Collegium

Business, television, new media

Peter B. Kaufman (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)) is founder and president of Intelligent Television. He executive produces Intelligent Television’s media productions and directs the company’s research and strategic consulting work.  He also serves as co-chair of the JISC Film & Sound Think Tank; an expert consultant on access strategies for the Library of Congress Division of Motion Pictures, Broadcast, and Recorded Sound; and co-chair of the Copyright Committee of the Association of Moving Image Archivists. 

Mr. Kaufman has served as director of the Open Education Video Studio Project, supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; associate director of the Columbia University Center for New Media Teaching and Learning; director of strategic initiatives for the digitization provider Innodata Isogen; president and publisher of TV Books, a company he founded and sold to Lorne Michaels’s television and film company Broadway Video; founder and executive director of PUBWATCH, a nonprofit organization that supported the publishing and bookselling industries in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union during the (putative) collapse of totalitarianism in Europe; and director of publications at the East-West Institute, a foreign policy think-tank in New York City.  He serves in an advisory capacity for EUscreen; Europeana; Opencast; PrestoCentre, and the World Policy Journal.  He has served as a consultant on technology strategies and business affairs for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, WNET.org, and other educational and cultural heritage institutions in the United States and abroad.

Educated at Cornell and Columbia, Mr. Kaufman writes and produces video about media, education, history, and society.  He has published work in Publishers Weekly, Scholarly Publishing, Slavic Review, Russian History, The New York Times, The Nation, First Monday, D-Lib, the Times Literary Supplement and International Book Publishing: An Encyclopedia.  His recent work includes “Film and Sound in Higher and Further Education,” with Paul Gerhardt for the JISC Film & Sound Think Tank; “Video for Wikipedia and the Open Web: A Guide to Best Practices for Cultural and Educational Institutions” for iCommons, the Open Video Alliance, and the Ford Foundation; “Funding Media, Strengthening Democracy: Grantmaking for the 21st Century,” with Mary Albon, for Grantmakers in Film + Electronic Media; “On Building a New Market for Culture: Virtue and Necessity in a Screen-Based Economy” for the JISC Strategic Content Alliance; “Video Use in Higher Education” for New York University and the Copyright Clearance Center; and, with Jen Mohan, “The Economics of Independent Film and Video Distribution in the Digital Age” for the Tribeca Film Institute and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. 

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Archiving and access solutions

Jeff Ubois (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)) is a California-based consultant to libraries, museums, archives, and foundations engaged in mass digitization.  He is particularly focused on new approaches to personal digital archiving and working for a variety of U.S. and EU-based organizations engaged with moving image preservation, including Beeld en Geluid in the Netherlands. 

Prior to these associations, Mr. Ubois was a consultant to Thirteen/WNET, the public broadcasting station in New York City, and a staff research associate at the University of California, Berkeley, where he investigated access to television archives.  For the Internet Archive, he has worked on managing orphan works, maintaining archival integrity, and managing the collection and retention of digital library usage data.  He has worked as a consultant to the Sunlight Foundation, OCLC, Cisco Systems, and the Smithsonian Institution, and has been published in First Monday, D-Lib, Release 1.0, ACM Interactions, Computerworld, and the Journal of Digital Information.

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Television, network relations

Joel Westbrook is executive producer of Interface Media Group in Washington, DC.  Previously, he was president of the television production company Alexandria Productions.  Prior to founding Alexandria, Mr. Westbrook served as Senior Vice President and Executive Producer at Time-Life Television and Video, where he was head of all original production, including serving as Senior Executive in Charge of Production on “The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll” and Executive Producer of “Time-Life’s Lost Civilizations,” a 10-hour NBC documentary series (and winner of the 1995-1996 Prime-Time Emmy Award, Outstanding Informational Series).  As Executive Vice President of TBS Productions, Turner Broadcasting Systems, he was responsible for all original nonfiction programming, excluding sports. 

