Our People

Women In Media & News benefits from the vision, insight and energy of a diverse team of advisors, including journalists, social justice activists, media reform advocates, academics, media producers and communications professionals. Click here to view WIMN's individual and foundation supporters.

• Board of Directors
• Website Consultants
• WIMN Volunteers
• WIMN's Voices Bloggers

Founder & Executive Director

Jennifer L. Pozner

Jennifer L. Pozner founded Women In Media & News in 2001 to increase women's presence and power in the public debate through media analysis, education, advocacy and reform.

A widely published journalist and media critic, Pozner formerly directed the Women's Desk at the national media watch group FAIR, where she was a staff writer for Extra! magazine and the organizer of the national Feminist Coalition on Public Broadcasting. She also served as Media Watch columnist and contributing media editor for Sojourner: The Women's Forum, the dearly-departed national women’s newspaper.

Pozner's freelance work on women, media, politics and pop culture has been published in Newsday, Chicago Tribune, Arizona Republic, Hartford Courant, Ms., Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture, Women’s Review of Books, Salon.com, AlterNet.org, TomPaine.com, WomensEnews.org and CommonDreams.org, among others.

Her essays have appeared in anthologies such as What Do We Do Now (a post-2004 election manifesto); The W Effect: Bush’s War on Women; Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century; Uncovering the Right on Campus; and Points and CounterPoints: Controversial Family and Relationship Issues in the 21st Century.

Pozner has appeared as a commentator on ABC News Now's "Top Priority," Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart," Fox News Network's "The O'Reilly Factor," Fox 5's "Good Day NY," Oxygen TV's "Pure Oxygen," Free Speech TV, Pacifica Radio's "Democracy Now!" and "Wake Up Call," WNYC's "On The Media," CJAD's "News Radio Montreal," FAIR's syndicated radio show CounterSpin, and other commercial and independent radio stations. She is also featured in several independent documentary projects including such films as I Was a Teenage Feminist.

A noted public speaker, Pozner has conducted multi-media presentations and participated in panels and debates at dozens of colleges and conferences across the country. Additionally, she has worked closely with the women's human rights groups MADRE and Women for Afghan Women, and with a variety of other women-led social justice groups, including the Center for New Words’ WAM (Women, Action & Media) conference, Women Leaders Online and New Yorkers Say No To War.

And because laughter is both a powerful weapon and an activist’s best medicine, Pozner served for several years as volunteer coordinator of the New York City chapters of the "Billionaires for Bush (or Gore)" and the "Billionaires for More Media Mergers," political satire groups using humor to call attention to the corruptive influence of money in politics and media. She is a graduate of Hampshire College.

 

WIMN's Board of Directors

Veronica I. Arreola

Veronica I. Arreola is a member of the Northwest Suburban (Chicago) chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW), and has served as vice-president and acting-treasurer of the Chicago chapter of NOW. She also served one year on the national NOW board, representing the Great Lakes region. The first member of her family to attend college, she is a double graduate from the University of Illinois at Chicago (BS in liberal arts & sciences, MPA in public administration, both with concentrations in women’s studies), and is currently the program coordinator for the UIC Women In Science & Engineering Program. An active member of the UIC campus, Arreola has served on the Chancellor's Committee on the Status of Women, the Chancellor's Committee on the Status of Latino's Latina Network Committee, and is a vocal supporter of PRIDE. Prior to her tenure at UIC, Arreola spent three years at the Field Museum of Natural History on a National Science Foundation funded internship in zoology. She has represented NOW on local radio (WSCR and WLUW), local television (FOX News in the Morning) and in the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times.

Sara Beinert

Sara Beinert is an experienced professional fundraiser for social justice causes. She is currently manager of individual gifts at the Brennan Center for Justice, a public interest law firm that promotes equality, human dignity, and the legacy of Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. Prior to joining the Brennan Center, Beinert spent more than five years producing fundraising events for the Ms. Foundation for Women. Beinert graduated cum laude from the State University of New York at Geneseo with a BA in psychology and sociology, and a minor in women’s studies.

Shonna Carter

Shonna Carter is a publicist at Riptide Communications, a New York-based firm offering services to groups and individuals seeking progressive social change. She graduated from New York University's Gallatin's School of Individualized Study, where she majored in journalism, arts and politics. Prior to Riptide, Carter worked for the Village Voice, as well as the Global Information Network (GIN), writing articles about news in developing services for Inter Press Service. Carter has also served as host of WNYU's weekly hip-hop and soul radio show, "The Gumbo Show."

