Faculty
Dr. Katherine Bell
Assistant Professor & Department Chair
E-mail: kate.bell@csueastbay.edu
Phone: (510) 885-3189
Office: MI 3011
PhD, University of Washington, Seattle
MA, York University, Toronto
Katherine M. Bell teaches media and cultural studies in the undergraduate core and journalism in the Media Production Option. Her research explores celebrity as a form of cultural authority in 21st-century social and political life, and its relationship to race, gender, and sexuality. She worked as a journalist for more than 20 years, mainly with The Canadian Press news agency as a reporter, editor, and newsroom manager. As a reporter she focused on issues involving the environment, industrial development, and First Nations communities. She is currently the Chair of the Department of Communication.
Dr. Lonny J Avi Brooks
Associate Professor
E-mail: Lonny.Brooks@csueastbay.edu
Phone: (510) 885-4854
Office: MI 3039
PhD, University of California, San Diego.
MLIS, University of California, Los Angeles
Lonny J Avi Brooks is Associate Professor of Strategic Communication in the Communication Department at AV狼, East Bay. He is the Co-Principal Investigator for the Long Term and Futures Thinking in Education Project and has piloted the integration of long term and futures thinking into his Communication courses. His research of long term thinking is part of a larger study of how organizations (especially forecasting think tanks), interaction designers, and college youth envision the future of media and information technologies. His work co-authored with Reynaldo Anderson, “Student Visions of Multiple Urban futures 2050”, was published as a chapter in Envisioning futures for environmental and sustainability education (2017). Lonny is the co-organizer of the Black Speculative Arts Movement Oakland symposium/film festival celebrating and exploring the Black Imagination at Cal State University East Bay. He is producer and co-creator with Ahmed Best of the podcast Afrofuturism—Democratizing the Future!
Dr. Brooks' research brings together his interests in the social and cultural impacts of new media and the distribution of societal stories we invent to forward, mitigate, or restrain technological and scientific invention. He looks at futurist think tanks worldwide to investigate the metaphors employed in future scenarios of computing as they interact with historical, sociocultural memories, and present-day realities. As part of his research on emergent trends in social computing and user experience research, he investigates how long term thinking can be implemented in higher education. Professor Brooks is a member of the research group Game Jam project to investigate gaming as a platform for understanding how gaming can provide students with immersive experiences in learning about media theory and practice.
Dr. Mary Cardaras
Associate Professor
E-mail: mary.cardaras@csueastbay.edu
Phone: (510) 885-3925
Office: MI 3011
PhD, Northeastern University, Political Science, Public & International Affairs
MSJ, Northwestern University, Broadcast Journalism
Dr. Cardaras is producing a documentary about journalism, This Just In, and has curated and edited an anthology about documentary film, Documentary Film: An Insider’s Perspective published by Cognella in January 2016. Also, in post-production is a documentary short entitled Sunday Dinner, about the weekly gathering of a large Chinese family, a story “as American as apple pie.” Dr. Cardaras is the co-editor of a six volume anthology, The Cultural History of News, which will be published in 2019 by Bloomsbury Publishing of London. Three years ago, she published her first book, Fear, Power and Politics: The Recipe for War in Iraq after 9/11. She is helping to build and manage a new journalism curriculum and is hoping to develop a new bachelor’s degree program in Journalism for Social Justice. Dr. Cardaras is also hoping to launch College Newsnet International (CNI), a news network of student journalism from around the world, and is on the governing board of the Center for Sport and Social Justice (CSSJ) at AV狼, East Bay.
She built the television, radio broadcasting, and digital film department at The New England Institute of Art in Brookline, Massachusetts and served as its chair for 13 years. She has been teaching college journalism courses since 1991 at universities including, LaSalle (Philadelphia), Syracuse (London campus) and at the American International University (Richmond, UK), Georgia State (Atlanta) and Northeastern (Boston). Dr. Cardaras free-lanced for CNN, Boston, and has worked for CNN, Atlanta, CNN and World Television News, London, and for numerous other news departments across the country in five other major markets spanning more than 30 years in journalism. Also, she has conducted media training workshops for students and professionals in the Arab world and in Vietnam. Dr. Cardaras is the recipient of two EMMY awards for excellence in spot news producing and feature producing and has been nominated numerous times during her career in journalism.
She served on the board of the Global Press Institute (San Francisco) as Vice President and served as both President and Vice President of the board of the Provincetown International Film Festival, (Provincetown, Massachusetts), which is home to the oldest art’s colony in America, and was its college and university liaison. She also served as Vice President of the board for the Boston Living Center, an organization that serves people with HIV/AIDS. She is a member of Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), Radio and Television News Directors Association (RTNDA), National Gay & Lesbian Journalists Association (NLGJA), Pi Sigma Alpha, Political Science Honor Society Member, Journalism & Women’s Symposium (JAWS), American Political Science Association (APSA), Middle East Studies Association (MESA), and the College Media Association (CMA). She worked extensively with the Coolidge Corner Theatre Foundation in Brookline, Massachusetts, and the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard University about which she Executive Produced, Chaos and Order: Making American Theater. She has worked with the Sonoma International Film Festival and is a volunteer for the Sonoma Valley Mentoring Alliance. In addition, she is a SCUBA diver, an aspiring sailor, a curious, enthusiastic traveler, a lover and patron of the arts, and someone who believes passionately in the influence and necessity of responsible journalism all over the world.
