New York / London

  • Sebastian Mary Harrington

    (London) sMary graduated from Oxford University in 2002 with a First in English Literature. Since then, she has written commercially for clients including Microsoft, the European Union, The Economist and Sony Playstation, alongside four mercifully unpublished novels, some published but thankfully obscure poetry and one guerrilla screenplay that has shown at the NFT and National Portrait Gallery. When not investigating new online literary forms with the Institute, she is co-founder of UK web startup School of Everything (chosen by Seedcamp as one of Europe's hottest startups of 2007) and co-founder and creative director of cult London art event ARTHOUSEPARTY.

  • Chris Meade

    (London) Chris Meade is Co-Director of the Institute. From 2000 to 2007 he was Director of Booktrust, the UK reading promotion charity which runs the Bookstart scheme and a host of projects, prizes and websites to encourage the discovery and enjoyment of reading. Previously he was Director of the Poetry Society where he set up the Poetry Café in Covent Garden and the lottery funded Poetry Places project which ran residencies for poets at London Zoo, the Millennium Dome, a gas platform, a high street store, a solicitor's office and many more community settings. In the 1980s he was a pioneer of reader development, promoting public libraries as 'imagination services'. Chris is currently studying for a masters in Creative Writing New Media at De Montfort University and is a member of Friendly Literature Organisations (FLO), a consortium supported by Arts Council England with whom he has been exploring the creative potential of new media for readers and writers.

  • Holladay Penick

    (New York) Holladay hails from the deep South, though you will not detect it in her accent. She attended Rhode Island School of Design, receiving a BFA in Printmaking. She has recently completed graduate studies at Parsons, and along with her interest in new media, hopes to further her experimentation with programming and design by building many half-functional websites.

  • Bob Stein

    (New York-London) Bob is founder and Co-Director of the Institute and founder of The Voyager Company. For 13 years he led the development of over 300 titles in 'The Criterion Collection', a series of definitive films on videodisc, and more than 75 CD ROM titles including the CD Companion to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, 'Who Built America', and the Voyager edition of 'Macbeth'. Previous to Voyager, Stein worked with Alan Kay in the Research Group at Atari on a variety of electronic publishing projects. 11 years ago, Stein started 'Night Kitchen' to develop authoring tools for the next generation of electronic publishing. That work is now being continued at the Institute for the Future of the Book.

  • Dan Visel

    (New York) Dan was born in the rural midwest, which he left to attend Harvard University, where he studied American literature & wrote a thesis on William Gaddis's "The Recognitions". He ran a magazine and wrote several travel guides in Rome before moving to New York, he worked for SparkNotes as a book designer, concentrating on issues relating to document structuring and information design. In his spare time, he designs Circumference, a journal of poetry in facing-page translation.

Elsewhere

  • John M McIntosh

    John resides on Vancouver Island, in British Columbia with his wife of 24 years, and their two sons. John graduated in 1982 from the Computer Science Co-op program at the University of Victoria. He is the founder, president and owner of Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd. John is a highly respected Information Technology professional, and has extensive technical and management experience in a variety of corporate, IT and research environments. John's broad technical base and skill set bring a rich and diverse perspective to both the public and private sector. He has provided support to an impressive multi-national clientele from across Canada, the United States, Europe and South America. John is perhaps best know and appreciated for his exceptional problem-solving skills, his proven ability to build fault-tolerant systems, and his record of quality software delivery on schedule!

  • Steve Riggins

    Steve has worked with Bob Stein for over 15 years at The Voyager Company, Kaleida Labs and Night Kitchen. He has enjoyed being near the leading edge several times, including interactive audio CD companions, the advent of digital video in QuickTime, developing translation tools at Kaleida Labs, easy to use electronic media tools in TK3 and now an entirely new universe in Smalltalk. Steve is an amateur photographer, is learning to make home movie DVDs with the hope of shooting his own film some day, is an avid Disneyland fanatic and is so ever happy that Apple survived to deliver G5s running Mac OS X, for it inspires him that art, beauty, ease of use and stability can actually exist in the digital world, as it should in his software.

  • Tim Rowledge

    Tim is a biker and Mechanical Engineer turned Industrial Designer then Software UI researcher who got hooked on Smalltalk in 1984 and hasn't been able to escape yet. Worked on Active Book's project to make the first real PDA (1989-91), ParcPlace's engineering team - including managing it - and fabled Interval Research Corporation's MediaWire system, not to mention the exobox,Inc. network appliance. A major contributor to the Squeak world since it was released in 1996, Tim is still trying to work out why anyone would ever use java.

Fellow

Alumni

  • Ray Cha

    Ray joined the institute after working at places such as the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching & Learning, Viacom, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Institute and mostly recently the design and concept firm AvroKO. His research interests include the interplay between culture and technology, design process, public policy, and trends in media. Ray studied engineering and public policy as an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University and holds a masters from New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program. He also is a regular contributor to the technology & gadget blog popgadget. When he is not wandering the streets of New York, he is watching age-inappropriate television.

  • Lisa Lynch

    Lisa is a media studies scholar particularly interested in the connection between experimental forms of new media and political and social activism. She is also the director of The Guantanamobile Project, a multimedia documentary project designed to raise awareness about the detention of terror suspects at the US Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Currently on leave from her position as Assistant Professor at the Catholic University of America, Lisa lives in Red Hook, Brooklyn with an enthusiastic but dyspeptic basset hound and a variety of expired laptops.

  • Eddie a. Tejeda

    Eddie is an entrepreneur and web developer. Soon after graduating from Hampshire College he founded Visudo, a company working closely with artists and non-profits. His main interests are in economics, free culture, history, and the future.

  • Ben Vershbow

    (New York) Ben was Editorial Director of the Institute and was with the group at its founding in 2004. He works primarily as a publisher and writer, coordinating and chronicling the Institute's various Web experiments. In addition to being a frequent contributor to if:book, the Institute's blog, Ben has written on digital publishing and network culture for Publisher's Weekly, Library Journal and Forbes. He received his B.A. in Theater Studies from Yale and is active in various productions around New York.

  • Kim White

    Kim is a text artist who works with experimental book forms. Her background in visual art and graphic design commingle in her concrete poetry and experimental prose. She has an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and has written several books for print and electronic media including: Scratching for Something, The Minotaur Project, The New Disease, and Stories of Chloe Roman (forthcoming). Her work has been published in The Iowa Review Web, Chain, Columbia, and Sojourner. She teaches creative writing in the summer high school program at Columbia University.

  • Jesse Wilbur

    Jesse works on Sophie and helps implement the publishing projects at the Institute. He designed Gamer Theory and the Iraqi Quagmire projects. He received his masters degree in information science from UNC Chapel Hill, where he studied information architecture, user interface design, and digital libraries. He is interested in user experience and graphic design, as well as the networked community and emergent phenomena. He lives in Brooklyn where he is discovering the culinary delights on Fifth Avenue and training for this summer's triathlons.