Aliza Dichter

Aliza Dichter is the co-director of the Center for International Media Action, a nonprofit organization that serves as a networking, research and strategy center for groups working to transform the media system in the service of social justice and human rights. Previously she helped found the nonprofit MediaChannel.org, serving as senior editor and education coordinator for a global information network of more than 1,000 media-issues groups. Dichter helped create the Action Coalition for Media Education, a media-literacy membership organization, and has organized with the media-policy activist group Angels of the Public Interest. An original member of the international CRIS Campaign (Communication Rights in the Information Society), Dichter was a delegate to the III World Social Forum in January 2003 in Brazil; in Geneva in December 2003, she participated in the World Forum on Communication Rights at the UN World Summit on the Information Society as well as the We Seize! counter-summit. Dichter recently served as the 2005 "Visionary In Residence" at Dartmouth College's Center for Women and Gender. Her articles on public-interest media policy and activism have been published by AlterNet.org, Media File, The Indypendent and the international quarterly journal Media Development. She lives in the Catskill Mountains of New York.

Lisa Jervis

Lisa Jervis is the co-founder and publisher of Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture, a national nonprofit quarterly magazine offering feminist commentary on our intensely mediated world. She is also editor at large of LiP: Informed Revolt. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines and books, including Ms., the San Francisco Chronicle, Utne, Mother Jones, the Women's Review of Books, Bust, Hues, Salon.com, Girlfriends, Punk Planet, Body Outlaws: Rewriting the Rules of Beauty and Body Image (Seal Press), and The Bust Guide to the New Girl Order (Penguin). Lisa is the co-editor Young Wives' Tales: New Adventures in Love and Partnership (Seal Press), and is currently at work on a Bitch anthology (forthcoming from Farrar Straus & Giroux) and a book about the intellectual legacy of gender essentialism and its effect on contemporary feminism. She speaks widely on feminism, media criticism and the independent press.

Sunita B. Mehta

Sunita B. Mehta is the co-founder of Women for Afghan Women and edited Women for Afghan Women: Shattering Myths and Claiming the Future (Palgrave/St. Martins Press). Currently the executive director of the foundation Funders Concerned About AIDS, she is the former associate director of the Soros Reproductive Health and Rights Fellowship at Columbia University. Until August 2004, Mehta was director of grants and programs at The Sister Fund. Mehta is a former board member of SAKHI for South Asian Women and the Center for Anti-Violence Education. She also served on the founding board of the Third Wave Foundation. She has a BA in mathematics from Douglass College, Rutgers University and a MA in sociology from SNDT Women's University, Mumbai, India.

John Nichols

John Nichols covers electoral politics and media issues for The Nation, America's oldest and largest weekly journal of opinion. He is the author of a number of books on politics and media, including (with Robert McChesney) the best-selling Our Media, Not Theirs; Against the Beast: An Anti-Imperialist Reader; Dick: The Man Who Is President; and Jews For Buchanan: Did you Hear the One About the Theft of the American Presidency? Nichols has covered politics in the United States and abroad for more than two decades, interviewing every president since Ronald Reagan. Formerly a writer and editor for The Toledo Blade and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newspapers, he is now editorial page editor for The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. A contributing writer for The Progressive, In These Times and numerous other magazines, his articles have appeared in The New York Times, Chicago Tribune and other newspapers. Nichols is a frequent guest on television and radio programs including PBS's "The Lehrer Report" and "NOW with Bill Moyers." He is a cofounder and board member of the media reform organization Free Press.

Website Consultants

Christine Cupaiuolo | Content/Web Support
Christine Cupaiuolo is a Chicago-based writer and online media consultant. She created and wrote ms.musings, Ms. magazine's daily blog on women, media and culture, becoming one of the first bloggers to write for a national magazine, and served as Ms.' online editor under Elaine Lafferty. Cupaiuolo also founded and edited the online magazine PopPolitics.com, now a group blog.

Will Etundi | Design
William Etundi, an activist and designer in New York City, designed WIMN's website as a staffer at the May First Technology Collective (formerly Media Jumpstart) and generously provided additional pro-bono support. A leader with the Complacent Organization, a culture jamming project that hosts interactive events, political stunts and guerilla media campaigns intended to challenge our complacent culture, Etundi cocreated CounterConvention.org, a website facilitating organizing protests around the Republican National Convention in New York City in the summer of 2004.

Sonali Kolhatkar | WIMN's Voices Blog Design/Web Support
Sonali Kolhatkar is the host and producer of KPFK Pacifica's popular morning drive time program "Uprising," based in Los Angeles, Calif., and syndicated weekly nationwide. She is also the co-director of the Afghan Women's Mission, a U.S.-based non-profit solidarity organization that funds the social, political and humanitarian projects of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). An award-winning journalist, Kolhatkar has been widely published in outlets from CommonDreams.org and AlterNet.org to the Berkeley Women's Law Journal and the Harvard International Review. Her first book, about U.S. policy in Afghanistan, is forthcoming from Seven Stories Press and co-authored with her partner, Jim Ingalls.

