Dean Terry

Director of the Emerging Media + Communication Program and Associate Professor

Terry is a transmedia artist and technologist. His most recent media project is the critically acclaimed documentary film Subdivided which was recently broadcast on PBS stations. His video and film projects have screened at the USA Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and Houston International Film Festival and others. He frequently curates technology related art shows including Real Time at the Contemporary. Terry has written numerous cultural commentary articles for The Dallas Morning News and other publications.

Terry is founder and Director of MobileLab at The University of Texas at Dallas, centered in the Telecom Corridor, where he is collaborating on mobile technology and content projects with founding sponsors Texas Instruments and Ericsson. He has also worked with Microsoft, Nokia, Warner Brothers, Sony, Yahoo, and many others. He regularly presents his ideas at major technology conferences including Supernova and GigaOm’s Mobilize, and has also won Best of Show at CTIA Wireless.

Dean Terry is also an emerging media entrepreneur and is the founder of placethings, a mobile location based media startup. He was co-founder of PixelWave which sold to AtomFilms (AtomShockwave) and subsequently to Viacom. He holds an MFA from Claremont Graduate University.

Cindy Shen

Assistant Professor of Emerging Media and Communication

Cindy’s Ph.D. is from USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Her research interests are social media, online communities, virtual worlds, and social network analysis. Her dissertation project examines the social dynamics among players in EverQuest II, a large massively multi-player online game. Cindy is a researcher with the Virtual Worlds Observatory, funded by the National Science Foundation and Air Force Research Lab. She is also an active member of VOSS: Understanding and Enabling Network Dyanmics in Virtual Communities, also funded by NSF.

Kim Knight

Assistant Professor of Emerging Media and Communication

Kim’s research interests are in viral media, online community & identity formation, and the role of “play” in knowledge construction. She comes to Dallas from the University of California, Santa Barbara where she wrote a dissertation entitled, “Media Epidemics: Viral Structures in Literature and New Media.” As part of her diverse and extensive research Kim worked on both the Transliteracies Project and The Agrippa Files. In addition to her scholarly work Kim is also a practitioner, working in WordPress, MediaWiki, Drupal, and building her own visualization tools for analyzing Emerging Media.

David Parry

Assistant Professor of Emerging Media and Communication

David Parry received his PhD in English from the University at Albany and joined The University of Texas at Dallas faculty in 2007. His work focuses on analyzing how literacy and knowledge change as me move from analog to digital structures, and more broadly the social changes that such a transformation brings about. He has published and presented on areas ranging from digital games to Wikipedia and microblogging. At UT Dallas he teaches courses in writing for new media, storytelling for new media, digital politics, and networked knowledge. He can be found online at OutsidetheText or Academhack and on Twitter as academicdave.

Monica Evans

Assistant Professor of Computer Game Design

Monica received her Ph.D. from the Arts and Technology program at The University of Texas at Dallas in 2007 and has served as a writer and designer on experimental and educational game projects with numerous university partners, including the Dallas Museum of Art, Alcatel, Samsung, U.S. Army Training Doctrine and Command (TRADOC), and Joint Forces Command (JFCOM). She is a member of both the Mobile Innovation Lab and the Virtual Worlds Lab at UTD. Currently she teaches courses in game design, serious games and simulation, and interactive narrative structure, and coordinates both the ATEC Game Production Lab and the UT Dallas Computer Gaming Entrepreneurship Competition, sponsored by Hughes Ventures.

Andrew Famiglietti

Visiting Assistant Professor of Emerging Media and Communication

Andrew Famiglietti is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Emerging Media and Communication. He studies how both intellectual property and creative labor are shaping and being shaped by digital systems for storing and communicating information. Both his research and teaching focus on the ways digital systems of production, and the cultures that have emerged alongside these systems, are changing the way we create and structure knowledge. He is especially interested in the culture, history, and political economy of Wikipedia, the phenomenon of Free and Open Source Software, and related experiments with commons-based information production. After earning his PhD in American Culture Studies from Bowling Green State University, he was one of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Brittain Postdoctoral Fellows before joining the faculty of EMAC in the fall of 2011. He currently teaches classes on new media writing, critical approaches to new media, and the history and culture of hackers and hacking. Andrew maintains a website, copyvillain.org, which serves as a hub for his teaching and research. He can also be found on twitter as @afamiglietti.

John Jones

Senior Lecturer Emerging Media and Communications

John received his M.A. from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga where he studied rhetoric and composition. After graduating, he taught technical writing and composition courses at UT-Chattanooga before entering the English Ph.D. program at the University of Texas at Austin in 2005. Currently, he is a doctoral candidate at UT-Austin, where he studies writing practices in new media environments. From 2007-2009 John was Assistant Director of the Department of Rhetoric and Writing’s Digital Writing and Research Lab at UT-Austin. While at the DWRL, John founded Viz., a website and blog investigating rhetoric and visual culture. In 2010, Viz. was awarded the John Lovas Memorial Weblog Award by Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. John is currently working on a dissertation exploring the effects of digital networking on writing practices. You can follow him on Twitter.

