ieiMedia Faculty, Back row: Greg Luft, Doug Cumming, Bob Marshall, Steve Anderson, Rustin Greene, Dennis Chamberlin. Front row: Barry Janes, Michael Gold, Susan West, Susan Biddle.

Program Director & Video Instructor

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 in 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014, and created the websites for presentation of student work.

Multimedia Reporting

Bob Marshall

Bob Marshall is the veteran reporter, feature writer and columnist whose work at The Times-Picayune earned two Pulitzer Prizes. He was co-author of the series “Oceans of Trouble: Are the World’s Fisheries Doomed?” which won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service from the Society of Professional Journalists. In 2006 Marshall’s investigations into the engineering missteps that led to the levee failures during Hurricane Katrina were among the stories for which the newspaper was honored with The Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. In 2007 Marshall was co-author of the series “Last Chance: The Fight to Save a Disappearing Coast,” about Louisiana’s coastal erosion problems, which won the 2007 John H. Oakes Prize for Environmental Reporting from Columbia University, and The National Academies of Sciences Communications Award for newspaper and magazine reporting. Today, Marshall covers environmental issues for The Lens, the New Orleans non-profit, nonpartisan public-interest newsroom dedicated to unique in-depth reporting projects. Marshall’s wide-ranging career has included covering professional and college sports, Olympics, and the outdoors beat, as well as working on special environmental projects. In addition to his newspaper work, Marshall’s professional credits include writing for Field & Stream Magazine, Men’s Journal and National Geographic Adventure. He taught reporting in Cagli in 2008 and in Urbino in 2009, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014.

Doug Cumming

Doug Cumming Ph.D. is an associate professor of journalism at Washington & Lee University with 26 years experience at metro newspapers and magazines. Since getting a Ph.D. at UNC-Chapel Hill in mass communications, he has taught multimedia reporting and feature writing at Loyola University-New Orleans and at W&L in Virginia. Earlier, he worked at the newspapers in Raleigh, Providence and Atlanta, was editor of the Sunday Magazine in Providence and helped launch Southpoint monthly magazine in Atlanta. He won a George Polk Award and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. His book The Southern Press came out in 2009. He taught Reporting in Urbino in 2011 and 2012 and taught in Armagh, Northern Ireland in 2014.

Photography

Susan Biddle

Susan Biddle was a Washington Post staff photographer for thirteen years and now freelances for the Post as well as other publications and organizations. She began her career photographing for the Peace Corps and later worked as a staff photographer for the Topeka Capital-Journal and the Denver Post. After five years at the Denver Post she left to become a White House photographer documenting the Presidency for the last year of the Reagan administration and all four years of the George H.W. Bush administration. She began working for the Washington Post in 1996. Prior to that she freelanced and her work has appeared in Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, Life, National Geographic and other publications worldwide. She has participated in various book projects including Day in the Life of America, Day in the Life of Thailand, Hong Kong – Here Be Dragons, Day in the Life of the American Woman and America at Home. She has won awards with White House News Photographers Association and National Press Photographers Association. Susan taught photography in Urbino in 2012 and 2014.

Dennis Chamberlin

Dennis Chamberlin is an assistant professor of journalism at Iowa State University and a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist. He has more than 20 years experience as a newspaper and magazine photojournalist and has worked for publications such as TIME, The New York Times Sunday Magazine and National Geographic. Most of his professional career was spent living in Eastern Europe, where he covered the fall of communism and reintegration of Europe for various publications over a 15-year period. He has spent most of his life shooting slide film but is now a strong advocate of the power of multimedia as a storytelling tool and focuses his own work and teaching on multimedia. He taught photography in Urbino in 2009, 2011, 2012 and 2013 and directed the multimedia program there between 2011 and 2013. Dennis returns to Urbino in 2015.

Video

Greg Luft

Greg Luft chairs the Journalism and Technical Communication department at Colorado State University. His professional work before and during his academic career includes television news reporting and anchoring; documentary, educational, and corporate video production; and freelance video journalism. Before his work in academia, Luft worked in local TV news as a general assignment and investigative reporter, and news anchor in Wyoming, Florida, Oklahoma and Colorado. His independent productions focus on television writing and production, and the behavior of journalists. Greg was named a Colorado State University best teacher in 2013. He also has served in leadership roles for the Broadcast Education Association, College Media Advisors, and the Colorado Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Greg taught video in Urbino in 2012, 2013 and 2014.

Barry Janes

Barry Janes works and teaches electronic media theory, programming and technology at Rider University. He has been a producer, director and/or writer of more than 100 video productions, and has advised numerous corporations, non-profit organizations and municipalities. Dr. Janes’ research interests include Broadcast Programming and History, and, most recently, the effective use of computer-based asynchronous technologies in the classroom. He participated in Urbino as a Faculty Fellow. As a Fellow, Janes had regular informal access to the program faculty for pedagogical and theoretical exchanges. In addition, he participated in the program’s video module and become a resource to faculty and students where appropriate.

