Our Story

Wonya Lucas is a Corporate Board Director and Former CEO of Hallmark Media. Lucas oversaw the company’s portfolio of entertainment brands, including linear networks Hallmark Channel, Hallmark Movies & Mysteries, and Hallmark Drama; subscription video on demand service Hallmark Movies Now; and publishing division Hallmark Publishing. Prior to joining Crown Media in August of 2020, Lucas was president and chief executive officer of Public Broadcasting Atlanta, where she oversaw Atlanta’s NPR (WABE) and PBS (ATL PBA) stations. Previously, she was president and chief executive officer of TV One, where she became the second African American woman to hold the president and chief executive officer role at a cable television network. Prior to joining TV One, Lucas held several positions at Discovery Communications, including executive vice president and chief operating officer for Discovery Channel and Science Channel, and global chief marketing officer, which entailed oversight of marketing in 210 countries and over 130 networks. Before joining Discovery Communications in 2008, Lucas served as general manager and executive vice president of The Weather Channel Networks, where she was responsible for corporate strategy and development and strategic marketing for The Weather Channel, Weather Channel radio and weather.com. She joined The Weather Channel Networks from Turner Broadcasting System, where she acted in a variety of roles, including senior vice president of strategic marketing for CNN (cnn.com, CNN radio, CNN Networks Worldwide and HLN); vice president of business operations and network development for TNT and TBS; and vice president of entertainment marketing for TNT Entertainment properties. Earlier in her career, Lucas spent several years in various brand management roles for The Coca-Cola Company and Clorox. She received an MBA in Finance and Marketing from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and BS Industrial Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Lorraine Ali is a television critic with The Los Angeles Times where she covers media, culture and American Muslim issues. Ali is an award-winning journalist who before joining the Times in 2011 was a culture writer and music critic with Newsweek and a senior critic with Rolling Stone. Ali was one of a few prominent female pop music critics in American journalism who rose to prominence in the 1990s and 2000s. Her work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, SPIN, GQ and The Hollywood Reporter, and her “West Bank Hard Core” feature was published in Da Capo’s “Best Music Writing” anthology. She’s appeared as an expert voice on radio and television programs including NPR, Oprah, Charlie Rose, CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera. Her writing awards include Best Online Feature from the New York Association of Black Journalists, an Excellence in Journalism Award from the American Arab Journalists Association, and Music Journalist of the Year from the Music Journalism Awards.

Manuel Betancourt is a Colombian-born film and television writer. He is a contributing editor at Film Quarterly, where he publishes his column, “Cineando,” all about Latin American cinema, and a regular contributor to Electric Literature, where he focuses on book-to-film adaptations. His work has been featured in The New York Times, BuzzFeed Reader, Vulture, The Los Angeles Times, Film Comment, Esquire, The Atlantic, Los Angeles Review of Books and Vice, among others. Betancourt is the former Film & TV editor at Remezcla. He is the author of “Judy at Carnegie Hall,” as well as one of the contributing writers of Chad Sell’s critically acclaimed graphic novel “The Cardboard Kingdom” and its sequel. Betancourt is a member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association; GALECA, The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics; as well as a founding member of LEJA, Latino Entertainment Journalists Association. In 2019 he was selected to be the Writer in Residence at the Sundance Institute’s Documentary and Story Edit Lab. Betancourt holds a doctorate degree in English Literatures from Rutgers University.

Hannah Giorgis is a staff writer at The Atlantic. In a recent cover story, “The Unwritten Rules of Black TV,” Hannah presented a definitive look at Black representation behind the camera, and the progress and roadblocks for creators whose voices have too long been ignored. Her essays, criticism, and reporting have appeared in publications including the New York Times magazine, New Yorker, The Guardian, Bon Appétit, and Pitchfork. She has written short stories for publications including the Lifted Brow literary journal, Spook magazine, and the Addis Ababa Noir anthology. Hannah was the 2018 Yoojin Grace Wuertz Writers of Immigration and Diaspora fellow at the Jack Jones Literary Arts retreat. Most recently she co-wrote Ida B. The Queen: The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Ida B. Wells with Wells’ great-granddaughter, Michelle Duster, and edited the inaugural collection of essays for Shea Serrano’s Halfway Books project, about rap albums including Lil’ Kim’s Hard Core, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, and The Notorious B.I.G.’s Life After Death.

