Program Director

Mary D’Ambrosio

Mary D’Ambrosio is an assistant professor of professional practice at Rutgers University, and previously taught at New York, Columbia and Central Connecticut State universities. A writer specializing in international issues, she has reported from the U.K., Turkey, Italy and Latin America. She served as an editor at Global Finance magazine in New York, a reporter for the Associated Press in Venezuela and a correspondent and book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her work has also appeared in Islands, Institutional Investor, Anthropology Now, and Working Woman magazines, and in Newsday, the Miami Herald and Worldpress. In 2009, she founded Big World Magazine, to feature multimedia storytelling about places. She holds a B.S. in magazine journalism from Syracuse University, and an M.Sc. in economic history from the London School of Economics. She edited ieiMedia’s Urbino Now magazine in 2010, and is the founding director of the Istanbul program.

Multimedia Director

Steve Anderson

Steven D. Anderson, Ph.D., is a professor of converged media in the School of Media Arts & Design at James Madison University. Prior to entering academe, Anderson was the environmental reporter and weekend weathercaster for KCNC television, a network O&O station in Denver, Colorado. He also worked as a news photographer, weathercaster and news reporter at stations in Fresno, California and Fargo, North Dakota. He is an author of a textbook entitled “Exploring Electronic Media: Chronicles & Challenges” (Wiley-Blackwell Publishing). His websites have won top awards from the Broadcast Education Association (BEA Best of Festival) and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC Best of the Web Competition). Anderson is a former President of the Broadcast Education Association (BEA), the association for electronic media professors and industry professionals. He taught video in Urbino, Italy from 2011 through 2015. He taught video storytelling as part of the Istanbul Program and created this website for the presentation of student work.

Reporting Instructor

Venise Wagner

Venise Wagner is an associate professor of journalism at San Francisco State University. She worked 12 years as a reporter for several California dailies including the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle. She has covered a variety of topics including issues in black communities around the Bay Area, education, religion and ethics, and Mexico/U.S. border issues. Her research emphasis is in intercultural communication and diversity as it relates to reporting minority communities. She is the co-author/co-editor of a forthcoming book “Reporting Inequality: Methods and tools for covering racial and ethnic communities” to be released in 2017. Venise has an M.A. in International Policy Studies from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, and a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Illinois, Champaign Urbana.

Faculty Fellow/Multimedia Instructor

Jack Zibluk

Jack Zibluk, Ph.D., is professor of Mass Media Journalism at Southeast Missouri State University, where he teaches visual communication, design, media history and media literacy courses. For 19 years, he led the photojournalism sequence at Arkansas State University. A former vice president of the National Press Photographers Association, he won the the NPPA’s Garland “educator of the year” Award in 2005. He also won the Arkansas Scholastic Press Association’s Lemke “teacher of the year” Award in 2008. He also won National Geographic magazine’s faculty fellowship in 2002. His writing and photography have appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Rolling Stone, News Photographer magazine and other publications. He has worked as a writer, editor and photographer for the Memphis Commercial Appeal, The Danbury (Conn.) News Times, the Milford Citizen and other publications in his native Connecticut. He earned a Ph.D. in mass media from Bowling Green State University and master’s and bachelor’s degrees in public administration and political science from Southern Connecticut State University. He lives in Cape Girardeau, Mo., with his wife, Sara E. McNeil, a writer, editor and yoga instructor, and their daughter Kate, 15.