Denise Atchley
Co-Founder, Festival Director & Host

Denise Atchley is the Co-Founder and Director of The Digital Storytelling Festival, an annual event that showcases the innovative work being created throughout the diverse areas of the Digital Storytelling community. She is also Director of Dana Atchley Productions, Inc. a company specializing in consultation, and production of Digital Storytelling projects. Denise's objective through her companies is to help people learn the tools of Digital Storytelling and enable them to identify and create stories that are important to their lives or business. Denise has a background in entertainment and event production and is the continuing partner of the late Dana Atchley.

Jeanne Biddle
Director Technology, Scott County Schools

Jeanne Biddle’s teaching career began in 1982. Her experiences span pre-K to high school, with specializations in special education, elementary education, and technology integration. Biddle is the Director of Technology for Scott County Schools in Georgetown, Kentucky, and her passion is to engage teachers in creating exciting lessons for students with technology as part of the core content/course of study.

Biddle is a Macromedia Education Leader, Apple Distinguished Educator, liaison for Kentucky’s Technology Resource Teachers, Digital Storytelling Association Educational Liaison, HPR-Tec Network Associate, Fulbright Memorial Fund Scholar, Kentucky Instructional Technology Leader, and is listed in the Who’s Who Among America’s Teachers. Biddle also conducts professional development workshops and presentations at the national, state, and local levels, she is a trained advisor in QUEST whose mission is to establish a continuous learning environment using teamwork, problem-solving, and cooperative learning skills.

Jay Boileau

With a degree in Music and Philosophy, Jay Boileau worked as a music video producer in Hollywood until he signed up with his child-hood friend Tyler Cassity to help create Forever Enterprises. 8 years ago Forever pioneered the idea of digital multi-media LifeStories in the cemetery industry. 8 years later the rest of the industry has gone from doubting to participating in what they began. Having created over 10,000 personal archives Forever has recently broken ground on their next revolutionary project. At their property at Mill Valley, CA they are pioneers once again, this time bringing the idea of a Green Cemetery to the West Coast. At Fernwood, the cemetery landscape looks like a forest, and the memorial landscape is entirely digital.

Steve Bull

New York State Council for the Arts (NYSCA) just awarded Steve Bull's Cellphonia: In The News, a location based karaoke cell phone opera about the alienation of the contemporary technophile that includes text, sound, moving images and allows participants outside the core players to contribute as a remote chorus. Cellphonia begins anywhere anytime five people gather. [cellphonia.org/InTheNews/]

Since founding Cutlass in 2000, Steve Bull has produced a locative cell phone treasure hunt in Times Square and on nationwide college campuses, TouchToneTours, a locative tour guide to U.S., UK, Japan, and Canada, HollywoodUSA, a locative guide to movie locations, and IT, a multi-player simultaneous real/virtual world interactive game. Previously while at Interval Research, Mr. Bull designed the interface for a music museum exhibit touring device for the Experience Museum Project, an automatic movie-making arcade, an MP3 consumer product with scenario and simulations, and an internet game and UI for the internet music world. He is a graduate of NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. For decades, Steve Bull has produced experimental videos which have screened at the Getty, AFI, MoMA, Berlin Festival, NewTV/PBS, Atlanta Film Festival, Cork, Cleveland, Humbolt, Athens, a national tour, a NYS tour, a ten-city tour of Brazil and for six months with Creative Time. On Fridays, you will find him teaching "Neighborhood Narrative" about cell phones and community at Temple University.

Ezra Cooperstein

Ezra Cooperstein manages the Viewer Created Content (VC2) department for Current TV. In this role he oversees all the elements of production in this pillar of Current's programming, working with up-and-coming filmmakers to develop and hone their production skills. Ezra was one of the first staff members at Current and has been instrumental in shaping the programming direction of the network. Prior to joining Current TV, Ezra worked for RKO Pictures in Los Angeles.

Abbe Don - Panel Leader
Senior Experience Design Researcher, HP Labs

Abbe Don, co-leads the Social Media Team in the Consumer Applications and Systems Lab at HP Labs.
The team creates user experiences and new technologies that enable consumers to use personal and commercial media to create and enhance emotional relationships. The Social Media team is investigating the social interactions of tweens and new models of mobile and situated storytelling. Abbe has been instrumental in the HP + KQED Mediascape collaboration which will premiere on the opening night of the 8th Annual Digital Storytelling Festival.