Dana A. Heller is Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, Michigan.  Prior to that, she was Eminent Scholar and Louis I. Jaffe Professor of English at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.  She holds a B.A. from Goddard College, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in American literature from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  She is the author/editor of eight books and numerous articles on topics related to television, popular culture, media, and gender and sexuality studies.  She was the recipient of Fulbright Fellowships in Russia, Bulgaria, and Belarus, and an exchange fellow in Osaka through the Japanese American Studies Fund.

Doug Herzog was formerly the President of Viacom’s Music Entertainment Group where he oversaw Comedy Central, MTV, VH1, Spike, TVLand and Logo. Herzog left the company in January 2017. Herzog is widely recognized in the industry for leading and building some of cable television’s most successful network brands, as well as launching long-running hits that permeated the cultural zeitgeist. Under his leadership, Viacom became home to some of television’s most acclaimed and enduring franchises, including The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report, South Park, The Real World, UFC, Key & Peele, Inside Amy Schumer, Hot in Cleveland, Workaholics, and Younger.

Michael Isip is President & CEO of KQED, the San Francisco Bay Area’s PBS and NPR media resource. Isip has a quarter century of media experience and has played a critical role in KQED’s growth and transformation into a multimedia organization. He joined KQED in 2001 as a Television Executive Producer and has served in a number of senior roles, including Senior VP & Chief Content Officer and Executive VP & Chief Operating Officer. Prior to KQED, Isip led production at KVIE Public Television, Sacramento. He started his career at WLS-TV, Chicago. Isip is a senior fellow for the American Leadership Forum — Silicon Valley and serves on the boards of Public Radio Exchange, American Documentary Inc., Joint Venture Silicon Valley, and the Silicon Valley Leadership Group. Isip has a B.A. from Cornell University and a J.D. from DePaul College of Law.

Cynthia López is CEO of New York Women in Film & Television. An award-winning media strategist, and former Commissioner of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, López implemented strategies to support film and TV production throughout the five boroughs. She joined the City of New York from American Documentary | POV, where she had worked since 2000, eventually becoming executive vice president and co-executive producer of the award-winning PBS documentary series. During López’s tenure at the POV series she championed diversifying the national PBS schedule through the CPB funded Diverse Voices Program, which provided major funding for this creative program that included mentorship and financial support for diverse filmmakers that had not been featured on a national broadcast. Cynthia is the recipient of eleven News & Documentary Emmy Awards, four George Foster Peabody Awards, two duPont – Columbia Awards and many other prestigious industry awards.

Orwa Nyrabia is a leading figure in the world of documentary film and art. He is a festival director and an award-winning film producer. Since 2018, he has been the Artistic Director of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), the world’s largest documentary film and new media festival. During his tenure at IDFA, Nyrabia successfully led the organization’s efforts towards wider international representation and gender parity, and his restructuring of the organization’s offer inspired many other festivals and organizations around the world. Before IDFA, being one half of a filmmaking duo with partner Diana El Jeiroudi, Nyrabia co-founded Syria’s first independent film festival, DOX BOX, and was a producer with credits that include Republic of Silence (D. El Jeiroudi, Venice 2021), Notturno (GF. Rosi, Venice 2020), Silvered Water (O. Mohammad and W. Bedirxan, Cannes 2014), Return to Homs (T. Derki, IDFA 2013) and Dolls, A Woman from Damascus (D. El Jeiroudi, IDFA 2007) a.o.

