Connecting Purposeful Storytellers

Media for Change Global Community

Media for Change is building a connected and supportive community of purposeful storytellers. As part of our Regional Resiliency Fellowship 2024, we are growing this community as a collaborative workspace on the Open Impact Coalition platform.

Both our One Water – OCEAN and WITH Festival communities are part of this effort.

Write to us for more information

Current Contributors

Sohini Sengupta
WITH Festival Coordinator/OCEAN Newsletter

Sohini is a feminist researcher, multimedia storyteller, and independent journalist. Her work spans gender studies, feminist advocacy, and media culture, particularly focusing on underrepresented voices. From leading communication campaigns to curating narratives as a scriptwriter, her career has been defined by her dedication to social justice and gender equity. Sohini has contributed to platforms like Feminism In India, winning the Laadli Media Award for Gender Sensitive Reporting.

She is the creator of *Consensify*, a board game aimed at teaching teenagers in India about consent and sexual education. Her current projects include a graphic history of feminist movements, a children's ocean newsletter, and a data-driven campaign focused on gender-based violence in India. Her passion for cultural preservation is reflected in her ongoing research on lullabies, where she explores the intersection of gender, history, and intangible heritage. She is also an independent illustrator and aspires to conquer the needlepoint. Sohini’s work emphasizes collective action, cross-disciplinary storytelling, and a commitment to advocating for marginalized communities.
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Abhi C.D.
Filmmaker/Artist

Abhi C.D. is an artist and filmmaker from Miami, Florida. His current practice showcases atypical cultural phenomena from his Miami upbringing and Indian heritage. He explores these cultures individually and where they strangely overlap in his personal experiences, aiming to illustrate a niche subculture within Miami’s already extremely diverse cultural landscape.

Olivia Flynn
OCEAN Community Outreach

As a recent graduate of McGill University with a double degree in Economics and East Asian studies, I am proud to call myself a citizen of the world. I have already traveled to more than 35 countries, experiencing their unique cultures—with plans to visit, revisit and make documentaries in many more. 

During my travels, I have developed a passion for scuba diving, which provides unique exposure to underwater environments and ecosystems. My travel and diving experiences have profoundly shaped the person I am today, one who believes in the power of documentaries to raise awareness to trigger crucial environmental, social and behavioral change. I am excited to embark on my graduate journey at the University of Miami to learn and earn my MFA in Documentary. I want to give voice to so many untold stories that deserve to be told, to make life better for future generations. Working and connecting with people who have traveled their own paths in life, people who value the power of the documentary to tell important stories, inspires me to do my best work and learn more every day. I look forward to the journey ahead...
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Uma Chatterjee
Video Editor/Designer

Uma Chatterjee is an assistant editor and editor based in Los Angeles, California. She began working in post production after graduating with a degree in Cinema & Media Studies and Documentary from the University of Southern California. She has worked in scripted television, reality television, commercial production, documentary, and music video spaces. 

She is grateful for the variety in her career that has taught her all about the editorial process. With experience in both unscripted and scripted media, Uma enjoys finding the shared thread between worlds real and imagined. She is especially interested in telling stories about nostalgia, memory, and reflection. In addition to her post production and film school background, Uma has worked on archival research and analog photography projects, and loves all “tactile” media. (Think sifting through an old photo scrapbook for hours on end.) When she’s not up all night working on an edit, Uma can be found on her yoga mat. She is currently completing her 200 hour teaching certification, and has found her yoga practice to be the perfect quiet companion to the high energy world of the entertainment industry. With her keen eye and perceptive nature, she hopes to use her creative voice to help show that subtlety and attention to detail are what help expand our awareness of the world around us.
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Madeline Popkin
Artist

Madeleine Popkin is an interdisciplinary artist from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with a background in painting, sculpture, and performance. Her work focuses on our species' relationship to the natural environment, specifically addressing climate change through the lens of prehistory and interspecies sensory connections.

After earning a BFA from Cornell University's College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, she drew inspiration from her North Carolina roots, particularly the ever-changing Outer Banks coastlines threatened by climate change. Madeleine’s work aims to use the universal language of the arts to help communicate scientific information by translating critical research into instinctually legible sensory experiences. Throughout her collaborations with scientists and research teams, she emphasizes that art is and always has been the most effective mode of communication our species can use to share visceral and life-changing information about our environment, and right now may be the moment we need it most. Her painting work visualizes the collective sensory overload that all living creatures experience in this anthropogenic age through tableaus of digital culture. During an era where a majority of the world lives digitally removed from the ecosystems we rely on, her work aims to address these gaps in time, species, and material priorities. Through collaboration with experts in climate-related fields, Madeleine is dedicated to visualizing the lived experiences of the animals, ancient populations, and ecosystems we rely on to allow us to understand other ways of being, inspiring action through visceral communication in an effort to collectively envision a more equitable and sustainable future for our planet.
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Board of Directors

Sanjeev Chatterjee
Founder/President

Sanjeev Chatterjee is a professor, visual storyteller and mentor to numerous media makers. His award-winning documentary work has been seen internationally on National Geographic, Discovery, The History Channel, PBS, ARTE, CCTV (China) and Doordarshan (India) among others. 

