Sasha Costanza-Chock is a researcher and mediamaker who works on civic media, the political economy of communication, and the transnational movement for media justice and communication rights. He is currently Assistant Professor of Civic Media at MIT's Comparative Media Studies program (http://cms.mit.edu). He has been a part of the Independent Media Center network (http://indymedia.org), the Allied Media Conference (http://alliedmedia.org), and VozMob (http://vozmob.net), among other projects. Sasha is a recent transplant to the Boston area from Los Angeles, where he worked with grassroots immigrant rights organizations to help build stronger popular communication strategies. For more info see http://schock.cc.

Becky works with Center community partners and colleagues in the field of civic media to design and practice codesign methods. An activist and an explorer, Becky has worked domestically and internationally developing and researching the ways that social justice movements are using technologies to bring about progressive social change. She is particularly dedicated to the demystification of technology and the democratization of technology creation and use. She holds a B.S. in Comparative Media Studies from MIT and an M.S. in Information Management and Systems from the School of Information at UC Berkeley.

Catherine D’Ignazio, a.k.a. kanarinka, is an artist, software developer and educator. She is the Director of the Institute for Infinitely Small Things, an interventionist performance troupe, and former Director of the Experimental Geography Research Cluster at RISD’s Digital+Media MFA program. She has also taught in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT since 2009. Her artwork has been exhibited at the ICA Boston, Eyebeam, and MASSMoCA, and has won awards from the Tanne Foundation and Turbulence.org. Catherine has a BA in International Relations from Tufts University (Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa) and an MFA in Studio Art from Maine College of Art. She has lived and worked in Paris, Buenos Aires, and Michigan, and currently resides in Waltham, MA.

At the lab, Catherine is interested in researching experimental ways of engaging more deeply with place and spatial justice issues - through storytelling, maps, media, social practice and algorithms.

Dan is a Masters student in the Information Ecology research group at the MIT Media Lab. He studied Information Systems as an undergrad at Carnegie Mellon University, and was awarded a News Challenge grant in 2007 to blog about connecting "People, Content, and Community." As a matter or fact, his research interests haven't shifted drastically from this theme, and the ideas of hosted community networks and group conversations grounded in physical space continue to shape his projects at the Lab.

As an intentional polymath, Nathan's activities have ranged widely over the arts, technology, charities, ideas, and education. A graduate of Elizabethtown College and the University of Cambridge, his academic research has been just as wide-ranging. Most recently, Nathan has pursued dual passions in education and technology innovation. As a software engineer for Texperts and TouchType, he has helped startups scale to millions of users. He also helped establish The Ministry of Stories, a writing center in East London.

At the Center for Civic Media, Nathan makes art, software and charities which empower people to become more creative, more effective, and more informed. His current projects include the Festival of Learning, a nutritional label for the news, research on cooperative design practices, and social network action research.

Professor Jing Wang received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Soon to join MIT’s Comparative Media Studies, she also serves as the Director of the Institute of Civic Media and Communication at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China. Wang is the founder and organizer of New Media Action Lab (NMAL) and serves as the Chair of the Advisory Board of while sitting on the Advisory Board of Wikimedia Foundation. In spring 2009 she launched an NGO 2.0 project (“Chinese NGOs in the Web 2.0 Environment") undertaken in collaboration with two Chinese universities, Ogilvy & Mather China, and three Chinese NGO partner organizations.

Professor Wang published several books and articles, among them, the award-winning The Story of Stone, High Culture Fever, and the editor of Locating China: Space, Place, and Popular Culture, Popular Culture and the Chinese State, China’s Avant-Garde Fiction, Cinema and Desire (with Tani Barlow). Her current research interests include advertising and marketing, civic media and communication, social media action research, pop culture, and nonprofit technology, with an area focus on the People’s Republic of China. Her book Brand New China: Advertising, Media, and Commercial Culture is available from Harvard University Press.

Matt's a Research Assistant at the Center. He has spent his career at the intersection of technology and social change. He graduated with high honors from the University of Maryland College Park, where he wrote a thesis on the disruptive role of political blogs in journalism. He went on to join the strategy team at EchoDitto, a boutique consulting firm building cool technology for nonprofits, startups, and socially responsible businesses.

Then Matt attempted to save democracy by directing new media at Americans for Campaign Reform, a bi-partisan grassroots effort to enact voluntary public financing of federal campaigns. Right before Citizens United v. FEC hit, he joined the New Organizing Institute, where he helped to train the next generation of organizers. For most of this time, he also ran one of the most popular NetSquared groups in the world.

Matt's interested in pretty much everything, particularly the everything taking place at the Media Lab.

Nick Grossman is a technologist & entrepreneur focused on the intersection of the web and urban, social, and civic systems. For the past 10 years, he has developed software and media products, advocacy efforts and enterprise businesses that help cities work better.

Nick currently works with three organizations that are building civic technologies on an international scale. He is the Executive Director of Civic Commons, a new nonprofit initiative that helps governments collaborate around technology development projects. Since 2006, Nick led new product and business development at OpenPlans, building civic media websites and developing enterprise open source software for cities. He is also an advisor to Code for America.

You can find nick blogging at The Exobrain, tumblogging at The Slow Hunch, and on Twitter at @nickgrossman.

Pablo takes part and develops his projects in several independent research groups such as: Basurama (Trash-o-rama), where he has developed 6000km.org, a project that, through geotagged information, researches about the landscapes that the Spanish real estate crisis has left behind; Meipi, which develops the open source software meipi.org for participatory mapping; Kulturometer.org, that researches about cultural expenses in Madrid Region; Montera34, a research group that develops organization and visualization tools such as newspaper surface coverage.

He holds a Master in Architecture by the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid. He has also studied in the Technische Universität Dresden in Germany.

As a scholar in the Ronald E. McNair Post Baccalaureate Achievement Program, Rogelio has conducted research regarding the use of new media among Latina/o activists in Los Angeles. Emphasizing a "from-the-ground-up" approach to scholarship and civic engagement, Rogelio has been involved with integrating media and technology into social justice geared movements. His work looks into lessening educational and health related disparities among historically underrepresented and underserved communities. Past examples of such fusion between media and public service include his involvement with the Fast for Our Future, a human rights focused hunger strike that utilized a new media campaign, and the South Central Farmers Health and Education Fund, which aims to provide low income communities with affordable organic produce and essential dietary education with the assistance of new media.

Rogelio will work closely with the Center for Civic Media to further develop the use of technology and media as a means of addressing societal disparities, with an emphasis on ensuring access to emerging technology, media, and digital information among communities that often fall victim to the "digital divide."

William Uricchio is Professor and Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program and Professor of Comparative Media History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He has held visiting professorships at Stockholm University, the Freie Universität Berlin, and Philips Universität Marburg; and Guggenheim, Fulbright and Humboldt fellowships have supported his research. Uricchio considers the interplay of media technologies and cultural practices, and their role in (re-) constructing representation, knowledge and publics. In part, he researches and develops new histories of 'old' media (early photography, telephony, film, broadcasting, and new media) when they were new. And in part, he investigates the interactions of media cultures and their audiences through research into such areas as peer-to-peer communities and cultural citizenship, media and cultural identity, and historical representation in computer games and reenactments.