Artists and Advocacy: Engaging Creatives to Create Change
Presenters
- David Bollier
Author and activist
David Bollier is an author, activist and blogger who studies the commons as a new paradigm of economics, politics and culture. He has collaborated with a variety of partners in this work since the late 1990s, but especially with the Commons Strategy Group, an international consulting project that he co-founded in 2010, and at his blog, Bollier.org.
Bollier’s scholarship and advocacy has taken many forms: as an author, conference organizer and frequent international speaker. He helped write and host a recent film, This Land Is Our Land: The Fight to Reclaim the Commons, and from 2004 to 2010, served as founding editor of Onthecommons.org and a fellow of On the Commons. Bollier's three most recent books are Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own (2009); Brand Name Bullies: The Quest to Own and Control Culture (2005); and Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Commons Wealth (2002).
Bollier is also co-founder of Public Knowledge, a Washington policy advocacy organization dedicated to protecting the information commons, and is senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. He worked with American television writer and producer Norman Lear on a variety of non-television, public affairs projects for 25 years. Bollier lives in Amherst, Mass.
- Jean Cook
Future of Music Coalition
Jean Cook is a musician, producer and the director of programs for the Future of Music Coalition, a national nonprofit that works to improve the lives of musicians through research, education and advocacy on policy issues that directly affect the ability of artists to make a living and reach audiences. She is a founder of Anti-Social Music, a New York-based new music collective. She currently records and tours with Ida/Elizabeth Mitchell, Jon Langford and Beauty Pill. Jean’s administrative background includes working as a publicist and curator for Washington Performing Arts Society; producing and hosting radio programs for 89.9 WKCR-FM, New York; and producing dozens of new music performance projects. For FMC, she currently directs initiatives to fix jazz and classical music metadata and to understand how copyright affects indigenous artists in places like Ethiopia, Tajikistan and Australia.
- Scherazade Daruvalla King
Founder, AmplifyMe
Scherazade King is the founder of AmplifyMe, a national non-profit whose work is at the nexus of civic engagement and the media. Their mission is carried out through media programming, workshops and youth-generated activities that promote action, self-worth, responsibility, intergenerational respect and communication. AmplifyMe is a winner of Harvard Business School’s Venture Philanthropy Award, the Media That Matters Film Festival, UNICEF’s Voices of Youth Video Competition and has been showcased on MTV, HBO, ABC, NBC, CBS, as well as in major newspapers and radio stations nationwide.
Scherazade is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, where she received a degree in Business Administration. She began her career as a consultant with Coopers & Lybrand in Washington, D.C., specializing in the city’s non-profit sector. She went on to start SDK Management, a consulting firm focusing on business planning, fiscal administration, and management training for domestic and international non-profit organizations.
Scherazade is also the president of The Power Company, a firm that specializes in using the power of communications to increase and leverage constituency dialogue and participation for positive outcomes on pressing social issues. Her clients include The Praxis Project, Health Resources in Action, Third Sector New England, JPNDC, Casa Esperanza, Progressive Communicators Network, Year Up, Freedom House, and many others. Scherazade is on the board of Boston Neighborhood Network TV, Traces of the Trade, and Hope Church. She is a passionate speaker, educator, activist, and believer in our ability to create transformative social change.
- Jack Walsh
National Alliance for Media Arts + Culture (NAMAC)
Jack Walsh possesses a life-long commitment to independent media and supporting the organizations that work on behalf of independent film and video makers. After completing film school at San Francisco State University, he worked for maverick independent filmmaker Peter Adair before taking the position as executive director of the legendary Collective for Living Cinema in New York. Returning to the Bay Area in the 90s, Jack became series producer of the innovative public television series Living Room Festival, worked as station manager of KTOP, Oakland's government channel, and as an executive producer at San Francisco public television station KQED.
Prior to becoming executive director at the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC), Jack was the capital campaign manager for the 9th Street Independent Film Center, an innovative cross-sector collaboration that enabled four nonprofit organizations to buy and renovate a building in San Francisco's SOMA district. Since joining NAMAC, Jack has overseen three national conferences (Taking Liberties, 2005; The Frontier is Here, 2007; and CommonWealth, 2009) as well as regional convenings, leadership developments, and capacity building programs. He is the principal investigator of Mapping the Field: A National Survey of Media Arts Organizations, which he launched in 2010.
An award-winning independent filmmaker and producer, Jack's work has screened around the world at film festivals and through broadcast TV. His current project, Feelings Are Facts: The Life of Yvonne Rainer, is a feature length documentary about the pioneering choreographer and filmmaker.
- Michael Winship
Writers Guild of America, East
Michael Winship is senior writing fellow at the public policy research and advocacy organization Demos, president of the Writers Guild of America, East, and former senior writer of “Bill Moyers Journal” on public television. Since 2002, he has written a weekly column for the nearly 400 daily and weekly newspapers of GateHouse News Service. It also appears on websites worldwide, including The Huffington Post, Truthout, Common Dreams, Alternet and the Bill Moyers Journal blog.
Winship has worked for America’s major PBS stations, CBS, the Discovery and Learning Channels, A&E, Turner, the Disney Channel, the Children’s Television Workshop, and National Geographic, among others. Experienced in documentaries and public affairs, kids’ TV, and music and arts specials, he won the 2009 Emmy Award for excellence in writing, and has been nominated for the Writers Guild Award for Excellence in Writing nine times, receiving it in 2004 and 2009 for commentaries written with Bill Moyers. For his work as WGA-East president during its hundred-day strike in 2007-08, he was a recipient of the Sidney Hillman Foundation Officers Award.
He is co-editor of the upcoming book "Bill Moyers Journal: The Conversation Continues" and author of the book "Television,' a history of the electronic medium published by Random House. Winship has co-produced two theatrical productions in Los Angeles, "The Arab-Israeli Cookbook" and "Charlotte: Life? Or Theatre?"
Video
Audio
- When
- Saturday, April 9, 9:00am - 10:30am
- Where
- Harborview Ballroom 1
map (pdf) - Track
- Media Makers, Culture and the Arts
Activism and public policy are inextricably connected. Activism and art have a lengthy history. But what about the relationship between art and public policy?
In this session, we will consider which media policy issues artists and creators need to pay attention to. How can artists and media makers motivate and move people to create political, social and cultural change? We will provide a simple toolkit for creators and their allies to help keep them abreast of important policy issues and to take action on legislation that may negatively affect artists’ access to communications or the public’s access to noncommercial creative works.