Magazine Reporting

Michael Gold

Michael Gold has been a writer, editor, and manager at award-winning publications, in print and online. He started his career as a reporter at the Bergen County (NJ) Record and the Boston Herald American. He was a founding writer and editor for Science 80, which won three National Magazine Awards while he was there. In 1986, Gold co-founded Hippocrates, now called Health, where he served as managing editor and executive editor. As a consultant for West Gold Editorial, he helped conceive and launch University Business and Dwell magazines as well as Thrive, an online health network produced by Time, Inc. and AOL. Gold has consulted for Inc, PC World, Consumer Reports, Executive Travel, and others, offering management advice, guiding major renovations, and coaching editorial staff. He has served as the editor of Strings magazine, edited several jazz arranging books for Berklee Press, and helped lead the magazine launch projects and online track for the Stanford Professional Publishing Courses. He is the author of A Conspiracy of Cells, a popular, nonfiction account of a scandal in cancer research. He taught in the Urbino Program in 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014.

Susan West

Susan West is a principal at West Gold Editorial consulting, where she has helped launch magazines such as Dwell, trained online editors at websites such as BabyCenter, and advised publications from the New England Journal of Medicine to Cooking Light and Acoustic Guitar. With an M.S. in science journalism from the University of Missouri at Columbia, West started her career as a staff writer at Science News and Science 80. In 1986, she co-founded a popular health magazine called Hippocrates (now known as Health and owned by Time Inc.), which won four National Magazine Awards during her tenure. In 2009, she served as the founding editor of the travel magazine Afar, which was named Best Travel Magazine in North America by the Society of American Travel Writers. She has also been the executive editor of Smithsonian magazine and of the Food and Environment Reporting Network, an award-winning non profit newsroom that partners with major media outlets to produce in-depth stories about food, agriculture, and environmental health. For many years she oversaw the magazine launch projects at the Stanford Professional Publishing Course. She directed the 2011, 2012 and 2014 magazine programs. She also directed the app program in 2013.

Promotional Video

Rustin Greene

Rustin Greene spent his first career as a television writer/producer/director, earning two Los Angeles Area EMMY awards and three Cable ACE awards. Rusty is now in his second career, teaching in James Madison University’s School of Media Arts and Design. Rusty continues to write and produce, and his programs have earned several awards, including a third EMMY for a NASA education program. Rusty has been a Bridgeforth Endowed Professor, and received the JMU Alumni Association 2006 Distinguished Faculty Award. Rusty has been immersed in international education for many years, directing JMU’s London Study Abroad programs for nine years, and teaching and directing programs in Florence, Montreux, Cairo, and London. Greene taught promotional video in Urbino in 2013 and 2014.

Faculty Fellows

Suzanne Chandler

Suzanne Popovich Chandler is an assistant professor in Creative Media/Broadcast Electronic Media at Gaylord College at the University of Oklahoma. The productions Chandler has worked on in roles as either a photojournalist, field producer, Director of Photography, lighting DP, producer, editor or audio recordist have received numerous awards including three Peabody Awards, regional and national Emmy and Telly awards, awards from the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) among many others. Chandler’s professional work as a broadcast photographer has been seen on 60 Minutes, America’s Most Wanted, CBS Evening News, CBS Sunday Morning, CBS 48 Hours, NBC Today Show, NBC Nightly News, Good Morning America, ABC World News Tonight, PBS, The Military Channel, ESPN, MTV – among many other networks. Her 30-plus year career includes corporate and commercial productions that have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and awareness for non-profit organizations and causes. Chandler is in post-production on her documentary, Saving Faces Restoring Hope- a Medical Mission to Vietnam. Her rough cut features doctors who, for over twenty years, travel once a year to hospitals in Vietnam to share their expertise with third world doctors. Chandler’s focus in Saving Faces Restoring Hope is the humanitarian efforts to educate – as doctors chose between what surgeries they can perform in the limited two weeks they are abroad every year.

Sonya DiPalma

Sonya DiPalma,Ph.D., APR, is an assistant professor of mass communication at the University of North Carolina Asheville and a 2015 ieiMedia Institute Faculty Research Fellow. Sonya’s research for the Urbino fellowship focuses on how students differentiate between media platforms and their perceptions on skills needed to enter the journalism profession. Sonya was recently selected as the 2015 Ginger Rudeseal Miller Carter Teacher of the Year through AEJMC. She teaches courses in public relations, social media, multimedia storytelling and media ethics. Prior to transitioning into academia, her professional career included public relations positions in higher education, state government, and a Fortune 500 energy company. She lives in Asheville, with her husband Frank.

Italian Language and Culture

Francesca Carducci

Francesca Carducci received her degree in Pharmacy at the University of Urbino. She teaches English and is a lecturer (CEL) in the Department of Modern Literature and Philological-Linguistic Sciences at the University of Urbino. She is a member of the CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) staff of the faculty of Computer Science and teaches in the English master’s program for Italian primary school teachers offered by the Department of Foreign Languages. Fran is originally from Buffalo, New York, and became interested in content-based teaching methodology as a consequence of her scientific background. She has revised and edited scientific articles to be published in English for years, and has created science and math courses in English for Italian students at almost every level. Francesca truly enjoys teaching both on-line and in the classroom and, after more than 20 years of living and working in Urbino, considers herself a bona fide “Urbinate.” She taught Italian language and supervised interpreters in Urbino from 2009 through 2014.