BIOS:

Tom Leeser
Tom Leeser is currently Program Director of Cal Arts Integrated Media Dpeartment and Previously he was a Visual Effects Supervisor/Art Director with Academy Award winning film production studio Rhythm & Hues, whose credits include the Empire Strikes Back, DragonSlayer, Poltergeist, Mouse Hunt, and Mystery Men. Tom is also an independent artist whose work began with 16mm film, migrated to video and transformed itself into a composite of architecture and digital image installation. His projects have been exhibited at, among others, Videobrasil: Festival Internacional de Arte Eletronica and Siggraph.

Patti Podesta
Production Designer Patti Podesta's feature credits include Memento for director Christopher Nolan. An interview regarding her design of the film is included in The Making of Memento, published by Faber and Faber. Other feature films include two with director Gregg Araki, Nowhere and Splendor and the upcoming Scorched. Her television work includes the new television series called Septuplets, a drama for Fox Television; Kathy Griffin's So-Called-Reality and the soap/novella Spyder Games for MTV. She has also designed commercials, main title sequences, music videos and an interactive CD-Rom project. Ms. Podesta's background is in art and she received an MFA from the Claremont Graduate School. Her experimental film and video works have been screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the Rotterdam Film Festival, the American Film Institute National Video Festival, the Pacific Film Archives and recently at LACMA and UCLA Hammer Museum. These works include A Short Conversation From The Grave With Joan Burroughs and A Glory. Podesta received awards and grants for her films; three from the National Endowment for the Arts, two from Art Matters, Inc., the Western States Regional Media Award and the James Phelen Award in Film She co-founded the video exhibition program at L.A.C.E. (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) and in 1986 was director of the project Resolution: A Critique of Video Art for which she edited a publication by the same title. Podesta has been a member of the Graduate Art Faculty at Art Center College of Design for over 10 years and teaches the experimental Art/Film class.

Lynn Spigel
Lynn Spigel is a Professor currently at Northwestern University and at formerly at the USC School of Cinema/Television who has written extensively on film, television, and popular culture. She co-edits Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminism and Film Theory. Her recent works include: Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (U. Chicago Press, 1992) and Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Duke Univ. Press, 2001).

Vince Cheung
Vince Cheung is better known as the Rice half to Ben Montanioís Beans in the comedy writing team of ìRice & Beansî. Together, they have written for television shows such as: Married With Children, The Steve Harvey Show, Roc, Empty Nest, Night Court and Growing Pains. While attending UCLA, Cheung was a struggling pre-med who opted to try his hand at stand-up comedy instead of cramming for organic chemistry. After some open-mike stints at the Comedy Store and Ice House and not becoming a cardiologist, he became a page at NBC in Burbank and got an internship in the network Story Department where he became a script reader and immersed himself in the executive track. He later moved to ITC Productions as a development executive where he met Montanio who was a production executive. There, they forged a bond working on low-budget features. In the wake of the 1988 writers strike, they were put in charge of a film where they had to fire the original director and writer. They did a full rewrite in a single weekend, and thatís when the writing bug hit them, inspiring them to form their own company, Rice & Beans Productions. Cheung and his partner are currently consulting producers on the new WB comedy series, Greetings From Tucson about growing up in a bi-racial, working class family.

Erin Aubry Kaplan
Erin Aubry Kaplan is a staff writer and columnist ("Cakewalk") for the LA Weekly who writes frequently about race, media and culture. She is a 2000 fellow in the Sundance Institute's Creative Nonfiction Writing Program, and the winner of PEN USA West's 2001 journalism award. She has also worked as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and was an original staff writer for New Times Los Angeles. Her essays have been widely anthologized.  

Lisa Nakamura
Lisa Nakamura is Assistant Professor of English at Sonoma State University, where she teaches Postcolonial Literature and Theory. Her book Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet is forthcoming from Routledge in the Spring of 2002. She co-edited Race in Cyberspace (Routledge, 2000) and her work appears in "The Cybercultures Reader," "Race in Cyberspace," "Unspun: Key Terms for the World Wide Web," and "The Visual Studies Reader." Her research focuses on the ways that Internet user interfaces enforce menu-driven racial identities upon users, as well as cross-racial role playing and identity tourism or "passing" in online social spaces. She is also interested in the ways that contemporary films such as Blade Runner and The Matrix depict race in relation to technology and the Internet. Several of Nakamura's papers are available online, including: "Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet," "Keeping it (Virtually) Real: The Discourse of Cyberspace as an Object of Knowledge," and "After/Images of Identity: Gender, Technology, and Identity Politics."

Chon A. Noriega
Chon A. Noriega Professor of Film, Television & Digital Media at UCLA and Director of UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Critical Studies Assistant Professor Chon Noriega was featured on the MSNBC show Edgewise about the work of Raphael Montanez Ortiz, a central figure in the Destructivism art movement. Noriega guest-curated an exhibition on the artist at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Additional stories appeared in the New York Times and New York magazine.

Garth Trinidad
Garth Trinidad is known by most as host mysterioso of KCRW's Chocolate City. For 7 years he's shared a most unique of black musical visions on air, receiving awards and accolades from press and peers for radio and live achievements, tasting worldwide exposure with KCRW's growing internet audience, and having programmed music for United Airlines and Amtrak. Along with capitalizing on his adam's apple in the world of commercial voiceover, heís recently formed a music production company and is writing, arranging, and remixing a small roster of artists, including Sheree Brown. Continually looking for the perfect beat, Garth spins records as a resident deejay at various parties around town, including Soundlessons, a monthly event 3 years running at downtown's Central City Café