Amelia is a postdoctoral researcher at the MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program (STEP). Her research focuses on design-based research approaches to supporting and understanding processes of mathematics thinking and learning. ​In her current role, she contributes to the development and evaluation of problem-based high school geometry curricula. She holds a PhD in mathematics education and an MA in mathematics from the University of California Berkeley, as well as a BA in mathematics from Columbia University.

Anna D. Gibson studies the intersection of community, labor, and justice in digital spaces. She earned her MA and PhD from the Department of Communication at Stanford University, where her doctoral work focused on volunteer moderation on Facebook. During her graduate career she earned fellowships with the McCoy Family for Ethics in Society and the Stanford Ethnography Lab, and she was awarded the Centennial Award for excellence in teaching. Her research on content moderation has been published in Social Media + Society. Anna also holds a BA in linguistics and cognitive science from Pomona College.

SHASS Diversity Predoctoral Fellow Biyi Wen is a Ph.D. candidate in the Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance Graduate Program at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her dissertation project "textBox: an intermedia assemblage on Chinese text processing" is a media history on Chinese text processing and computing from 1940 to 1990.

She is also a research affiliate with the MIT Trope Tank.

After earning her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of Southern California, Ka Lee Wong (黃嘉莉) was a Dornsife Fellow at USC, teaching Asian cinema, media and pop culture classes. Ka Lee’s research focuses on Chinese languages and cultures in the transnational context, particularly issues concerning global Chinese diaspora, language politics and the ways that “Sinophone”, or sounds of Chinese languages, play a role in top-down control and bottom-up resistance. Her writings have appeared in Asia Sound Cultures: Voice, Noise, Sound, Technology (Routledge), Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, Cha: Asia Literary Journal, and Hong Kong Review of Books. As a postdoctoral associate, she will further her research on sounds and Sinophone media. She likes word play, photography, and cats.

Mic Fenech earned his PhD in STEM Education from The University of Texas at Austin and is a former high school mathematics teacher of five years. He earned his MAT in Education and his BS in Mathematics from Sacred Heart University, and he is certified to teach secondary mathematics in Connecticut and Texas. His research interests center around how students’ classroom experiences influence their attitudes toward mathematics, as well as how mathematics teachers can promote positive attitudes in their classrooms. After his postdoctoral associateship ends, he wants to continue working in academia at the university level, teaching future mathematics educators best practices for providing their students with positive experiences. On a personal note, Mic loves to play Nintendo, watch/discuss movies and TV shows, and spend time with his corgi.

Yichen Rao is a postdoctoral associate in MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing (affiliated with the MIT Game Lab). He recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan after receiving his Ph.D. in Anthropology and STS from the University of Hong Kong in 2021. He conducts ethnographic studies on the socio-cultural impacts of digital capitalism, such as the gaming and fintech industries. He has published on a wide range of topics, including digital lending apps and remote debt collection, Animal Crossing fever during the pandemic, and League of Legends players in China's controversial internet addiction treatment camps. After the fellowship, he will join Utrecht University as an assistant professor of anthropology.

Nancy Baym is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New England, a couple of blocks to the east of CMS/W's haunts. Her work focuses on interpersonal relationships and new technologies. She is the author of Personal Connections in the Digital Age (Polity 2010), Internet Inquiry (co-authored with Annette Markham) (Sage 2009) and Tune In, Log On: Soaps Fandom and Online Community (Sage 1999). Her current research is about musicians' relationships with audiences and how social media affect them.

Wasalu Jaco, professionally known as Lupe Fiasco, is a Chicago-born, Grammy award-winning American rapper, record producer, entrepreneur, and community advocate. Rising to fame in 2006, following the success of his debut album Food & Liquor, Lupe has released eight acclaimed studio albums, his latest being Drill Music In Zion, released in June 2022. His efforts to propagate conscious material garnered recognition as a Henry Crown Fellow, and he is a recipient of an MLK Visiting Professorship at MIT for the 2022/2023 academic year.

Louis J. Massiah SM '82 worked on the team that produced The Taking of One Liberty Place (Scribe Video Center, 1987) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is a documentary filmmaker and the founder/director of Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia. His innovative approach to documentary filmmaking and community media have earned him numerous honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship (1996-2001), two Rockefeller/Tribeca fellowships, and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts.

Alberto Angelini (pka Albert Figurt) is an Italian videomaker, musician, and independent researcher. Since 2005 he has worked as a director and screenwriter both for TV and documentaries, while also presenting video-art installations and experimental theatre pièces all over Europe. He has taught within several study abroad programs in Italy, organizing “Expanded Video Editing” and “DIY Guerrilla Filmmaking” seminars for American exchange students. Since 2009 he has been part of the Video Vortex community (promoted by Amsterdam's INC), lecturing and publishing on online video and its aesthetic & sociological side æffects. In 2022, thanks to the very first Italy-USA Fulbright Grant for “Independent Researchers in the Art Field”, he spent six months as a visiting scholar at MIT (hosted by Nick Montfort's Trope Tank), focusing on the “Re-Design of Cinematic Experience in Screencast Narratives”.

Brian Jacobson, Professor of Visual Culture at the California Institute of Technology and Director of the Caltech-Huntington Program in Visual Culture, is a historian of modern visual culture and media. Working at the intersection of cinema and media studies, the energy and environmental humanities, and the history of science and technology, he has published widely in academic journals and publications including The Atlantic and the Los Angeles Review of Books on topics including media technologies and infrastructure, corporate and industrial media (especially in oil and gas industries), and media representations of technology and industry. Jacobson is the author of Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space (Columbia, 2015), a finalist for the Theater Library Associations’ Richard Wall Memorial Award, and editor of In the Studio: Visual Creation and Its Material Environments (California, 2020), winner of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies award for Best Edited Collection and the Limina Prize for Best International Film Studies Book. With James Leo Cahill and Weihong Bao, he edited “Media Climates,” the Winter 2021 issue of Representations. He is currently completing two books: “The Cinema of Extractions” (under contract with Columbia University Press) and “The Art of Oil in France: A Global History, 1944-1975.” He graduated from the MIT Comparative Media Studies graduate program in 2005.