Kurt Fendt, Executive Director

Peter Donaldson, Faculty Director

Peter S. Donaldson was educated at Columbia (BA 64, PhD 74) and Cambridge (BA 66 MA 70). Since the late 1980s he has focussed on two major research areas: Shakespeare on Film and electronic projects involving Shakespeare across media. These include the Shakespeare Electronic Archive, Hamlet on the Ramparts and XMAS: Cross-Media Annotation System . Donaldson has been a pioneer in the use of media-rich presentations for scholarly and intepretive use. Donaldson is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (UK), and was the first Lloyd Davis Visiting Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Queensland (2006). More on his website. In his spare time he photographs small flowers in Vermont with a T-90 and collects Konica Pop cameras.

Dave Della Costa, Applications Programmer

Dave Della Costa is one of the developers building the next generation of HyperStudio's modular Repertoire library, using technologies such as Ruby and JavaScript. He has over 10 years experience building web applications, almost three of those at MIT. His development philosophy is based in trying to find the best balance between fast, functional development and well-structured, modular architectures—made possible using an test-driven-development approach. His interests outside of programming include music, traveling and language learning.

Gabriella Horvath, Administrator

Whitney Anne Trettien, Research Affiliate

Whitney Anne Trettien is a second-year graduate student in Comparative Media Studies, currently writing her thesis on the relationship between early modern rotary text generators and digital poetry. Before coming to HyperStudio, she translated Latin and Old English source texts on a project led by Professor Martin Foys to develop a digital edition of the Cotton Map, an eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon mappamundi. At HyperStudio, she has pursued her interest in the digital humanities as project lead on a collaboration with Old North Church, and in her work on the Serial Experience Project, the Comédie-Française Registers Project, and US-Iran Relations. Outside of MIT, Whitney can be found blogging about baroque oddities, collecting dictionaries, and promoting her book Cost of Freedom, an anthology of stories, poems, photography, and artwork from the American peace movement.

Whitney’s own website is at http://www.whitneyannetrettien.com/

Belinda Yung, Technical Manager

Belinda Yung has been centrally involved in all aspects of digital Shakespeare at MIT since 1994, working with the Shakespeare Project and the Literature Section. Currently, she is the manager and technical director of the Shakespeare Project and webmaster of LIT@MIT. Prior to working for Literature, Belinda worked as a programmer on the Paradoja Project (Paradox of Women in Developing Countries) for Foreign Languages and Literatures. She also coordinates various educational media projects developed in the HyperStudio. Her work focuses on helping faculty to integrate digital media and technology in the classroom, supporting researchers and scholars at partner institutions, and exploring new ways for active learning.

Jamie Folsom, Web Applications Developer

Jamie Folsom is a web applications developer and instructional designer with skill in envisioning, creating, and deploying useful and usable technology tools. He has extensive experience teaching with and about technology, managing technology projects, and building web sites.

He holds a AB in French from Vassar College and an Ed.M. in Technology in Education from Harvard University, and he has been a foreign language teacher, a technology trainer and manager, and a web applications developer for 20 years. His work includes a diversity of projects in education, the arts, politics and advocacy, for clients in a wide range of fields.

He served for two years as a US Peace Corps volunteer in Guinea, West Africa, where he learned an immense amount about appropriate and improvisational uses of technology and about the importance of access to, and participation in education, politics, the media and community.

Brett Barros, HyperStudio Alum

Brett Barros designs and develops the front-end of HyperStudio applications, examining use-case scenarios and applying carefully selected design patterns. He is also a web stats analyst, perhaps best known for his SEM News site which aggregates web marketing news. Brett graduated Magna Cum Laude from Boston University’s Advertising program and accordingly applies a customer-driven focus to all of his work.

Madeleine Elish, HyperStudio Alum

Madeleine Clare Elish worked in the fields of contemporary art practices, anthropology of technology and critical theory as an undergraduate at Columbia University (BA 2006). Beyond her coursework, she directed and acted in theater productions, curated art shows and taught in an after-school arts program. An internship during college turned into a job at the Whitney Museum of American Art where she wrote essays and curriculum guides based on the museum's art collection for publication on the Whitney's website. Since graduating, Elish has also worked for the contemporary art gallery Gavin Brown's enterprise, NPR's On the Media. Most recently, she worked as an editor for various websites published by Rodale. At CMS, her research revolves around the intersection of vision, perception, aesthetics and ethics, centering around the ways that new media alter the way we see the world.

Suzana Lisanti, HyperStudio Alum

With extensive experience in web communications, Suzana provides web communications strategy for MIT projects such as the Global Shakespeare Performance Video Archive, the Edgerton Digital Collections, the upcoming MIT Museum's Holography and Spatial Imaging collection, and the Arts at MIT portal.

Nicholas Seaver, HyperStudio Alum

Nick Seaver graduated with a BA in interdisciplinary literature from Yale (2007). As an undergraduate, his interest in sonic media led him to research the relationship between the technology of sound reproduction and social conceptions of "noise." At CMS, he is studying indeterminacy and control in sound transmission, the role of "skill" in aesthetic judgments, and the history of automatic musical instruments. His academic work is supplemented by experiments in computer-aided composition that combine experimental music processes with pop music materials. In addition to his work in sonic media, Nick has a longstanding interest in the history of the book, which led him to spend a year training full-time as a hand bookbinder at Boston's North Bennet Street School. Nick blogs about sound at noiseforairports.com.

Anna van Someren, HyperStudio Alum

As HyperStudio’s project manager, Anna van Someren combines a background in curriculum design and education with her experiences researching new media and participatory culture. Prior to working at the HyperStudio, Anna worked at the Center for Future Civic Media to conduct research on the ways in which participatory culture environments support the kinds of social deliberation, debate, and advocacy practices that allow entry into a shared public discourse. She formerly worked as Creative Manager for project New Media Literacies (NML) at MIT’s Comparative Media Studies (CMS, leading the production and development of innovative educational materials informed by a deep understanding of the ways youth interact with and produce media. She is a current board member of the Regional Youth Media Arts Education Consortium (RYMAEC) at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston.

 

Prior to working at MIT, Anna developed new media curriculum and taught multimedia production at after school programs and at the college level. An independent video artist, Anna has shown her experimental shorts in festivals internationally. She received her B.A. magna cum laude in Art & Art History from Colgate University, and her MFA in Film & Video from Massachusetts College of Art.