Sanjeev received the Fulbright-Nehru scholarship twice (2011 and 2018). Sanjeev is a Fellow of the Salzburg Global Seminar. He is a tenured professor at the School of Communication, University of Miami where he teaches filmmaking and journalism.
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Chad Tingle
Board Member

Chad Tingle is a Miami-based filmmaker and director with screening credits at SXSW, Aspen Shortsfest, The Miami International Film Festival, Maryland Film Festival, and the Cleveland Film Festival. He is the founder of Crown Street Films. .

His commercial directing includes spots for Anthemâ’s Simply Healthcare, Oakley lifestyle campaigns, Resorts World Casinos, and Broward Health, one of the 10th largest health systems in the U.S. Chad's began his career creating documentaries on Miami's social and cultural issues such as race-based gentrification, African-American church customs, and the soul music scene of the 1960s
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Gonzalo Mejia
Board Member

Gonzalo Mejia, originally from Ecuador, is a filmmaker with an extensive list of credits which include Documentaries, Films, and Web Content.  He is also an entrepreneur, having founded Bananas Films in 2004 in which they have produced media content for top brands around the world. 

Originally from Ecuador, is a filmmaker with an extensive list of credits which include Documentaries, Films, and Web Content.  He is also an entrepreneur, having founded Bananas Films in 2004 in which they have produced media content for top brands around the world.
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Sumita Chatterjee
Board Member

Sumita Chatterjee is a historian specialising in modern India and the English Caribbean, with focus on women’s work, and the role of gender, caste, race, and religious identities in the South Asian diaspora. She has a M. A. and M.Phil. in Modern Indian History from Jawaharlal Nehru University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. 

She has published in the journal Himal – South Asia, an edited anthology, Empire and Community: South Asians in Diaspora, and co-authored with Arva Parks and Kathleen O’Connor, Florida’s Third District Court Of Appeals: Balancing Justice. She currently holds a dual appointment as lecturer in the Department of History and Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at the University of Miami. She was the University of Miami’s Engaged Faculty Fellow in 2015-16. She continues to work with community organizations in Miami-Dade county such as Refugee Assistance Alliance and City Year Miami. She has received the Mellon CREATE grant to archive stories of South Asian immigrants in South Florida for the year 2020-2021. Sumita enjoys teaching, research, and civic engagement in her local community.
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Nina Furstenau
Board Member

Nina Mukerjee Furstenau is a journalist, author and editor of the Food Story book series for the University of Iowa Press. She has penned award-winning books, articles and essays focused on food identity and history, and received a Fulbright-Nehru research grant in 2018-19. 

Nina served in the U.S. Peace Corps (1984-86) and was one of its delegates for the U.N. World Conference on Women in Nairobi, Kenya. She was director of Food Systems Communication for the University of Missouri's Science and Agricultural Journalism program (2010-2018) and completed food/nutrition projects in Ghana and Mozambique for U.S. AID and the McKnight Foundation.
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Mohit Gulati
Board Member

is an independent filmmaker who explores avenues to use new age media to bridge the gap between alternative narratives and encourage dialogue to foster communities. Mohit has worked on various documentary projects, brand films, social impact studies, and fiction short films. 

Mohit launched Paridrishya in 2017 as an initiative to democratize storytelling in rural India. Mohit is a Young India Fellow and Alumnus of NIT Jalandhar and MICA. He founded Xooplabs, a content production studio in 2018.
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Jaswinder Bolina
Board Member

Jaswinder Bolina’s previous books include his debut essay collection Of Color (McSweeney’s 2020) and three full-length poetry collections, The 44th of July (Omnidawn 2019), Phantom Camera (New Issues Press 2013, winner of the 2012 Green Rose Prize in Poetry), and Carrier Wave (CLP 2007, winner of the 2006 Colorado Prize for Poetry). 

