Ioana Literat (2008 TMS Fellow and 2010 Local Coordinator) Ioana Literat is a PhD Candidate and Provost Fellow at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. Her research – under the supervision of Dr. Henry Jenkins – explores the educational, cultural and transnational aspects of digital participation, with a current focus on collective creativity and crowdsourced art. The recipient of the Phi Kappa Phi Award for excellence in research, Ioana has published widely in peer-reviewed journals, including in Communication Theory, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, International Journal of Communication, Journal of Media Literacy Education, and Learning, Media & Technology.

Dave Kutz (2009 TMS Fellow) Dave Kutz is originally from Massachusetts, and graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a BA in English in 2008. He loves to play the drums and piano, read the National Geographic, and watch basketball. The Modern Story fellowship was an amazing experience really opened his eyes. After completing the fellowship, he knew he wanted to continue giving back and offering service in some way. Dave worked as an Americorps VISTA volunteer at an elder services agency in Boston and did grant writing for an anti-poverty agency in the city. Dave currently resides in New Hampshire, working as a Career Counselor for adults with disabilities at a social services agency. He is working towards a Masters degree in Social Work and will perhaps go on to work with immigrant/refugee populations in the States…We’ll see!

Danny Thiemann (2009 TMS Fellow) Danny Thiemann is a migrant farmworker advocate in the Pacific Northwest. He is a 2008 recipient of Cairo, Egypt’s Madalyn Lamont Award for Literature from the American University in Cairo. In 2009, he served as an Arabic-English documentary film interpreter and interviewer for SeeChangeNow.org in Nablus, Palestine. From 2009-2010 he worked as a Modern Story Fellow in Hyderabad, India teaching film, photography, and writing. In 2011, he worked as a Milt Stewart Global Law Fellow in New Delhi, India, and as a Arthur C. Helton Grantee in Costa Rica where he helped develop a conflict resolution program for the Inter-American Development Bank. Most recently, he served as a 2012 Global Law Fellow with the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center in Mexico and, in 2014, was awarded New York City’s Table 4 Foundation Writer’s Grant. He is a contributor to Guernica, Insight on Conflict, Paper Tape Magazine, and the Matador Travel Network.

Vidya Putcha (2009 TMS Fellow) As a TMS fellow, Vidya had the wonderful opportunity to learn about Indian education firsthand while teaching and interacting with students in various schools in Andhra Pradesh. This experience had a major influence on her subsequent studies and work. Vidya is currently a consultant at the World Bank where she works on policy research on education systems in low and middle income countries. Being in a classroom with students and having the opportunity to engage with full-time teachers and administrators as a TMS fellow was an invaluable experience for her.

Kara Newhouse (2010 TMS Fellow) Kara Newhouse is a journalist, artist and educator with a B.A. in cultural anthropology from American University. After completing the 2010-11 TMS fellowship and launching the Communities Rising Partnership, she returned to Pennsylvania, where she’s been working for local newspapers. She currently combines her dual passions for media and education by reporting on preK-12 education in Lancaster, PA. She is a co-founder of Put People First! PA, an organization fighting for human rights in her home state. She also dreamed up and launched Faces of Mental Health Recovery, a participatory public art celebrating people in recovery from mental illness.

Ilana Milner (2010 TMS Fellow) Ilana Millner is a multimedia storyteller from Washington Crossing, Pennsylvania. She is an alumna of the University of Pennsylvania, and holds a B.A. in English with a concentration in Creative Writing and a minor in Fine Arts. Ilana joined TMS soon after graduating from Penn. Following her time as a TMS Fellow, Ilana spent a year in Switzerland, working as a writer and editor for Urban-Think Tank and the Chair of Architecture and Urban Design at ETH Zürich. There, her research and editorial work focused on design and infrastructure in informal settlements around the world. Ilana is currently based in Mumbai as an American India Foundation William J. Clinton Fellow for Service in India where she works with Apnalaya—a holistic, rights-based community development organization located in Shivaji Nagar, Govandi. Back in India, she once again finds herself happily generating new opportunities to teach digital storytelling, and to continue crafting her own modern story one classroom at a time.

