Kira Pollack is a leading creative director and photo editor known for pioneering new approaches to visual storytelling. Throughout her career, she has redefined how photography, emerging technology, and digital media intersect to expand the possibilities of visual journalism. Pollack was Creative Director and Deputy Editor at Vanity Fair, where she oversaw more than 50 […]
Sarafina DiFelice is a documentary producer, creative executive, and curator. She was previously on the Netflix Original Documentaries team where she oversaw global non-fiction acquisitions, as well as a commissioned slate of celebrated and award-winning documentary feature films. Prior to this, Sarafina spent over a decade as a curator at some of the world’s largest film festivals, including roles
Shirley Abraham is a Cannes prize-winning Indian documentary filmmaker. As a child, she came to the movies by rebellion. She watched them in secret—covering the television screen with a cloth, making her own magical cave. The Cinema Travellers, her debut film made in collaboration with Amit Madheshiya, premiered as an Official Selection at Cannes Film
Christian L. Tom most recently served as Assistant to the President and Director of Digital Strategy in the Biden White House. He has previously worked across the business, academic, and political aspects of the digital media landscape in a variety of roles and capacities. Before the White House, he led the first-of-its-kind Digital Partnerships team
Gabriel Stein is a technologist, developer, and writer who has been interested in the intersection of culture and technology since he taught himself to code in middle school to build an online roleplaying game. He is the Head of Platform at Knowledge Futures, a non-profit that builds public digital infrastructure to make information useful. He
V Spehar is an award-winning digital journalist, TikTok personality and podcaster. Spehar launched UnderTheDeskNews with the aim to make news media less intimidating and easier to understand and rapidly amassed a collective 4 million subscribers to their various social media platforms. Their original reporting has won them one on one interviews with Vice President Kamala
Ravi Gupta is the Founder and CEO of The Branch, a non-profit media company that launched in October 2021 to fight polarization and misinformation online. Before launching The Branch, Gupta co-founded Arena, where he led a team that helped elect dozens of candidates and launched the largest campaign staffer training academy in the history of
Shuwei Fang is Associate Director, Programs at Open Society Foundations where she has spent over a decade advancing civic media and information technology via grants and hybrid investments. At Open Society, she recently led the AI in Journalism Futures project, one of the first significant global attempts to understand how the long-term impact of AI
Felipe Estefan has dedicated his career to the intersection of democracy, media and technology. Currently, his work focuses on narrative change as a path to promoting mutual understanding, fostering belonging, and reimagining democracy in a digital age. For the past decade, Estefan was part of Luminate – a global philanthropic organization – where he most
Tracy Chou is an entrepreneur and software engineer well-known for her work advocating for diversity and inclusion in tech. Motivated by personal experience in countering online harassment, and drawing on professional experience as an early engineer at social media companies like Facebook, Pinterest, and Quora, she founded the tech startup Block Party to build end-user
Leisel Bogan is a technology, international, and national security leader with experience in the private, public, and academic sectors. As a Senior Technical Advisor at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Bogan focused on safeguarding critical infrastructure and defending against nation-state cyber threats. Prior to CISA, Bogan was a Research Fellow at the Harvard
Louis Barclay is a software developer and tech activist who was banned and legally threatened by Meta in 2021 for creating Unfollow Everything, a tool to delete users’ news feeds, leading to a major lawsuit last year. Barclay is also the founder of Nudge, an open source project to give people more control over what
Magdalena Tarnawska Senel (Ph.D., UC Irvine) is the Managing Editor at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review. She is a published author, scholar, and educator. For the past 25 years, she has taught and conducted research in the fields of German, cultural, and gender studies; history of medical education and social history; language teaching and social
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Heather Sulejman is the Managing Director of the Constructive Disagreement Project. A trained mediator, Heather’s experience centers around processes for effective disagreement, conflict management, and negotiations. Heather works to translate research in conflict management into practical and scalable interventions for partners in education, healthcare, and the media. Previously, she has held leadership roles in public and private
Betsy is project coordinator for Professor Jennifer Lerner and also supports Professors Todd Rogers, Julia Minson, and Sharad Goel. She holds a BA from Connecticut College and has an eclectic background in teaching, veterinary medicine, and customer service. Her hobbies include sewing, trying new cheeses, attending live theatre, and spending time outdoors providing her partner
Emily Roseman leads the Shorenstein Center’s research community, including the fellowship program. Previously, she was the Research Director for the Institute for Nonprofit News, a news network of over 450 nonprofit, independent news organizations. Her interest in the future of news started at the Shorenstein Center in 2016 while managing a research project that examined how
As the Project Data and Insights Manager with the Public Interest Technology Lab, I work with data in a variety of ways. I serve as a data engineer and analyst for our in-house developed apps and platforms by leading efforts related to the storage, management, curation, and analysis of data associated with these initiatives. Subsequently,
Rodas is a recent MC/MPA graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School. Her previous training and work include architecture, planning, and business. Rodas has the resilience, enthusiasm, and ability to be the beacon of hope for her fellow classmates, colleagues, and citizens of the world. In her role at the Shorenstein Center as a resident fellow,
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Brian Friedberg is a graduate student in Social Anthropology at Harvard University, a Senior Researcher at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, and the coauthor of Meme Wars, released in 2022. Blending ethnographic methods and investigative techniques, his research focuses on alternative media, pseudonymous communities and unpopular cultures,
Rebecca Richman Cohen is an Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker who teaches courses on media theory and advocacy at Harvard Law School. Through her work, she has examined a range of topics, including the prosecution of war crimes in Sierra Leone, responses to sexual violence in the US, cannabis legalization, and biodynamic winemaking. Her most recent film,
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The Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy is a Harvard Kennedy School research center dedicated to exploring and illuminating the intersection of press, politics and public policy in theory and practice. The Center strives to bridge the gap between journalists and scholars, and between them and the public.
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