Aswin Punathambekar is a professor at Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania and a Director at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication. With interests ranging across radio, film, television, and digital media, his research and teaching focus on the impact that globalization and technological change have on the workings of media industries, formations of audiences and publics, and cultural identity and politics. Based on research in India, the U.K., and the U.S. he has written and co-edited several books including “From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry,” “Media Industry Studies,” and “Television at Large in South Asia.” He serves as an editor of an international peer-reviewed journal Media, Culture and Society, and co-edits the Critical Cultural Communication book series for NYU Press. Punathambekar holds a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and master’s degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Georgia.

Nicholas Quah is the podcast critic at New York Magazine’s Vulture and a contributing critic at NPR’s Fresh Air. One of the earliest journalists dedicated to covering the podcast industry, he is also the founder of Hot Pod, widely considered to be a leading trade newsletter covering the podcast business, which was sold to Vox Media. Originally from Malaysia, he has a B.A. from Wesleyan University, an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and was a Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 2017.

Kent Rees is an industry-leading digital and content marketing strategist. He is currently the general manager and chief marketing officer for FAST Studios, a company that owns and operates ad-support streaming TV networks.  Prior to that, he was the Chief Marketing Officer for Pop TV and the EVP and General Manager of Pivot.  Mr. Rees went to NYU Film School and has been an adjunct professor at Emerson College since 2018.

Mark Ruffin is the program director of the Real Jazz channel on Sirius/XM Satellite Radio.  Before that he spent over 25 years as a fixture in jazz broadcasting and journalism in Chicago, winning two Emmy Awards for his efforts to bring stories about jazz to television on WTTW-TV.  Mr. Ruffin worked as the jazz editor for Chicago Magazine and has written hundreds of articles on jazz, broadcasting and African-American culture.  In 2020, Mr. Ruffin released his first book, Bebop Fairy Tales: A Historical Fiction Trilogy on Jazz, Intolerance and Baseball.

Russ Schriefer is a leading American political and corporate strategist, media consultant, and the Founding Partner of Strategic Partners & Media. With senior roles advising eight presidential campaigns, his groundbreaking advertising prompted one veteran columnist to praise his work as the “most powerful, focused, and skillfully executed political ad campaign I have ever witnessed.” Schriefer offers strategic counsel, coaching, and crisis messaging to elected leaders, global CEOs, and Fortune 500 companies. He has played a pivotal role in producing three Republican National Conventions, curating the agenda, creating legacy films, and developing prime-time narratives. Russ is passionate about live theater and actively contributes as the board vice chair at the Tony Award-winning Signature Theater.

Cynthia Tucker is a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist.  Her weekly column, which appears in newspapers around the country, focuses on political and cultural issues, including income inequality, social justice and reform of the public education system. Tucker has spent most of her career in newspapers, working as a reporter and editor. For seventeen years, she served as editorial page editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, overseeing the newspaper’s editorial policies on everything from local elections to foreign affairs. She also worked as a Washington-based political columnist for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. After leaving the newspaper, she spent three years as a visiting professor at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, where she was also a Charlayne Hunter-Gault writer-in-residence. Tucker is currently journalist-in-residence at the University of South Alabama.

Bonnie Turner is a veteran film and television writer and producer with more than forty years of experience. She began in Atlanta producing for Ted Turner and was present at the launch of CNN. In the mid-eighties she wrote and produced for “Saturday Night Live.” During her tenure, her work introduced many comical words and phrases into the pop zeitgeist. Turner wrote five successful films for Paramount Pictures including the feature-length version of “Wayne’s World,” which set a comedy box office record. She then wrote and produced for the Carsey-Werner company where she created “3rd Rock From The Sun” and “That ’70s Show.”