Samantha Love (2011 TMS Fellow) A native of Washington DC, Samantha grew up surrounded by the diversity of the Nation’s Capital.   She  studied English and Spanish at the University of Michigan, and decided to go into teaching through the Teach for America program at the end of her senior year.  Since 2008 she has been teaching high school English in the New York metro-area.  In 2010 she received her Masters of Education from the City University of New York and in 2011 she accepted The Modern Story teaching fellowship. Traveling to India to teach the program’s innovative social justice and digital storytelling curriculum transformed her pedagogy and proved to be a life-changing experience.  She returned to the states in 2012 and has been back in the classroom teaching English at Newark Collegiate Academy, a KIPP high school in Newark, NJ. Sam now incorporates digital storytelling into her 11th grade English classroom, encouraging students to express themselves through diverse mediums such as photography, video and blogging. She recently achieved one of her greatest goals as an educator when she helped organize and chaperone a trip with the International Leadership Program for 15 NYC and Newark public high school students to travel to India for a three week service learning trip.

Stella Tan (2011 TMS Fellow) A native Californian, Stella Tan served as a TMS fellow in 2011, after graduating from Columbia University with a B.A. in English. During the fellowship, she worked with her students to create mini-documentaries addressing issues of women’s rights, pedestrian rights, and linguistic diversity in their communities. She also caught the travel bug while in India, and spent several months after the fellowship moving around Southeast Asia and Europe and WWOOF-ing at a vegetable farm in France. She recently completed her M.A. in English at University College London, and now resides in Brooklyn.

Kelly Adams (2012 TMS Fellow) Hailing from Pennsylvania, Kelly comes from a background in Anthropology and Environmental Science and was drawn to teach digital storytelling through a passion for social justice, education, and cross-cultural dialogue. After completing her fellowship with The Modern Story in 2012, she was inspired to continue along the path of facilitating youth media production. Through watching the young women in Hyderabad’s government schools engage with critical social thinking and issues of identity through digital self-representation, her belief in the importance of storytelling was affirmed. She started an interdisciplinary Masters at New York University in Fall, 2013 where she is focusing on Culture and Media, namely indigenous and community media production. She is beginning an ethnographic project exploring the youth mediascape of New York City that she hopes will deepen her knowledge of the pedagogic potential of creative multimedia expression and compliment her work interning with the StoryCorpsU youth development curriculum. The Modern Story Fellowship was not only one of the most rewarding periods of her life, but continues to hold influence in her anticipated career trajectory!

Emily Kwong (2012 TMS Fellow) Emily Kwong is a radio and multimedia producer based in New York City. After graduating from Columbia University, Emily was a Fellow with The Modern Story alongside her wonderful co-fellows, Dana Anderson and Kelly Adams. Their trio taught a group of 115 brilliant students in the creation of video projects in Hyderabad. Inspired by the semester, Emily attended the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies to acquire more storytelling skills and become a radio teacher. She is now a production assistant for Radio Rookies, WNYC’s youth radio program, and 2013 recipient of the “Best New Artist” award at the Third Coast International Audio Festival. Raised by a Chinese father and English mother, she is passionate about social justice, education, and storytelling and hopes to dedicate her professional life to dignifying the human voice. You can follow her on Twitter at @emilykwong1234 or view her work here.

Dana Anderson (2012 TMS Fellow) When not in India, Dana Anderson is happiest hiking in the mountains of Colorado, where she was born. Dana’s other favorite place is Sydney, Australia, where she graduated from high school and learned to surf. Dana spent her freshman and sophomore years at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. The highlight of her time there involved working at the United Nations as a representative for a small Indian NGO called Jigyansu Tribal Research Center.

Dana studied journalism and international media at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Her passion for writing and all-consuming fascination with India drove her to focus her studies on these two interests. While at CU, Dana was awarded a grant to research the methods and effects of community radio as a means of empowerment. The grant funded a trip to Andhra Pradesh in the summer of 2011 to observe a station managed by local farmwomen. Dana especially appreciated the educational role of the station, which is helping to change the lives of the children she befriended at a nearby school. Her article about the station was published in Eye See Media magazine.

Upon graduation in 2012, she became a fellow with The Modern Story. She considers the Fellowship to be a pivotal experience in her life! Dana returned to India in the summer of 2013 to work with the India Literacy Project and Mahita NGO, an educational center that offers training and tutoring for young students who were previously forced to drop out of school. Currently, Dana also works for a company called In The Telling, which partners with universities to create transmedia course experiences. She hopes to pursue the passions she developed during her time as a Fellow by obtaining a graduate degree in child rights.