Dan Langendorf

Visiting Assistant Professor of Emerging Media + Communication

Visiting Assistant Professor Dan Langendorf has led three professional lives, each building one upon the other. In Life 1.0, he was an award-winning investigative reporter for The Dallas Times Herald, where he covered the athletic, entertainment, business, legal, medical, civic, and cultural impact of sports of society. His subjects included the likes of Muhammad Ali, Reggie Jackson, and George W. Bush. In Life 2.0, he merged investigative and communications skills into product design and development, where he helped build an “in the streets” front-end research methodology and strategic design platform. His work included projects for Texas Instruments, Fossil, RadioShack, various cell phone manufacturers, and others. He’s now combined lives 1.0 with 2.0 into Life 3.0, teaching at The University of Texas at Dallas. His classes include undergrad and graduate courses in emerging media and communications, interaction design, and business and the digital arts. He’s actively involved in UT Dallas’s Mobile Lab, university-wide collaboration efforts, and is the host of the Dallas Museum of Arts’ monthly Art Bytes program, an “open mic for artists and their technology” presented during the museum’s popular Late Nights program. He hopes Life 4.0 is for retirement and cycling through the Alps.

Recently Langendorf was the lead digital lifestyle writer at the blog last100.com, a part of the prestigious ReadWriteWeb network of tech blogs. He’s now concentrating his efforts on the EMAC and ATEC programs at UT Dallas, his own blog (danlangendorf.com), and whatever is on his mind at Twitter (dlangendorf).

Adam Brackin

Adam Brackin teaches Game Design including traditional Video Games and “Alternate Reality Games.” “Doc B” is a published writer and the Writer/Creator of various ARGs in cooperation with Fundi Technologies. He was director of game development at Fundi Interactive Games from 2006-2008, during which time he was the head writer and Creator of various works of Collaborative Online Fiction, most recently the 2006-2007 “Deus City” ARG, and the 2008 “Conspiracy Asylum” Online Interactive Fiction spin-off. He has been a presenter at ARGFest the annual alternative reality gaming festival. Adam created the “Circular Model of ARG Development” which allows for new ways of ARG diagramming such as the “Adjacent ARG,” Inclusive ARG” and “ARG Cluster” models. He earned his Ph.D. in “Humanities: Aesthetic Studies” with a focus on Art and Technology at UT Dallas in May of 2008.

Randy Hoyt

Adjunct Professor of Emerging Media and Communication

Randy Hoyt works as an information architect and web developer in Dallas, TX building web sites for clients in WordPress and other platforms. He teaches web development and web publishing in the EMAC program. You can often find him speaking at WordPress community events like WordCamp, and other monthly meetups. When he has time offline, he enjoys reading and writing about mythology and fantasy literature.

David Leeson

Adjunct Professor of Emerging Media and Communication

Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist David Leeson began his career at the Abilene Reporter-News in 1977. In 1982 he moved to New Orleans as a staff photographer for the Times-Picayune. He joined the photo staff of the Dallas Morning News in 1984 where he remained until 2008. He now owns Protege Films, a video production company specializing in documentary films, as well as still photography.

His assignments for newspapers have taken him to more than 60 countries and numerous world conflicts. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer three times prior to winning the award in 2004. The Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography was awarded to him, along with colleague Cheryl Diaz Meyer, for photographs made in 2003 while on the front lines during the American invasion of Iraq. He has also won two Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards and numerous regional, state, and national awards.

In the fall of 2000, he began shooting video for the Dallas Morning News making him the first staff photogorapher in the nation shooting video full-time for a newspaper. Since then he has completed more than seven documentary films.

In 2006, Leeson was named Innovator of the Year in Photojournalism by American Photo magazine for his work using frame grabs for newspaper daily still assignments.

Two of his documentaries from the war also won honors. War Stories (2003) won a National Headliners aware, a national Edward R. Murrow Award and a regional Emmy Award for best television documentary. Dust to Dust (2004) was named a finalist for best short film at the USA Film Festival. He won a second Emmy in 2007 as a producer/editor of combat footage from Afghanistan.

Leeson is a graduate of Abilene Christian University, is married and has five children.

STAFF

Julie Larsen

Academic Advisor Emerging Media and Communication

Julie is the advisor for both undergraduate and graduate students pursuing EMAC degrees at UT Dallas. She received her B.A. in Psychology from Knox College, and her M.A. in Student Development Administration from Seattle University. She helps guide students through degree plans, connects students to academic resources on campus, and answers questions of potential EMAC students. Having worked in higher education for four years, her interests include social justice initiatives, student leadership programs, and (of course) student use of technology and social media. You can follow her at twitter.com/EMACAdvise.