Abbe is a long-time practitioner of digital storytelling, dating back to 1989 with her groundbreaking piece "We Make Memories" an interactive family album that simulates the way her great-grandmother told stories. She pioneered the concept of audience generated stories with her 1991 installation "Share With Me a Story" in which visitors to a museum scanned a family photo and told their own story, creating a companion to "We Make Memories." In 1996, she launched "Bubbe's Back Porch" a website dedicated to personal and family storytelling. Inspired by requests for help from her audience, in 1998 Abbe launched "The Digital Story Bee" a workshop designed to help people tell stories and become comfortable with web-based tools and technology.

Since receiving her master's degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU in 1989, Abbe has pursued a dual career as a user experience designer in the software industry and as an interactive media artist in the arts community.

Lauren Dunbar

Documentary television director and writer for 25 years and now personal historian, Lauren Dunbar began her career as a filmmaker at Sunset Films, a division of Sunset Magazine, Lane Publishing Company. Since 1975, she has earned over 100 professional credits as a producer, director, screenwriter, and editor on film, video, and multimedia programs for national broadcast and business television.
Founder of three successful companies, Corporate Media Design, Harbinger Films, and Memoria (in 2000), Lauren has created programs for broadcast on National PBS, the Discovery Channel, National Geographic Explorer, National and Bay Area Network stations, CNN, and Channel 4 in London. Her work has been honored with national and international film awards. Lauren’s national PBS special Healthy Aging includes inspiring stories from some of our “wise ones” — 70 to 100 years old.

Richard Dupell

Richard Dupell is a Northern California based director, producer, and storyteller. For over twenty years he has been producing and performing in original theatrical productions for both general and business audiences. In recent years his focus has been using improvisation and scripted works to bring the power of theater to strategic corporate meetings and events for Fortune 500 companies around the world. He founded the award winning theatrical troupe, I Fratelli Bologna, and co-founded Bay Area Theatresports™ where he served as show producer and artistic director.

Josh Goldman

Josh Goldman is Chief Executive Officer of Akimbo Systems, Inc., the world's first Internet-delieverd video-on-demand system for the television. In this role, he oversees all aspects of the company's operations and strategy and has led the company to its position today with over 150 content partners and 5000 individual titles available on the system. Before joining Akimbo, Goldman was Entrepreneur-in-Residence for Sprout Group Venture Capital where he was tasked with advising portfolio CEOs and creating new startup opportunities for the firm.
Previously he was CEO of mySimon, a comparison shopping service sold to CNet Networks in 2000, and then served as President of the consumer group at CNet. He has also held technology management roles at Apple, USWeb, Softbank and Phoenix Technologies. He received an MBA from Harvard Business School and a B.Sc (honors) in Computer Science from Tufts University. He sits on the Boards of Directors at Akimbo Systems as well as at Ask Jeeves (NASDAQ: ASKJ) and startup local search company PremierGuide.

Trevor Haldenby

Trevor Haldenby is a multidisciplinary creator and thinker based in Toronto. Since graduating from the Canadian Film Centre's Habitat
New Media Lab earlier this year, he has been working on numerous projects as photographer, musical deviser, producer, and installation designer.

Stan Heller

Stan Heller began his career in computing by sitting down to a Wang system to play with a program called "Adventure." He has been a compulsive gamer since that time, as well as a storyteller, a technologist and a person with a great curiousity about the rapid transformation of language and story in the past 30 years. His most recent project is the Mediascape presented at this Festival.

John W. Higgins

John W. Higgins has been associated with commercial and non-commercial, community-based radio and television since the mid 1970s. His experience includes work in production, management, performance and research; he has served on governing boards for cable television and community radio. An associate professor in Mass Communication at Menlo College in Atherton, California, Dr. Higgins teaches and conducts research in the areas of media production, media studies, alternative media, new media technologies, and international communication. Higgins has taught and developed media facilities and programs of study at colleges and universities in the U.S. and overseas.

The author of several articles exploring U.S. public access cable television, Higgins is a member of the editorial board of the Community Media Review, the journal of the Alliance for Community Media (a national organization promoting the use of community-based media). He currently serves as President of the board of directors of the non-profit San Francisco Community Television Corporation, which oversees the operations and management of Access San Francisco, the cityís public access channel and facilities.

Hana Iverson
Director - New Media Interdisciplinary Concentrations
Temple University

Her public installation art work crosses between digital, video and sound media. Iverson exhibited her work most recently at the International Center of Photography (2004). Her long-term installation and multimedia project, View from the Balcony, was on view at New York’s Eldridge Street Synagogue from 2000-03. Her work has also been shown at many galleries and festivals including Dorfman Projects, Mary Anthony Gallery, Pulse Art, Art in General, and 494 Gallery in New York; the Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City; and in Canada. Her videos are in the permanent collections of the Donnell Library Media Center, New York; Centro de la Imagen, Mexico City; and California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA. She has been reviewed and profiled in Art in America, the Village Voice, the Forward and other publications. She has received support for her work from the Covenant Foundation, TU Vice Provosts Research Initiative, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and Tisch School of the Arts. A member of the faculty of the International Center of Photography/Bard College graduate program in advanced photographic studies, Iverson has been a guest artist and/or lecturer at several universities including the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Ms. Iverson holds a Masters Degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.