Mark Whitaker is the former managing editor of CNN Worldwide, Washington bureau chief for NBC News, and Editor of Newsweek, where he rose to become the first African American leader of a national newsweekly. He is now an author and Emmy Award-winning Contributing Correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning. Whitaker’s books include the critically acclaimed memoir, My Long Trip Home; Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance, about the historic legacy of Black Pittsburgh; and Saying It Loud: 1966-The Year Black Power Challenged the Civil Rights Movement.

Andrea Wishom is President of Skywalker Holdings, LLC, where her responsibilities include the financial, philanthropic, and strategic priorities of a diversified family office. An award-winning media executive, Andrea joined Skywalker from Harpo Productions where she spent over two decades launching, developing and producing some of the most successful programming in television history for The Oprah Winfrey Show, and OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network. As Executive Vice President she played a key role in leading OWN to become a top 30 network within its first year and the #1 Cable Network among African American Women. As Executive Producer of Super Soul Sunday, she won a GLAAD award. Wishom is the lead independent director of Pinterest , and serves as a director for Tory Burch, LLC. She previously served on the board of Nextdoor Holdings, Inc.

Katerina Cizek is a Peabody and two-time Emmy-winning documentarian. She is the artistic director and co-founder of the Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab. At the studio, she wrote (with Uricchio et al.) the world’s first field study on co-creating media called Collective Wisdom (forthcoming with MIT Press). For over a decade, Cizek worked as a documentary director at the National Film Board of Canada, transforming the organization into a world-leading digital hub, with the projects HIGHRISE and Filmmaker-in-Residence. Both community-based and globally recognized, these two ground-breaking long-form digital projects garnered international awards and critical acclaim. Cizek is a member of the Directors’ Guild of Canada, has served as an advisor at the Sundance Institutes’ New Frontier Lab and Stories of Change Program as well as CPH:DOX and ESoDoc. She is a founding member of the Guild of Future Architects, a member of the editorial collective at IMMERSE.

Sergio Peçanha is an Opinion columnist and a graphics editor for The Washington Post. He uses visual elements such as illustrations, cartoons, maps, information graphics and videos to tell stories in print and digital media. Sergio writes and designs his own stories and focuses on pieces that generate empathy, amuse and explain complex concepts. Before joining the Post, he was a visual journalist at The New York Times for more than a decade, mostly coordinating graphics and multimedia coverage for the International desk. His work has been recognized multiple times by the Society for News Design and the Malofiej infographics awards, in Spain, Communication Arts, Society for Publication Design and Pictures of the Year. Sergio began his career in his hometown of Rio de Janeiro and has a B.A. in journalism and a masters degree in illustration.

Aymar Jean “AJ” Christian is an associate professor of communication studies at Northwestern University. His first book, Open TV: Innovation Beyond Hollywood and the Rise of Web Television on New York University Press, argues the web brought innovation to television by opening development to independent producers. His work has been published in numerous academic journals, including the International Journal of Communication, Television & New Media, Social Media & Society, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, among others. He has juried television and video for the Peabody Awards, Gotham Awards, and Tribeca Film Festival, among others. His work has been recognized by the Field & MacArthur Foundation (Leaders for a New Chicago, 2019), Filmmaker Magazine (25 New Faces of Indie Film, 2018) NewCity (Chicago’s Film Hall of Fame, 2020), Chicago magazine (New Power List, 2021).

Dr. Christian co-founded OTV | Open Television, a research project and platform for intersectional television. OTV programs have received recognition from HBO, the Television Academy (Emmy Awards), Webby Awards, Streamy Awards, Gotham Awards, among others. Its programming partners have included the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Sundance Institute, and the city of Chicago, along with numerous galleries, community organizations, and universities.

Building on the success of OTV, he co-founded OTV Studio with Stephanie Jeter and Lilly Wachowski. OTV Studio is an incubator for intersectional film & television, developing artists and producing their short-form content to accelerate discovery and long-form development with an array of mission-aligned studios, production companies, and institutional partners.

He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.

