Collegium

Business, television, new media

Peter B. Kaufman () is president and CEO of Intelligent Television. He executive produces all Intelligent Television media and directs the company’s research and consulting work.  He is also an expert consultant on access issues for the Library of Congress Division of Motion Pictures, Broadcast, and Recorded Soundand in 2008 was appointed co-chair of the new Film and Sound Think Tank of the U.K.’s Joint Information Systems Committee.  He is a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York and a member of the Editorial Board of the World Policy Journal. He has served as director of the Open Education Video Project, funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; Associate Director of the Columbia University Center for New Media Teaching and Learning; a member of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure in the Humanities, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; and a member of the Social Science Research Council Digital Cultural Institutions Project, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.  Previously, Mr. Kaufman served as founder and president of TV Books, where he negotiated and concluded publishing deals with television networks and independent producers, literary agents, and authors worldwide, and sold majority interest in TV Books to Broadway Video, Lorne Michaels’s television and film company.  Mr. Kaufman has served as director of strategic initiatives at Innodata Isogen, a publicly traded media digitization company. He also has served as founder and executive director of PUBWATCH, a nonprofit organization supporting the publishing industries in Central and Eastern Europe, and as director of publications at the Institute for EastWest Studies. 

Educated at Cornell University and Columbia University’s W. Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union, he has written for 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.

Research and development

Mary Albon () 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.

Jen Mohan is a research associate with Intelligent Television. Previously, she was an account manager at Critical Mention, a television monitoring service in New York City. Ms. Mohan is currently heading a Digital Library Federation project that is investigating 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.

Charlotte Jones Voiklis () 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.

Television, network relations

Joel Westbrook is the 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 also 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.

Television, producer relations

Vanessa Roth has worked with the largest national foundations, television broadcasters, film distributors, national social welfare organizations and universities, making social issue documentaries for over a decade.

In 1998 Ms. Roth received the DuPont-Columbia Award for her first documentary feature, “Taken In: The Lives of America’s Foster Children.” This groundbreaking film chronicled the history of the foster care system in America through the lives of generations of foster-care youth; it was broadcast nationally as a primetime special on PBS, was used by Congress to enact new child welfare policy, is used in over 400 universities and libraries across the country and serves as a pivotal document for foster care and child welfare practitioners.  Ms. Roth’s second feature, “Close to Home,” took an unprecedented look at child sexual abuse.  It premiered at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, served as the focus of a special “Oprah” broadcast and was broadcast on the Discovery Health Channel as the channel’s first two-hour television event.

Following “Close to Home,” Ms. Roth co-produced and co-directed “Aging Out” with two-time Oscar nominee Roger Weisberg.  This story of three young people leaving foster care at 18 years old to live on their own premiered nationally on PBS in May 2005.  “Aging Out” was awarded the prestigious CINE Golden Eagle Award as well as “Best Documentary” in film festivals across the country, and was the centerpiece of a national outreach and educational campaign designed to improve the outcomes for former foster care youth.  In 2004 Ms. Roth appeared in and led the documentary team on the television pilot “The Danson Report” for Ted Danson and Paramount Pictures. Ms. Roth recently completed a feature documentary, “The Third Monday in October,” which delves into American politics through the eyes and lives of 12-year-olds as they campaign to become president of their middle-school student councils.  She is developing a film about autism, as well as a ten-year follow-up to her first film, “Taken In.” In 2007, Ms. Roth produced “Freeheld: The Legacy of Laurel Hester,” with director Cynthia Wade, a film that won the 2008 Academy Award for best documentary short film.

Before making documentaries, Ms. Roth received her Masters Degree in Social Work and a minor in Family Law from Columbia University and worked as a child advocate in New York City’s Family Court system, the New York school system, and the Los Angeles Rape Treatment Center.

Film

Richard Lorber 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 20 years in education and publishing as an art critic, editor, and teacher.  He 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, wrote regularly for Artforum and other periodicals, and has served as an 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.

DVD and CD productions

Jeffrey Peisch, an award-wining producer of television and music projects, has over 15 years of experience in home video and music marketing, with particular expertise in direct-response.  At Time-Life Video, he introduced several new product categories that resulted in over $20 million in profit.  Prior to Time-Life, he worked at 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 recently 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.

Archiving and access solutions

Jeff Ubois (), based in Silicon Valley, is director of archiving and access solutions at Intelligent Television.  He has co-produced three of Intelligent Television’s recent conferences —“Online Video and the Future of Television,” Berkeley, September 2005; “The Economics of Open Content,” Cambridge, January 2006; and “Culture, Commerce, and Public Media,” New York, June 2006.  Previously, he was staff research associate at the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California, Berkeley, where he developed approaches to measure the accessibility of archival holdings.  He is a consultant to variety of commercial and non-commercial institutions concerned with the mass digitization of video, including WNET/Channel 13 and BitTorrent.  For the Internet Archive, he has contributed to efforts to managing orphan works, maintaining archival integrity, and managing the collection and retention of digital library usage data.  He writes about issues in television archiving and digital video at http://www.archival.tv.  His articles have appeared in First Monday, D-Lib, the Journal of Digital Information, Release 1.0, ComputerWorld, and the publications of Ferris Research, a San Francisco-based consultancy specializing in collaboration software.

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, 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.

Online media and web development

Jack Brighton is Assistant Director of Broadcasting and Director of Internet Development at WILL Public Media, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he manages web site 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.