Joe Lambert
Co-Director, Center for Digital Storytelling
Digital Storytelling Bootcamp instructor/Festival Presenter/Curator

Joe Lambert is Co-Director of the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley, California. Founded in 1994, the center's mission is to assist people in using digital media to tell meaningful stories from their lives. Joe has helped thousands of individuals complete their stories. Joe will be one of the instructors of the Festival Digital Storytelling Bootcamp workshop, as well as curating a Festival panel presentation about the uses of Digital Storytelling in education environments.

J.D. Lasica
Co-founder/Director - Ourmedia

J.D. Lasica is co-founder and executive director of Ourmedia, a global repository and community space for grassroots video, digital stories, audio, photos and text. A writer and blogger, his recent book about the personal media revolution -- "Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation" -- is the result of two years of reporting and research. J.D blogs about citizens media and digital rights at Newmediamusings and Darknet.com, and he has just started a Grassroots Talent Agency. He lives with his wife and 6-year-old son in the San Francisco Bay Area and is a frequent speaker and panelist at new media and technology conferences.

Howard Levin

Howard Levin is Director of Technology at the Urban School of San Francisco, an independent high school in the Haight-Ashbury area. Howard oversees the award-winning website, Telling Their Stories: Oral History Archives Project (www.tellingstories.org) which houses over 50 hours of student conducted interviews with Bay Area Holocaust survivors, concentration camp liberators, and Japanese American internment camp internees. He team-teaches this project-based course with Urban history teacher, Deborah Dent-Samake.
Urban received the 2004 National Association of Independent Schools Leading Edge award in technology for work on Telling Their Stories. Howard began integrating technology in the classroom 18 years ago teaching history at the Overlake School in Redmond, Washington. He is also former Assistant Head of the Jewish Day School of Metropolitan Seattle. Howard has published articles in ISTE's Learning and Leading with Technology and is a frequent speaker at education and technology conferences throughout the nation. He holds an MA.Ed. from the University of Washington.

Harry Marks
Festival Presenter - Technology Curator

A veteran of ABC, CBS and NBC, Harry Marks has earned nearly every award in broadcast design and promotion, including an Emmy and the first Lifetime achievement Award from the Broadcast Design Association. He is a frequent lecturer and presenter at design and computer conferences around the world.

Lee Marrs
President - Lee Marrs Artwork

Lee Marrs is an Emmy Award-winning art director, the president of Lee Marrs Artwork, a digital design & animation company for TV, feature films, computer games, and the internet. Her clients have included Apple Computer, IBM, Time Warner Inc., Children's Television Workshop, Nickelodeon, Electronic Arts, and MTV. She's consulted for Disney/ABC and others on digital storytelling. A recipient of the comic book field's Inkpot Award, she's author/artist to hundreds of titles, reprinted in nine countries, for such characters as Pudge, Girl Blimp; Batman; Wonder Woman; and Indiana Jones.
Lee teaches multimedia courses, including Storytelling in Digital Media at San Francisco State's College of Extended Learning, Cal State University East Bay and Vista College, Berkeley. She's lectured at Cal State University Sacramento and the University of California, Berkeley. A current research paper, American Hypercomics in the 21st Century, can be found at http://www.leemarrs.com/HYPER2.pdf
Currently an Advisory Board member of the Digital Storytelling Festival, she's been a founding board member of Northern Calif. Women in Film & TV, Berkeley Community Media, Berkeley Citizens Action, Video Compañia, East Bay Community Arts Project, Artists in Print, Public Action for Tenants & Housing, Wiomen's Comix Collective, and an Art Commissioner - City of Berkeley.

Daniel Meadows -Keynote Speaker
Digital Storyteller, Photographer and Teacher
Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University, Wales, UK

Daniel is currently developing Digital Storytelling as Capture Wales with a team at the BBC. This prize-winning citizen media project has been online (http://bbc.co.uk/capturewales/) since 2002 and the site now hosts more than 400 stories made either in monthly workshops or in partnership with community organisations. The project contributes Digital Stories to radio and television schedules in the UK at a rate of about five per week as well as 24/7 for the BBC's Your Stories "red button" interactive television service.