Gabriel J.X. Dance is the deputy investigations editor at The New York Times focusing on the nexus of privacy and safety online. Previously, Dance was part of a team of journalists that reported on the data-sharing practices at Facebook and the bot economy on Twitter, was involved in the reporting on Donald Trump’s taxes, and was a founding managing editor at The Marshall Project. Dance has undergraduate degrees in computer science and technical journalism from Colorado State University, a master’s degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and was among a group of journalists at The Guardian who won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of widespread secret surveillance by the N.S.A..

Yasmin Elayat is an Emmy-award winning immersive director, United States Artists 2020 Fellow, and Co-Founder at Scatter, an immersive company pioneering Volumetric Filmmaking. Yasmin directed Scatter’s Zero Days VR (Sundance 2017) a documentary about cyber warfare and the Stuxnet virus, which won the Emmy for Original Approaches: Documentary. Yasmin is the co-creator of 18DaysInEgypt, which was lauded as one the Moments of Innovation in Participatory Documentary. Yasmin is a co-director of The Changing Same trilogy. Episode 1 premiered at Sundance 2021 and won “Best Immersive Narrative” at Tribeca Festival. Yasmin’s work has won multiple awards and exhibited at various festivals including Sundance, Tribeca, SIGGRAPH, Festival de Cannes, and the World Economic Forum.

Navid Khonsari, is the co-founder of  iNK Stories, an award-winning studio creating impact-forward original work across games, mixed reality (VR/AR) and immersive experiences, and has forged a new hybrid of documentary-games: ”Verite Games.” Drawing upon personal history Khonsari created 1979 Revolution: Black Friday, which received the industry’s top honors: a BAFTA, Facebook Game of the Year, Tribeca FF Storyscape, among others, and was recognized by UNESCO as a digital solution for peaceful conflict resolution. Khonsari is credited with having ushered in the current wave of contemporary AAA video games, such as Grand Theft Auto, Max Payne, Red Dead Revolver, and The Warriors, up to the recent Resident Evil: Biohazard. He is an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins, and guest lectures at Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Duke, Northwestern in Qatar, White House, UN, Sundance and more.

Dan Pacheco holds the Peter A. Horvitz Chair of Journalism Innovation at the Newhouse School of Public Communications and is a pioneer in the use of virtual reality for journalism. In 2014 he started and co-produced The Des Moines Register’s Harvest of Change VR project for the Oculus Rift, the world’s first large-scale use of virtual reality by a commercial news organization. Harvest of Change earned an Edward R. Murrow Award in 2015 for its innovative use of 360-degree video for virtual reality.

Previously, Pacheco spent 20 years in the trenches of digital publishing everywhere from Fortune 500 companies to startups. He started his career as an online producer for Washingtonpost.com, where he produced Interact, one of the first online news communities. As a principal product manager at America Online, he oversaw some of the internet’s first truly global community products. In 2005, after pioneering the first implementation of a social networking platform at a U.S. newspaper, he received a Newspaper Association of America’s “20 Under 40” award. And in 2007, he received a Knight News Challenge grant to build a democratized publishing service that evolved into an eBook platform.

Pacheco’s areas of emphasis are XR, data journalism and data visualization, and the exploration of emerging media platforms. He lives in Syracuse, NY with his partner and puppy.

Kamal Sinclair, is making the world more beautiful as the Executive Director of the Guild of Future Architects and artist at Sinclair Futures. She served as an External Advisor to the MacArthur Foundation’s Journalism & Media Program, a Creative Advisor to For Freedoms (the largest collective art project in US history), a member of Sharon Chang’s Family Office (Dream Office of Imaginary Friends) and as a board member of MIT’s Center for Advanced Virtuality and Eyebeam.

Previously, was the Director of Sundance Institute’s New Frontier Labs Program for seven years, which supports artists working at the convergence of film, art, media and technology. She partnered with Chief Curator, Shari Frilot, in the development and platforming of landmark projects in the evolution of story, including experimentations with bio media, XR, iOT and AI as storytelling mediums.

