Committee of Management (Board)
Matt Abud - President
Matt Abud has worked in the field of media development in various countries in Asia for the past decade, including EastTimor, Indonesia, Afghanistan, and Sri Lanka; employers have included the UN, Radio 68H, Internews and others. His personal focus has been on media access for marginalised or less affluent communities, which has led his work to emphasise especially radio, with other media platforms added depending on context. More recently he has been worked on media communications projects in disaster settings, including in Haiti in early 2010, and Pakistan for the 2009 conflict, and the 2010 floods. He lives in Melbourne, where he is completing his studies in media, conflict, and development.
Rachel Maher- Vice President
Rachel Maher is a project director for the media development agency, Internews working on new media, technology and advocacy with journalists and producers in Afghanistan. Previously she worked on journalists’ rights and freedom of expression and with Internews in Sri Lanka. Rachel has many years’ experience working as a producer and mentor on media production and training projects in Australia and abroad. Her work has had a particular focus on Indigenous and migrant communities and on young people’s empowerment. She worked for many years in Australian community radio and has freelanced as a producer for Radio New Internationalist, ABC Radio National, SBS and the Pacifica Network in the USA and newmatilda.com.
Rachel is the Vice President of EngageMedia, a video advocacy and distribution organization working across South East Asia and the Pacific, and is a board member of the Community Broadcasting Foundation in Australia. She completed post-graduate studies in documentary film and television at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2002 and is currently undertaking a Masters in Journalism at the University of Technology in Sydney.
Aryo Danusiri
Aryo Danusiri is an artist and anthropologist born in Jakarta in 1973. His works explore the circulation of new keywords, violence and memory in reconfiguring the political and social landscape of post-authoritarian Indonesian since 1998. His films have premiered at various festivals, including the Rotterdam, Amnesty Amsterdam, Mead and Yamagata "New Asia Current" festivals. His first feature length documentary, Playing Between Elephants was awarded the "Movies That Matters for Best Human Rights Film" at the Jakarta International Film Festival 2007 and "Best Documentary" at Brussels Independent IFF.
In 2005, he completed a Master's Degree in Visual Culture Studies at Tromsø University, Norway. At present he is doing his Ph.D. in the Media Anthropology program, with a secondary field in Critical Media Practice, at Harvard University.
More at http://www.der.org/films/filmmakers/aryo-danusiri.html
Dr Ellie Rennie
Ellie Rennie is the Deputy Director of the Swinburne Institute for Social Research, and an Associate Researcher of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation. Her research spans community media, Indigenous media and broadband policy. Ellie has worked as a researcher and policy advisor with numerous community media organisations, including the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia, Goolarri Media, ICTV, SYN Media and C31. She is a board member of the Community Broadcasting Foundation and Chair of the CBF TV Grants Advisory Committee. Ellie joined the EngageMedia Committee of Management in 2010. She has published two books: Community Media: A Global Introduction (Rowman & Littlefield 2006) and Life of SYN: A Story of the Digital Generation (Monash University Publishing 2011). She is currently writing a book on remote Indigenous media.
Andrew Lowenthal – Secretary
Andrew Lowenthal has been working in the field of media and technology activism since 1998. He got started with Melbourne video activists Access News in the late nineties before moving on to work as an editor and coordinator with Melbourne Indymedia and the global Indymedia network for six years.
From 2006-08 he worked with the UK based Tactical Technology Collective as their participatory media project lead, editing the NGO-in-a-box series of open source software toolkits, and the more recent Message-in-a-box, as well as facilitating at training camps in Indonesia, the Netherlands, Thailand and India.
Andrew is co-founder and Executive Director of EngageMedia and an affiliate of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