Mr. Westbrook has produced nonfiction programming in the following genres: history, environmental, nature, and children’s.  Among them are: “National Geographic Explorer”; “Cousteau’s Rediscovery of the World”; “Rome: Power and Glory”; and “Trials of Life with David Attenborough.” He also has extensive experience producing live and packaged sports programs with Major League Baseball, NBA Basketball, and the 1986 Goodwill Games in Moscow.  Mr. Westbrook began his career as News Film Cameraman and Film Editor at WRBL-TV in Columbus, Georgia, after receiving an ABJ degree in journalism from the University of Georgia.

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Research and development

Jen Mohan is a senior project manager with Intelligent Television. Ms. Mohan recently completed a Digital Library Federation project that investigated the current condition of moving image collections across the United States. Among her research interests are moving image archiving and preservation, copyright law and media distribution, digital distribution of moving images, new technology, Internet culture and new media sharing and creation. Ms. Mohan graduated from Emerson College in 2000 with a B.A. in Film, concentrating on film history, theory and genre. She received her M.A. from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2004 in Public History/Museum Studies with a concentration in Modern American Cultural History. In 2006 she earned her M.A. in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation from New York University, where she wrote her thesis on the digital distribution of archival materials. She is the author, with Peter B. Kaufman, of “The Economics of Independent Film and Video Distribution in the Digital Age,” commissioned by the Tribeca Film Institute and available at: http://www.tribecafilminstitute.org/home/about/26250304.html.

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Research and development

Mary Albon (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)) is a research associate with Intelligent Television.  Ms. Albon has over 20 years of experience in education, media, and management.  Presently she is a consultant to Barnes & Noble Publishing, Inc., serving as commissioning editor for B&N’s Library of Essential Reading and working on the development of new book series.  Previously she served as manager of international field-based programs and corporate relations at the F. W. Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College; associate director of Pubwatch, a nonprofit organization supporting the publishing industries in Eastern & Central Europe and the former Soviet Union; program officer at the Foundation for a Civil Society, where she managed the Project on Justice in Times of Transition; and publications editor and program officer at the Institute for East-West Security Studies.  Ms. Albon has designed and implemented a wide array of high-level international academic and policy programs and conferences focused on Eastern & Central Europe, the former Soviet Union, Central America, and Northern Ireland.  She also has worked as a public relations consultant in Moscow.  Ms. Albon is a graduate of Harvard College and Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, and she is a fellow of the 21st Century Trust.

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Online media and web development

Jack Brighton is Director of New Media and Innovation at WILL Public Media, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he manages website technology and content. For 16 years he produced WILL’s public affairs radio program Focus 580, and has also produced many news features, documentaries, and long-form broadcast and new media projects. He is a guest lecturer in online journalism at the Department of Journalism at the University of Illinois, and presents workshops on Internet media, media preservation, and web development at academic and media industry conferences. He chairs the News, Documentary, and Television Interest Group of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, and serves on the PBCore Resource Group established by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. From 2002 to 2007 he chaired the University of Illinois Campus Webmasters, and in 2003 he co-founded the University of Illinois Educational Media Group to foster collaboration on best practices in Internet media for higher education.

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Media and Education

Ellen Bratina directs the company’s relationships with television and publishing companies worldwide, as well as its associations with K-12 schools and universities.  Previously a literary rights agent, literary scout, and corporate publishing executive, she founded a literary rights company based in Prague and Warsaw in the 1990s.  A graduate of Marquette University, she has worked with media companies large and small in Europe and North America and has coordinated fundraising initiatives at several educational nonprofits in New York City. 

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Filmmaker/Social impact relations

An Academy Award, duPont-Columbia, and Sundance Award-winning filmmaker, Ms. Roth has been writing, producing and directing pivotal social issue documentaries for more than a decade.  Her work, which combines filmmaking with national social outreach campaigns, has received worldwide acclaim and distribution.  Her films have been given primetime slots on PBS, HBO, Discovery, A&E and the Sundance Channel, and have been featured on Oprah, NPR, as the media centerpiece of the 2008 Bill and Melinda Gates Education Forum, and as part of the official Youth Inaugural events in DC in 2009.  Some of her award-winning films include: Taken In: The Lives of Americas Foster Children, Close to Home, Aging Out, Schools in the 21st Century, The Third Monday in October, 9/11s Toxic Dust, Freeheld, No Tomorrow, and The Teacher Salary Project. Ms. Roth holds a Masters Degree in Social Work from Columbia University.

