Overcoming Silence - 9 June 2010
About the Contributors
Mallary Abel is an independent curator and filmmaker. She studied Cinema at San Francisco State University, and volunteered at Other Cinema while there. In 2009 she moved to Brooklyn, New York, and worked with Steve Holmgren an Associate Programmer at UnionDocs.
Kazembe Balagun is a writer/curator/organizer who lives in Co-op City the Bronx. His work has appeared in Left Turn, Monthly Review and the Indypendent.
Colin Beckett is a writer and video editor in Brooklyn. He is the Critical Writing Fellow at UnionDocs.
Darius Dixon is an engineer turned journalist, who has written for Wired and The Nation. Recently, he began reporting on issues of energy, clean technology and the environment, in Washington, DC.
Daniel Frontino Elash earned an M.A. in American History, with an emphasis on Immigrant and Labor History, from San Francisco State University in 2008. He has since relocated to New York City, where he works in a retail video shop and occasionally writes for People's World, newspaper of the Communist Party USA.
Benj Gerdes is an artist, writer, and organizer working in film, video, and a number of other public formats. He frequently works in collaboration with other artists, activists, and theorists, including as a member of 16 Beaver Group. He is interested in intersections of political discourse, knowledge production, and popular imagination. His individual and collaborative work focuses on the affective and social consequences of economic and state regimes through historical research, dialogue, and participatory or aleatory formalizations.
Chris Maisano is a librarian and activist living in Brooklyn. His writing has appeared in Democratic Left and In These Times. He edits The Activist, the blog of Young Democratic Socialists.
Melissa Morrone is a public librarian in Brooklyn and a member of the NYC collective of Radical Reference.
Jeanette Samyn is working towards her Ph.D. at Indiana University. She studies the Victorian novel, and is interested in theories of space and the urban poor.
Laura Schleifer is a NYC-based writer, theater artist, and NYU Tisch grad. Her work has spanned the Middle East, where she performed for Palestinian and Iraqi children on a theater/circus tour; to an NGO in Nicaragua, where she taught English through the use of theater; to off-Broadway, where she's performed her socially-conscious songs and monologues at theaters throughout New York with the Theaters Against War network; to working with homeless and at-risk youth as an Artist Mentor. She writes for several magazines, including Scenario and Looking Glass.