Brenna Wolf | WIMN's Words List Manager
Brenna Wolf is a collective member of Riseup Networks. She has worked on media activism and social justice organizing in Seattle for over seven years. She co-founded Reclaim The Media and was active in the development of the IndyMedia.org network movement. She envisions a world where many worlds fit and where communications policies reflect human needs not corporate profits. She manages WIMN's Words, which you can join by subscribing here.

Volunteer Assistance

Erin Greeson | Public Relations
Erin Greeson is public relations director at Grady Britton, an advertising and public relations agency headquartered in Portland, Ore. Strongly committed to community involvement, she currently serves on the advisory committee for the Portland Center for the Performing Arts. With a background in the fine art business, Greeson previously held directorship positions at Portland's Gallery 500 and Belinki & DuPrey Gallery. She used thematic curatorial projects as opportunities to support nonprofit organizations such as Outside In, JOIN, and Bradley-Angle House. Seeking collaborations with nonprofit leaders, Greeson coordinated gallery-based fundraisers and awareness campaigns to benefit numerous human services organizations. Greeson previously lived in New York and worked at the CODA Gallery, Maxwell Davidson Gallery, and the W. Graham Arader III Gallery.

Sanford Hohauser | Research
Sanford Hohauser has provided video research and archival support for WIMN's multi-media lecture series since 2002. An accomplished photographer, his subject matter focuses on urban and found art, New York subculture, and natural landscapes. Hohauser is also shipping and sales manager for the progressive media watchdog group FAIR.

Anh Dào Kolbe | Photography
Anh Dào Kolbe is a Massachusetts-based photographer. Her photos are among those that appear in the animated banner at the top of WIMNonline.org ("Uprising Radio" host Sonali Kolhatkar interviewing journalist Noy Thrupkaew while "Wake Up Call" Radio's Deepa Fernandes looks on; a woman at a computer writing her blog). She also shot this photo of Jill Nelson. Currently she is working on publishing her photographs as an adoptee revisiting her birthplace. The project explores her birth outside Saigon, Vietnam, immigration to the United States via New York City in 1972, and her upbringing with Greek and German parents in the Middle East. See her work at www.adkfoto.com.

Therese Shechter | Video Editing and Production
Therese Shecter has provided video editing and production for several video reels used in WIMN's multi-media presentations. A documentary filmmaker based in Brooklyn, her most recent film is I Was A Teenage Feminist, a personal journey to discover what it means to be a feminist circa 2005. Screenings for this film, which began in the fall of 2005, feature interviews with Jennifer L. Pozner, Gloria Steinem, Marlo Thomas, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Jennifer Baumgardner and many others. More information about this film and about How I Learned to Speak Turkish, Shecter's short documentary about her obsession with Turkish men, can be found at www.trixiefilms.com.

Frances Stewart | Tech Support
Fran Stewart has been troubleshooting WIMN's computer systems since its inception and generously volunteered her time to help get WIMNOnline up and running. A veteran of the dot.com software wars, Stewart is a software tester and computer hardware consultant. In addition, she is actively involved with the Ingersoll Gender Center in Seattle, Wash.

Karen Weeks | Graphic Design
Karen Weeks, an art and production associate at Country Living magazine, designed WIMN's logo. A freelance graphic designer with The Mardiney Group, a full-service graphic design studio in Brooklyn, N.Y., she studied design at Massachusetts College of Art. Weeks has provided pro bono design support including fundraising and promotional materials, as well as the fliers for WIMN's multimedia presentation on misogyny in reality television and WIMN’s media training workshops (.pdf files).

Deanna Zandt | Web Support

Bio coming soon

WIMN’S Voices Bloggers

The only women's media monitoring group blog on the web, WIMN's Voices: A Group Blog on Women, Media, AND… features a diverse online community of approximately 50 female journalists, academics and activists blogging on media coverage of women and a variety of important social, cultural and political issues. Full profiles of all WIMN's Voices participants are available.

WIMN is proud of the tremendous range of perspectives represented within this group blog. Of the stellar writers and thinkers participating in WIMN's Voices:

• Approximately 45% of bloggers are women of color
• Bloggers' ages range from 19 to 64
• Bloggers are straight, lesbian, bisexual and transgender
• Bloggers' religious affiliations include Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, Quaker, Unitarian, atheist and agnostic
• Bloggers self-identify their economic status as ranging from struggling to working class to middle to upper middle class

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