Puerto Rico and the American Dream: Founders

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	JUDITH ESCALONA Founder, Executive Director Founder and Executive Director of the award-winning Web site Puerto Rico and the American Dream (www.prdream.com) and MediaNoche (www.medianoche.us), Uptown Manhattan's sole new media gallery. Judy comes to new media with a background in film, television and print. The Krutch, a 30-minute narrative film she wrote, directed, and edited, screened in 2005 at the Harlemwood Film Festival, NY and Japan, the Havana Film Festival, NY, Loisaida Cortos, NY, and the International Latino Poetic Film Festival 2009, NY. She is currently editing Bx3M, the story of three Latino youths coming of age in a city going up in flames. Judy has written for VIVA, a publication of the Daily News, and Quarterly Black Review. She is the former film critic of the online publication Womensnet.net. Judy also curates film programs on- and off-line. The Nuyorican Cinema program that was screened as part of the New York Latino Film and Video Festival was curated by Judy and continues to be presented online with two accompanying essays by her. Judy has worked in broadcast, cable and corporate television, producing and/or directing over fifty works of varying genres. She was project director in the construction of Starrett City Television, a television facility in Brooklyn. As Studio Director, she was responsible for training and developing programming for a community of 20,000 residents. Sessions, a popular jazz and latin jazz series she produced and directed, attracted musicians citywide to the studio for live jam sessions. A Poet’s Visit, one of the first television series to feature urban poets, was also produced and directed by her. She is the authorized translator of a popular Puerto Rican literary work by Luis López Nieves entitled Seva: The History of the First U.S. Invasion of the Island of Puerto Rico, May 1898. Judy is a member of the National Association of Latino Independent Producers and the New York New Media Association. In 2000 she was designated a "Distinguished Latina" by El Diario/La Prensa, one of the oldest and most prestigious Spanish-language newspaper in the United States. Judy teaches film and television production at The City College of the City University of New York and is a segment producer for CUNY-TV's Independent Sources.
	STEPHANIE OWENS Co-founder, Original Web Designer Stephanie, who left the organization in 2005, has been an active part of the New York new media scene for the last 10 years. She is Founder and Creative Director of Wallflowermedia, a web design consultancy. Prior to Wallflowermedia, Owens was the co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of Oddcast, a new media company dedicated to creating media communities on the Web. A trailblazer in the arena of user-generated media, Stephanie's work brought the first interactive music video maker to the Web for clients such as BMG, RCA, and Sony, and provided innovative web-based design for Fineline Entertainment, October Films, and Kenneth Cole. Stephanie received top honors in the Omni Media Awards (1998), the Webby Awards (2000) and Flash Forward (2002, 2001). She was the designer and media consultant for "Rights Alert," a broadband Web site for Witness, a documentary production company founded by Peter Gabriel. She is also the co-founder of PRdream's MediaNoche, the first uptown digital art space in East Harlem, NY. MediaNoche is dedicated to context-specific media and network-based art projects. Currently Stephanie Owens is an instructor at Parsons School of Design, Graduate Department of Design and Technology in New York City where she teaches Graduate Thesis Studio and the aesthetics of new media. Owens has an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has exhibited as an artist and designer in New York, Europe and Asia. She has recently exhibited her work in Seoul, Korea, the First Beijing International New Media Art Exhibition and will exhibit her latest work in July at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles.

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