrote Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (MIT Press, 2003), and, with William Gillespie, 2002: A Palindrome Story (Spineless Books, 2002), which was acknowledged by the Oulipo as the world’s longest literary palindrome. He is now investigating narrative variation in interactive fiction, the human meanings and machine functions of code, and the role of platforms in creative computing. Montfort and Ian Bogost wrote Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, which will be the first book in the MIT Press Platform Studies series, which they are editing.

Eduardo Navas is an artist and researcher specializing in New Media and Contemporary Art. He has presented and lectured about his work and research in various places throughout the Americas and Europe. Navas has been a juror for Turbulence.org (Boston) in 2004, and Rhizome.org (NYC) in 2006-07, as well as a 2008 Emerging Fields Consultant for Creative Capital. He was the founder of Net Art Review (2003-05); co-founder of newmediaFIX (2005 to present); and gallery Coordinator at CALIT2, UC San Diego for 2008. Navas has taught art and media theory for numerous colleges and Universities in Southern California, and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Penn State University, while completing his Ph.D. (ABD) in the Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the University of California in San Diego. His ongoing research can be found at http://remixtheory.net.

Helen Thorington is the Co-Director of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (aka Ether-Ore), the founder and producer of the national weekly radio series, New American Radio (1987-1998), and the founder and producer of the Turbulence.org and Somewhere.org websites. She is a writer, sound composer, and radio producer, whose radio documentary, dramatic work, and sound/music compositions have been aired nationally an internationally for the past twenty-four years. Thorington has created compositions for film and installation that have been premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, the Whitney Biennial, and in the Whitney Museum’s annual Performance series. Thorington has also composed for dance over a period of 20 years, and performed with the Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane Dance Company at Jacob’s Pillow, MA in 2002, and at The Kitchen, New York City in 2003. She has produced several narrative works for the web including Adrift, which was presented as a performance and installation at the New Museum, New York City, 2001. Her most recent awards include Honourable Recognition, Prix Bohemia Radio Festival, Czechoslovakia; and Winner, Aether Festival, KUNM-FM, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Thorington has lectured and published widely. She blogs at Networked_Performance and Networked_Music_Review.

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