He is also author of the digital chapbook The Tallest Building in America (Floating Wolf Quarterly 2014). His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from journals and magazines including American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Gettysburg Review, The New Yorker, and Ploughshares, among others. His essays have been featured at the Washington Post, Paris Review, Shenandoah, The Believer, Poetry Foundation dot org, and others. He is host of the podcast Between Black & White: Immigrant Perspectives on Race, which is currently in production on its first season. Jaswinder serves as the chair of the University of Miami English department. He teaches on the faculty of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Miami. (from Copper Canyon Press)
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Janet Saidi
JANET SAIDI is KBIA’s assistant news director and teaches at the Missouri School of Journalism. All of Janet’s varied projects are about building community, through audio, journalism, and storytelling. She has written and produced pieces for NPR, PBS, the BBC, the Christian Science Monitor and the Los Angeles Times.
Janet recently hosted KBIA’s live talk show The Check-In, and has also directed the station’s “You Don’t Say” and “Missouri on Mic” series that combine oral history with audio journalism. In 2014 and 2016, Janet co-produced two journalism-on-the-stage theater productions with playwright Michelle Tyrene Johnson, “Justice in the Embers,” with Kansas City’s Living Room Theatre, and “The Green Duck Lounge,” with MU Theatre. Janet began her public-media work at KPBS in San Diego, on a live, nightly talk show called The Lounge. While in California, Janet also helped produce the award-winning national PBS series “Remaking American Medicine” about healthcare in America, and worked as an editor at the Gay & Lesbian Times and Uptown Newsmagazine. As vice president for news at Kansas City Public Television, Janet lead a team of multiplatform journalists to launch KCPT’s digital magazine “FlatlandKC,” and co-produced the “Beyond Belief” interfaith journalism project for AIR’s Localore “Finding America” series. Janet lived for several years in England, where she earned her master’s in Literature from University College, London.
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Board of Advisors

Lucy Lehman
Agent Provocateur

Lucy Lehman graduated from the University of Wisconsin (BS ART, 1963) and later worked at the Art Institute of Chicago in the Department of Oriental Art. 

She had a successful career in wholesale sterling silver jewelry business. Ms. Lehman is a noted philanthropist who has raised funds for arts organizations and well as healthcare organizations focused on access and equity. With her son Peter, Ms. Lehman is the founder of Race Fans for Change, dedicated to helping motor race fans on political issues.
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Paul Mihailidis
Associate Professor, Emerson College and Director, Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change

Paul Mihailidis is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director of Media Design at Emerson College, Boston. His work straddles the fields of media literacy, civic and community engagement and activism. 

Paul serves as the Director of Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change. His recent books, Civic Media Literacies (Routledge), Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice (w/ Eric Gordon, MIT Press) and Media Literacy and the Emerging Citizen: Youth, Engagement and Participation in Digital Culture(Peter Lang) explore the ways in which citizens use media to meaningful participate in civic life in the digital age.
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Rick Ray
Investor and Media Entrepreneur

Rick Ray graduated from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and grew up in television . He as Chief Executive Officer and his wife, Dee as President started Raycom Inc. in 1979 and led a trend in televising college athletics on a broader basis. They have 4 children.

Rick and Dee have a history of service in their communities ,with several Universities and NGOs

1995- RAYCOM was regularly producing over 600 events, major bowl games and golf tournaments and basketball events, produced / sold college basketball for ABC network and the CollegeFootball championship / merged with a group of 13 television stations. 1998- RAYCOM was sold to RSA 2002-2003  investor/ member of the board of Action Performance, 2008- present  investor and consultant for Woodfield Partners 2010 -present  Operating partner in Palo Alto based Virgo Investment Group. 2011 -2012 Chief Executive Officer of “Nightly Business Report”, an award- winning  business news program selected as one of 4 best programs of the year on PBS stations sold to CNBC. 2018 – present Advisor to the Board / Board Member of Bitcentral the largest  supplier of television news production software and hardware in the US.
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Karin Gwinn Wilkins
Dean, School of Communication, University of Miami

Karin Wilkins is Dean of the School of Communication at the University of Miami. Before coming to UM in September, 2019 she was Associate Dean for Faculty Advancement and Strategic Initiatives with the Moody College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin.