Dr. Anita W. Chang
Assistant Professor
Email: anita.chang@csueastbay.edu
Phone: (510) 885-3292
Office: MI 3011
PhD, University of California, Santa Cruz
MFA, San Francisco State University
Digital publics, online cultural representation, documentary, expanded documentary, experimental/avant-garde media, transnational film and media, Third Cinema, Indigenous cinema and media, Ecomedia, and feminist film theory.
Artist Website:
Anita Chang is a media artist scholar, educator and writer. Her films have been screened and broadcast internationally, and presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ Bay Area Now, Walker Arts Center, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and National Museum of Women. Her movies include Tongues of Heaven; Joyful Life; 62 Years and 6500 Miles Between; She Wants to Talk to You; Imagining Place; Mommy, What’s Wrong?, and One Hundred Eggs a Minute. They are distributed by Women Make Movies, Third World Newsreel, The Center for Asian American Media, Taiwan Public Television, Kanopy Streaming and Alexander Street.
Chang’s research and creative practice examine the ways postcolonial, diasporic, and multicultural societies represent themselves in various visual media, with a focus on retelling, reviving, and reinventing their stories and histories, along with the impact these works have on their respective communities and nations. Chang’s moving image works reflect observations and philosophical explorations of ideas, such as inequality, spirituality and freedom. In pushing the boundaries of the moving image medium, she experiments with the interplay between content and form to inspire different kinds of audience engagements. Many of her creative works focus on the experiences of women and girls, minorities, immigrants, exiles, Asians, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, and disenfranchised communities. They are engaged with and complicate discourses on (post)colonialism, ethnography, diaspora, race, gender and cross-cultural representation. They also attempt to address the challenges of representing the experiences of people who exist under conditions of marginality—be they socio-economic, political, psychic, or spatial.
Before joining CSUEB, Chang taught at the University of San Francisco and University of California at Santa Cruz; she also taught abroad at AAVAS in Kathmandu Nepal, the renowned Motion Picture Department at National Taiwan University of Arts, and the Department of Indigenous Languages and Communication at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. She has received grant awards from Creative Capital, the Fulbright Foundation, the San Francisco Arts Commission, National Geographic and the KQED Peter J. Owens Filmmaker program.
She is the author of Third Digital Documentary: A Theory and Practice of Transmedia Arts Activism, Critical Design and Ethics (Peter Lang, 2020); contributor to Interactive Documentary: Decolonizing Practice-Based Research (Routledge, 2022); Teaching Transnational Cinema and Media: Politics and Pedagogy (Routledge, 2016); and has published in American Quarterly, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, positions, Concentric and Taiwan Journal of Indigenous Studies.
Dr. Grant Kien
Professor
Graduate Program Director
E-mail: Grant.Kien@csueastbay.edu
Phone: (510) 885-3927
Office: MI 3005
PhD, Communications Research, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana
MA, Communication and Culture, York University, Toronto
Dr. Kien studies new digital media and conducts audience effects research, using qualitative research methods and cultural analysis. His most recent book is entitled Communicating With Memes: Consequences in Post-Truth Civilization (2019/2021). He has published more than 20 scholarly research papers, and single-authored two books (one translated into Russian). Dr. Kien has conducted research in seven countries, with on-the-ground experience in Seoul, Pusan, Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, Chiapas Mexico, Florence Italy, and numerous cities in Canada and the USA.
He has been an invited speaker at universities and conferences throughout North America and as far flung as Moscow. Dr. Kien’s current research focuses on the socio-cultural effects of media memes and memetic communication.
Professor Kien is the current MA in Communication Graduate Program Director.
Dr. Yung-I Liu
Associate Professor
PRSSA Faculty Advisor
E-mail: yungi.liu@csueastbay.edu
Phone: (510) 885-3188
Office: MI 3025
PhD, The Ohio State University, Communication
MA, The Ohio State University, Journalism
Political campaign communication, strategic communication, quantitative and statistical research methods, media effects on different ethnic groups.
Dr. Benjamin K. Smith
Assistant Professor
Email: benjamin.smith@csueastbay.edu
Phone: 510-885-2543
Office: MI 3019
PhD, University of California, Santa Barbara
MA, Portland State University
Benjamin K. Smith’s research interests lie within the domains of public opinion, informal learning, and mass communication, with a focus on how issues, events and actors are portrayed in news media, and the effects of these portrayals on the formation, updating and expression of beliefs, attitudes, and opinions. In addressing these questions, he employs a multi-disciplinary approach, bridging theories and research paradigms from mass and political communication, political science, cognitive and social psychology, and media sociology. He also employs a variety of analytical approaches, choosing the method that best answers the question at hand, whether that be computational text analysis, inductive framing analysis or multilevel structural equation mixture modeling.
Dr. Smith earned his Ph.D. in Communication from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2018, where he studied public opinion, media communication, and quantitative methods. He earned his M.S. in Communication from Portland State University, and his B.S. in Communication, with Concentration in Public Relations, from Southern Utah University. He has previously served as Research Director at the non-profit Institute for Methods Innovation, as a Visiting Scholar at the Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies, and was the co-founder and lead research analyst of a boutique public relations firm, Personal Branding Pros, LLC.