His books include Living Like This (Arrrow, 1975), Nattering in Paradise Simon & Schuster, 1988), Set Pieces, Being About Film Stills Mostly (BFI Publications, 1993), National Portraits (Viewpoint/Montage, 1997) and The Bus (The Harvill Press, 2001). Visit his Photobus website (http://www.photobus.co.uk) to find out more.

Thaddeus Miles

Thaddeus Miles is Director of Public Safety at MassHousing, Founder and President of MassIMPACT and President of the National Neighborhood Network Consortium which represents over 1200 Technology Centers across the United States. Mr. Miles' love of community and technology led him to MIT, where he served as an invited Reflective Community Practice fellow, focusing on helping others understand the important lessons learned in bringing technological resources to underserved communities. That experience resulted in Thaddeus working with Creative Narrations to establish a Digital Storytelling agenda for local computer centers in the Massachusetts area.

Patrick Milligan

Patrick Milligan is a multimedia developer with a strong background in authoring languages. He has been active in the world of "Digital Storytelling," providing interface design and programming for Dana Atchley's "Next Exit" performance piece and Abbe Don's "We Make Memories" museum kiosk.

Patrick Milligan has served as technical director of the Digital Storytelling Festival, and as an instructor in multimedia authoring at San Francisco State's Multimedia Studies program. Mr. Milligan has spent 30 years programming mainframe, mini, workstation, and PC class machines. For the past decade, his focus has been on interactive computer graphics, multimedia, and interface design. His entrepreneurial ventures include Mouse Systems, Video Seven, Momenta and Kaleida Labs. He was the principal developer of the CD-ROM title "Jazz: A Multimedia History," developed for Compton's NewMedia.

Harry Mott

Harry Mott is the founding Chair of the Digital Media department at Otis College of Art + Design. As the first Education Director for The American Film Institute's Professional Training Division, he created courses and curriculum that were the first of their kind and have since become models for other programs throughout the world. He was the Chair for the first three DV Expo conferences and is a freelance designer and producer of motion graphics Harry holds a MFA/MBA as a graduate of the first Peter Stark Motion Picture Producers Program at USC.

Leena Pendharkar
Filmmaker, Interactive Designer, Teacher
http://www.spicymango.com

Leena comes from a background in journalism and social issues media. Her documentaries Dreaming In Code and My Narmada Travels have screened in numerous festivals, and won several awards. Leena’s narrative short, This Moment, about an inter-racial couple forced to choose between culture and passion, has screened at over a dozen festivals. She has been designing web sites since the mid-1990’s for a number of clients and currently does so under the guise of her company, Spicy Mango Productions. She recently moved to Los Angeles where she teaches film/multimedia courses at Loyola Marymount University and UCLA Extension.

Rick Prelinger

Rick Prelinger (http://www.prelinger.com), an archivist, writer and filmmaker, founded Prelinger Archives in 1982, whose collection of 51,000 advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films was acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002. Rick has partnered with the Internet Archive to make 1,969 films from Prelinger Archives available online for free viewing, downloading and reuse. With the Voyager Company, a pioneer new media publisher, he produced fourteen laserdiscs and CD-ROMs with material from his archives, including "Ephemeral Films," the "Our Secret Century" series and "Call It Home:The House That Private Enterprise Built," a laserdisc on the history of suburbia and suburban planning (co-produced with Keller Easterling). Rick has taught in the MFA Design program at New York's School of Visual Arts and lectured widely on American cultural and social history and on issues of cultural and intellectual
property access. He sat on the National Film Preservation Board (2002-2005) as representative of the Association of Moving Image Archivists and is currently Board President of the Internet Archive, the San Francisco Cinematheque and on the Board of Stay Free magazine. His feature-length film "Panorama Ephemera," depicting the conflicted landscapes of 20th-century America, opened in summer 2004. He is co-founder (with Megan Shaw Prelinger) of the Prelinger Library , an appropriation-friendly reference library located in San Francisco. He is currently working on a book about archival access and cultural control.

Jo Reid

Josephine Reid is an experience design researcher in HP Laboratories, Bristol. She has helped to design, lead and analyse a number of field trials to test the value of situated mediascapes and mobile and pervasive technologies. Mediascapes are a new medium. Media is triggered through movement and automatically plays on a GPS enabled hand-held computer. Jo has been instrumental in the design and production of a range of differentforms of mediascape that have been deployed for evaluation. Analysis and insights from this and other experimental applications have led to the publication of an initial set of "Experience Design Guidelines for Creating Situated Mediascapes".

Jo has recently run a couple of Situated Digital Story telling workshops and is interested in the difference between mediascapes and the PC as astory telling medium. Jo joined HP Labs in 1994 having worked in Research and Development at Texas Instruments on expert systems and prior to that for Rank Xerox on HCI prototyping and testing interface designs.