While at UT. Austin, she also held the John T. Jones Jr. Centennial Professorship in Communication and the John P. McGovern Regents Professorship in Health and Medical Science Communication. She was awarded the Cale McDowell Award for Innovation in Undergraduate Studies, for creating a certificate in global studies, programs in Middle East studies, and a degree in Communication and Leadership. Wilkins is also the Editor-in-Chief of Communication Theory. She has won numerous awards for her research, service and teaching, and chaired the Intercultural/Development Division of the International Communication Association. Her work addresses scholarship in the fields of development communication, global communication, and political engagement. She holds a Ph.D. and a Master in Communication from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.A., in Interdisciplinary Studies from Bucknell University.
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Gyan Sinha
Finance Professional
Gyan Sinha is a Portfolio Manager at Linden Advisors, LP. Gyan has over 25 years of experience in researching, trading, structuring and managing securitized products. Gyan joined Linden from Godolphin Capital Management (a data-science focused private credit fund) where he was the CIO. Prior to Godolphin, he was a Partner/Portfolio manager at KLS Diversified Asset Management and a member of KLS’ Investment Committee. At KLS, he co-managed and supervised the day-to-day workings of the Structured Product group.
Gyan headed the Global Structured Credit Research group at Bear Stearns, which was well known for its groundbreaking ABS/MBS prepayment and credit analysis and its cash CDO research. Over the past decade, he was consistently one of the top-ranked analysts in Institutional Investor’s (II) All-America Fixed Income Research survey for his work in asset-backed securities, notably in prepayments, ARMs and CDOs. For 7 years, his work on ABS prepayments garnered him the first rank in the annual II polls. His work on CDOs has also been recognized as worthy of the top spot for 2 years in a row during this period. Gyan joined Bear Stearns in 1996 and was with the firm for almost 12 years. Prior to joining Bear Stearns, he was a Vice President at CS First Boston in the Mortgage Research area. He started his career on Wall Street at Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette (DLJ) where he focused on, among other things, some of the earliest sub-prime transactions in the mortgage market. Prior to his Wall Street experience, Gyan was an Assistant Professor in the faculty of commerce at the University of British Columbia from 1991 to 1993. Mr. Sinha earned a Bachelor’s degree in Economics in 1985 from Delhi University and a Ph.D in Economics from Syracuse University in 1991.
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International Advisors

Ana Laura Gamboggi Taddei
University Professor, São Paulo, Brazil

Ana Laura Gamboggi’s work with institutions and organizations around the world on environmental research projects add perspective to mediaforchange.org’s educational and research policies. 

She is a published author and currently teaches at SENAC University, Brazil.
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Chandra Shekhar Sinha
Adviser, Climate Change Group, World Bank

Chandra Shekhar Sinha  joined the World Bank in 1997 and was part of the team which established carbon finance at the World Bank.Mr. Sinha has held various positions at the World Bank, including the Lead Financial Specialist for the Energy Group of the Latin America and the Caribbean, Team Leader for Operations for the Carbon Finance Business and the Fund Manager for the €970 million Umbrella Carbon Facility.

Mr. Sinha was the Head for Environmental Markets in Asia for JP Morgan Chase from February 2008 to March 2010 during which time he set up and managed the carbon finance business for the firm in Asia. Between 1989-96, Mr. Sinha worked on rural energy, renewable energy and climate change at the TERI (New Delhi). He was a Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University from 1993-95. Mr. Sinha has a Ph.D. and M.Tech. in Energy Studies from the IIT, Delhi and a Masters degree in Physics from the IIT, Kanpur.
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Gautam Bose
Documentary Filmmaker, India

Gautam Bose has been making documentaries for 30 years. Also as a development communication professional, Gautam has used film to help people from diverse backgrounds communicate effectively with one another.

Gautam’s creative output has ranged from biotechnology-learning videos for the farmers, to critical social documentaries on women, migration and mental health. His audience is equally varied —his work has been screened along the coastal villages of Kerala, in National Geographic channel as well as at the UN. Gautam made nearly 5000 learning videos on products, services and processes, shot a dozen of shorts for National Geographic Channels and shot and directed dozens of documentaries for various TV channels, NGOs across the world. In early 80’s Gautam got his first professional training in CENDIT (Centre for Development of Instructional Technology) Delhi.
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Girish Muzumdar
Multimedia Scholar. France

Girish Muzumdar’s research focuses on developing a model of care and support that favors social inclusion and allows persons with intellectual disabilities to lead the lives of their choice, expressed through the narrative function. He is an associate member of Projekt, a design lab at the University of Nimes, France.

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Karen Fowler-Watt

Karen Fowler-Watt is a senior principal academic at Bournemouth University in the UK. A former senior BBC journalist, she is interested in storytelling, authorial voice, questions of ethics and reporting conflict and trauma.

Her current projects are focused on re-imagining journalism education - she is co-editor (with Stephen Jukes) of the forthcoming publication 'New Journalisms: Rethinking practice, theory and pedagogy' (Routledge, 2019). She is also working on a pedagogic project on marginalised voices with Dutch non-profit Global Voices and recently ran workshops on fake news and trust for a research project funded by the US Embassy in London. Karen seeks to build connections between industry and the academy through her role as research theme lead for journalism education in Bournemouth University's Centre for Excellence in Media Practice. She has an M.A. in History from the University of Cambridge, a doctorate from University of Southampton and was a Harkness Fellow at Harvard.
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