During that period, she consulted for the Ford Foundation’s JustFilms program on a multi-year research projects aimed at furthering equality in emerging media, which resulted in the landmark work “Making a New Reality,” which has been published through Immerse.news and sparked a four year speaking tour at some of the most prestigious tech and media companies, philanthropic organizations, academic institutions, and social justice community initiatives. Currently, the research is informing a developing documentary (The Radical Imagination Project), a book and a game/toolkit for the field of emerging media practitioners and organizations.

Sundance Institute was both a resource and inspiration for the research, then an early adopter of specific recommendations that emerged from the research regarding the need to break silos between art, science and technology. Currently, she is consulting their collaboration with Stanford University’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts to explore the future of identity in an AI integrated future at the intersection of these fields.

Johns Hopkins University’s Immersive Storytelling and Emerging Technology Center and NYU Tisch’s Future Imagination Fund engaged Sinclair in consulting projects to translate the learning from the research into programs and centers within their organizations to democratize the imagination of the future in a just and equitable manner, as well as optimize human creativity as we design social and cultural systems for exponential technologies. Both university initiatives are in exciting development phases to implement the strategic plans developed during her engagement.

Sinclair got her start in emerging media as an artist and producer on Question Bridge: Black Males. At Question Bridge, where she and her collaborators launched a project with an interactive website and curriculum; published a book; exhibited in over sixty museums/festivals; won International Center for Photography’s 2015 Infinity Award for New Media; and was archived at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Earlier in her career, Kamal was a Transmedia Producer at 42 Entertainment and worked on projects such as Legends of Alcatraz for J.J. Abrams, Mark of the Spider-Man and Random Acts of Fusion; as Principal at Strategic Arts Consulting, and the Artistic Director of Universal Arts. Her career began as a cast member of the Off-Broadway hit STOMP.

Benjamin Stokes is a civic media scholar, game designer, and director of The Playful City Lab. He is also an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication, and at the AU Game Center. Previously, he co-founded Games for Change, the movement hub for advancing social change with games. At the MacArthur Foundation prior to academia, Benjamin was a program officer in their portfolio on Digital Media and Learning. Benjamin has also worked at the UC Berkeley School of Information as a postdoctoral scholar in data science. Design experience in civil society includes leading teams at NetAid/Mercy Corps in global citizenship education. His new book is Locally Played: Real-World Games for Stronger Places and Communities (MIT Press, 2020).

An alumnus of the Sundance Screenwriting Lab, Lance Weiler is recognized as a pioneer in mixing storytelling and technology. Wired magazine named him “one of 25 people helping to reinvent entertainment and change the face of Hollywood.” He was nominated for an International Emmy in digital fiction for his work on Collapsus: The Energy Risk Conspiracy. His collaboration with David Cronenberg entitled, Body/Mind/Change premiered at the TIFF Lightbox and went on to win the American Alliance of Museums’ Jim Blackaby Ingenuity Award. Lance co-created Frankenstein AI, a multi-year project that explores humanity’s relationship to artificial intelligence through storytelling, performance and immersion. Frankenstein AI was an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival and later was commissioned by the National Theatre’s Immersive Storytelling Studio and IDFA Doc Lab. Weiler’s most recent work entitled, Where There’s Smoke had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. The 1,400 sq ft experience became the first off-site installation to ever be staged at the festival. IndieWire wrote “Over 100 movies screened at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival, but one of its best offerings lets you walk inside the frame and experience a story from the inside out.” Lance is currently touring Where There’s Smoke and is developing the project into a limited TV series and YA novel.

Lance is a Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia University School of the Arts where he is jointly appointed in Film and Theatre. He co-founded the School of the Arts’ Digital Storytelling Lab and since 2013 has served as its director leading and shaping the lab’s vision and programming.