Leslie Rule
Festival Presenter
Bootcamp Workshop Instructor

Leslie Rule is the Project Supervisor for the Digital Storytelling Initiative at KQED, the PBS affiliate in San Francisco, working in the fields Education, Community Outreach, and Adult Learning. Over the last 10 years, Ms. Rule developed a nationally recognized teacher training program for the American Film Institute, taught multimedia storytelling to adults at the College of San Mateo, and served as an educational technologist in middle and high school. She is an acknowledged expert on using digital storytelling as a teaching strategy and sits on the Executive Board of the Digital Storytelling Association. Ms. Rule has spoken at numerous conferences, seminars, and festivals, including MacWorld, NECC, CAIS, AMLA, and SXSW Interactive Festival. Over the last decade, Ms. Rule has trained 500 digital storytellers around the world.

Currently she is moving her storytelling practice out of the lab and into the street. Delving into place-based story creation to investigate what happens when people tell stories of, for, by, about, and in their communities. She is exploring narrative archeology and place-based storytelling as it begins to find form through emerging technologies, most recently serving as KQED lead on the collaborative project, Scape the Hood. Ms. Rule lives high atop the hills of San Francisco with her beloved son Thom and her beastly border collie, Bella.

Anthony F. Saad

With a solid grounding in video production and 20 years experience in education & corporate communication Tony has created training and marketing projects in a variety of media including; Video, Audio, Print, Multi-screen Multi-projector, VideoWall, Interactive MultiMedia, CDROM, World Wide Web and most recently Interactive Art Installations. Tony is a founder and senior producer at Nth Degree Communication Arts, an organization of skilled communications professionals that provide a wide range of solutions from design & pre-press to digital video production and the World Wide Web.

Tony is actively developing new rich media installations, mixed media performances and projects for interactive public spaces. He is currently focussed on the development of Painting The Myth the new system for interactive storytelling for galleries & museums he co-developed at the Canadian Film Centre's Habitat New Media Lab. The strength he brings is a unique ability to combine diverse resource elements to create greater value.

John Sanborn
Writer/director/video artist

John Sanborn is an award-wining writer, director and video artist who has worked with some of the most recognized entertainment and media companies in the world including Comedy Central, MTV, National Lampoon, MMG-Radar Pictures, MGM, Showtime, Microsoft, PBS, Mattel Interactive, UbiSoft and Electronic Arts to conceive and create entertainment for both traditional and emerging technologies.
Sanborn is also a video artist whose recent work "MMI", a short feature film about his adventures in New York in 2001, death and the redemptive power of family. The work premiered at the Mill Valley Film Festival in October of 2002 and was reviewed by VARIETY who said "Avant-garde in form yet poignant, funny and accessible, normally acerbic experimental filmmaker John Sanborn's short feature "MMI" unites the political, the personal and the philosophical in one deft package. Reflection on his tumultuous first post-millennial year -- one that encompassed a cross-continental move, stressful new job, deaths and 9/11 -- is an inventive audio/visual collage that carries real emotional heft." MMI has been selected to screen at over 20 festivals worldwide, including the Tribeca Film Festival (founded by Robert DeNiro) in May 2003.
Sanborn is currently completing another personal digital feature called "365" a chronicle of a year documented by making a short video every day. An 7 channel installation version premiere at Videoformes in Cleremont-Ferrand last year. Sanborn is also the Creative Director of eBay, the world's online marketplace.
John Sanborn holds an honorary Masters of Cinema degree from ESEC in Paris, and lives in Berkeley California with his wife Sarah Cahill and their daughter Miranda.

Nick West

What happens when people are invited to leave their stories, love letters, rants, and other annotations at specific locations in the city?
What differences would it make if the scaffolding on which these comments were hung was both open to the public, and permanent -- so that people could return and see annotations that had been made years ago?
Nick West is researching these questions through the prism of several “situated media” projects. He recently worked on the core design team that developed Urban Tapestries for Proboscis, a London-based think tank and creative studio. This research prototype created and analyzed software that let people use text, pictures or sounds from their mobile phones to create annotations anywhere in the city. Nick was gratified that regular people seemed to enjoy the process, and created wonderful and imaginative annotations – much more than the “hey, yo, I’m here!” kind of scraps that you might expect.
Currently he’s working on an extension to the Urban Tapestries platform called RoadMarker – an experiment in letting people listen to audio annotations “placed” along highways. This demonstration is part of a PhD thesis in Cultural Studies that he’s writing for Goldsmiths College, University of London.