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Advertising, underwriting, corporate sponsorships

Alex Kroll, Jr. has served many of the world’s largest corporate clients in broadcast media advertising and underwriting campaigns for over 20 years as Senior Copywriter, Creative Director, Senior Writer, and Copywriter at Young & Rubicam, PriceWeber, Babcock-Rickert Advertising, the Leo Burnett Company, Ammirati & Puris, and, most recently, Siegel+Gale, the premier branding and strategic consultancy and part of the Omnicom Group. Mr. Kroll, who is also a novelist and producer, received his Russian degree from Princeton University in 1985. Mr. Kroll and Mr. Kaufman visited the Soviet Union together in 1979, accelerating the process that culminated in the end of the Cold War.

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Research and development

Charlotte Jones Voiklis (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)) is a development consultant working with Intelligent Television to build new partnerships, having worked in both non-profit and corporate environments developing strategic communications and relationships. Ms. Voiklis began working with archival material and pondering issues of access and preservation in college, moving onto graduate school where she cataloged pamphlets from the French Revolution for the New York Public Library, worked in pre-press production for major publishers, and taught undergraduates. Eventually earning a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (epistemology and fiction in 17th-century France and England), Ms. Voiklis left the academy to work for idealist.org where she learned a great deal about the global nonprofit sector, technology, organizational development, fundraising, and coalition-building. Ms. Voiklis is also responsible for the intellectual property and literary estate of her grandmother Madeleine L’Engle, informing her thinking about archives, access, and education.

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DVD and CD productions

Jeffrey Peisch, an award-wining producer of television and music projects, has over 20 years of experience in home video and music marketing, with particular expertise in direct-response.  He has served as head of video at Time Life, where he introduced several new product categories that resulted in over $20 million in profit.  Prior to Time Life, he worked at Sony Music Entertainment and Vestron Video, a pioneering home video company that was the first organization to recognize a home video market for special interest programming.  Mr. Peisch has served as project director of “Ken Burns’s Jazz,” a 28-CD boxed set from Sony Music that received a Grammy nomination.  He was series producer of “The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” a 10-hour television series for Time-Life/Warner Bros. Television that received an Emmy nomination.  He has worked as a consultant to a variety of clients including Sony Music; National Geographic Video; Nickelodeon; Smithsonian Video; Bertelsmann Intl. Direct; McGraw-Hill; Time-Life Music; the Verve Music Group; and PBS.

Mr. Peisch has served as Series Producer of the music CD set for “The Blues,” a PBS production of Vulcan Productions and Road Movies Production in association with Cappa Productions and Jigsaw Productions and Project Director of the music CD set for “Broadway: The American Musical,” a PBS production of Ghost Light Films and Thirteen/WNET.

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Film

Richard Lorber is chairman and CEO of Kino Lorber Inc., Lorber Media Inc., and president and CEO of Lorber HT Digital.  He started the film and distribution company Fox Lorber Associates, Inc., in his apartment in 1981.  He built it into a worldwide media business with 40 employees and $20 million a year in revenues.  Best known for its home video label, Fox Lorber distributed critically acclaimed foreign films, award-winning independent features, and classics.  After selling the company to WinStar in 1996, Mr. Lorber became co-chairman of WinStar TV and Video.

Mr. Lorber has spent over 20 years in education and publishing as an art critic, editor, and teacher.  He has worked in education for the Museum of Modern Art, served on advisory panels for the New York State Council on the Arts, edited the quarterly journal Dance Scope, written regularly for Artforum and other periodicals, and served as Assistant Professor on the graduate faculty of New York University and on the faculty of the New School.  He has earned bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees from Columbia University.

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