Audubon Dougherty studied writing at Emerson College before earning her BA in anthropology at Smith College. This led her to the field of human rights, where she worked in communications and traveled to Southeast Asia to document the struggle of refugee populations. As a communications specialist and video producer for a labor union, she helped develop a new media program which utilized web outreach, streaming video and mobile messaging to organize workers in Massachusetts. Her time at MIT included a summer in Peru researching the social impact of wireless internet on rural communities, and the completion of her CMS master's thesis on civic production in live-streaming mobile video. Dougherty continues to make short films on the side; her website is amd4.net.