Board of Directors
Anne Bray :: Executive Director and Secretary ::
Anne Bray has been working in the field of media arts since the mid ’70s as an administrator, artist and art teacher. With representatives of other communities, she founded the concept of LA Freewaves and has administered the program since inception. As the Executive Director, she has continued to see the organization through the technological, social and aesthetic changes of the 1990s to now. Creating intersections of public art and media art has been her path to providing art for many people much of the time. She teaches graduate seminars in new genres and public art at Claremont Graduate University and the University of Southern California. Her own multimedia artwork is widely exhibited.
Kenneth Rogers :: President ::
Kenneth Rogers is Assistant Professor in the Media and Cultural Studies Department at the University of California, Riverside. His interdisciplinary research and publication is concerned with the intersection of labor, attention, political economy, art practice, and digital media. His current book project, The Attention Complex: Media Technology and Biopolitics (forthcoming Palgrave Macmillan 2012), maps out how contemporary media technologies like video games, search engines, mobile computing applications, and social networking platforms are part of a larger biopolitical strategy that directs, manages, and governs the conduct of individuals at the level of human biology. He has published on contemporary art and photography, video, alternative media, crowdsourcing, critical pedagogy, attention, and biopolitics. He is also the recipient of both UCHRI and UCIRA grants for 2010-2011; has been a fellow at the Center for Ideas and Society at UC, Riverside; is co-recipient of a three-year Mellon grant on affect and interactive media; and has been an invited lecturer at a variety of venues. He is also engaged with the practical application of digital tools and social media in experimental pedagogy and direct action politics.
André Blas
André Blas is a freelance video maker and editor focusing on experimental documentaries about artists, urban spaces and post-modernist culture. Anthropology describes his point of view, contemporary art his interest, music his source of energy and inspiration. Blas was raised in Brazil and now resides in Los Angeles, California. In addition to English and Portuguese, he speaks Spanish, Italian, German and Hebrew. His diverse cultural experiences lend themselves to subjective and objective perspectives, which he applies to his biographical and anthropological experimental explorations. His professional experience stems from his work in both mainstream media conglomerates and non-profit cultural organizations. He has worked for AOL Time Warner, the Getty Information Institute, and has produced two video documentaries about iconic Franco-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle and about a utopian, monumental housing complex designed by the legendary modernist architect Oscar Niemeyer in Brazil.
Ron Frank
Ron Frank is your basic Hollywood renaissance guy who has directed, produced and acted in numerous contemporary plays and short videos. His multifaceted life originated and remains in Los Angeles after a BA at Reed College and a stint at NYU film school. He regularly attends as many cultural/artistic/musical/spectacular events as is humanly possible after a day of managing the Pasadena Antique Center, an antique & collectibles co-op with over 100 merchants. He brings his business, writing, media and creative acumen to the Freewaves arts community. The next time you go see some exhilarating event in Los Angeles, he will probably be in the audience.
Bill Kelley, Jr.
Bill Kelley, Jr. is a Los Angeles based educator, independent curator and theorist focusing on collaborative and public art practices. He received his Master’s degree in 19th Century Colonial Art Studies from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque in 2001. Bill is the former director and current Editorial Advisor of the journal LatinArt.com and is pursuing his Ph.D. in contemporary theory and criticism at UC San Diego. His most recent research projects include co-curating the exhibition ¿por que no te callas? arte, activismo y medio de comunicación (Arte Actual, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales [FLACSO], Quito, 2008) and the accompanying workshop Laboratorio de Arte y Espacio Social (Banco Central del Ecuador, Quito 2008); Proyecto Cívico: Diálogos y Interrogantes (El Cubo, Centro Cultural Tijuana [CECUT], Tijuana, Mexico 2009). Bill is currently a curator of the upcoming 2011 Medellín Encuentro (MDE11) and a founding member of the Third Rail research collaborative.
Jesse Lerner
Jesse Lerner is a documentary film and video maker based in Los Angeles, and teaches media studies at Pitzer College. His work has screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Anthropology Museum in Mexico City, the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, the Sydney Biennale, the Sundance Film Festival, The New York’s Guggenheim Museum, the Los Angeles International Film Festival, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and other festivals and museums internationally. In addition to his work as a filmmaker, his critical essays on photography, film, and video have appeared in Afterimage, History of Photography, Film History, The Independent, Visual Anthropology Review, The Spectator, La Pusmoderna, Wide Angle and other media arts journals. As a media arts curator, he has organized several exhibitions, including The Mexperimental Cinema, a traveling retrospective of 60 years of avant-garde film and video from Mexico, which has been presented at the Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley and the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao.
Cheng–Sim Lim
Formerly the Co-Head of Exhibition & Public Programs at the UCLA Film & Television Archive for seven years, and preceding that a Programmer at the Archive for eight years, Cheng-Sim Lim has curated and managed the theatrical presentation of a diverse array of American and international film programs, both contemporary and historical. Her work has helped to build audiences and appreciation in the US for filmmakers and video artists from Asia, the Middle East and Latin America, including now internationally recognized directors such as Hou Hsiao-hsien, Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Miyazaki Hayao and Wong Kar-wai. In 2003 and 2006, Lim curated a two-part retrospective that brought to the big screen for the first time in over 20 years, many newly restored Shaw Bros. martial arts classics. The series “Heroic Grace: The Chinese Martial Arts Cinema” launched at the Archive in Los Angeles, and subsequently toured major film museums and cinematheques in the US, Canada and Europe to both audience and critical acclaim. Malaysian-born, Lim studied fine arts at Smith College and filmmaking at UCLA. She has served on numerous grants, awards and film festival juries. While she has recently returned to filmmaking, her curatorial interests remain undiminished, especially in advocating for overlooked popular and “minor” cinemas, and media literacy.
Alessandro Marianantoni
Alessandro Marianantoni earned a degree in Computer Science from the University of L’Aquila, with a thesis on perceptual interfaces at the USC Integrated Media System Center. He then worked for several years as a researcher at the UCLA REMAP center at the Theater, Film and TV Dept where he was able to enrich his research in technology across different fields: culture, technology, environment and art with a multi-disciplinary approach. While based in Los Angeles he often travels to Italy where he started MEDIARS, an Experimental Center focused on Cultural Heritage and Technology with public funding. As a program director at MEDIARS, he runs an international summer program in the Castle of Contigliano. Over the last 15 years he has designed and developed innovative products for music, healthcare and environment. He’s now working with Marcos Lutyens to create a novel interactive art installation on climate change sponsored by the National Trust for a show at the GSK, Royal Academy in London.
