Team

See Also: About MIP ¦ MIP Steering Committee

Co-Directors

Michael Curtin is the Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Professor of Global Studies in the Department of Film and Media Studies. His books include The American Television Industry (2009); Reorienting Global Communication: Indian and Chinese Media Beyond Borders (2010); and Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV (2007). He is currently at work on Media Capital: The Cultural Geography of Globalization. With Paul McDonald, he is co-editor of the International Screen Industries book series for the British Film Institute and with Paul S. N. Lee, he is co-editor of th Chinese Journal of Communication.

Jennifer Holt is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She specializes in the study of media industries and regulatory policy. She is the co-editor of Media Industries (2009) and author of the forthcoming book Empires of Entertainment, a contemporary history of media deregulation from the Reagan era through the Telecommunications Act. Her current research explores media policy in the age of convergence. Her courses at UCSB include Media Industries, Television History and Media Criticism.

Project Manager 

Kevin Sanson is Project Manager for the Media Industries Project. His research considers how media professionals and audience members negotiate the physical, cultural, and economic geographies of global media production. More specifically, he is interested in the various ways space and place impact production processes, consumption practices, and the politics of cultural identity. Much of his academic work focuses on the transnational relationship between the US and UK media industries.  His current project, entitled Goodbye Brigadoon: Place, Production, and Identity in Global Glasgow, explores these issues in the context of an emerging riverside creative cluster in Glasgow, Scotland. It addresses the number of challenges and opportunities media professionals face when regional governments seek out the creative industries as a means for economic growth, social renewal, and urban rejuvenation. At the core of the project, however, remains a direct concern for how media professionals in “peripheral” markets reconcile the cultural and political import of their creative labor against the economic logic so central to developing global media hubs. He earned his Ph.D. in Media Studies from the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin.

Project Lead, Connected Viewing Initiative

Elissa Nelson earned her Ph.D. in Media Studies from the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. Nelson’s dissertation is a comprehensive content and contextual analysis of teen films of the 1980s, addressing issues relating to genre, industry, and culture. Her recent projects include an examination of the changing and increasingly connected structures of the television and music industries, an in-depth analysis of the Internet Movie Database (focusing on the history and current uses of the website), and an investigation of the different ways viewers remember narrative elements of genre films. She is currently focusing her research on the convergence of the media industries; the developing connections between Hollywood and the Internet, including new viewer and distribution practices facilitated by digital media; genre studies and the ways audience and business practices differ according to film classifications; and youth in film, paying particular attention to youth representation and marketing strategies.

Researchers

John Vanderhoef is a Research Associate with the Media Industries Project and a PhD student in the Film and Media Studies Department at UC Santa Barbara. His research interests include gender, race, and sexuality across media forms, especially in digital games, gaming culture, and the digital games industry. Other interests of his include issues of cultural hierarchy, creative labor, and power in the media. Additionally, he is an active editorial member of the Media Fields Journal.

John has written about independent video game distribution for MIP (forthcoming). 

Ryan Fuller is a doctoral student in the UC Santa Barbara Department of Communication, and a Research Associate with the Carsey-Wolf Center. His research interests center on cooperation and competition in media industries. Ryan's research projects have included turning points in the 2007-2008 Writers Guild of America strike, a state-of-the-art review of communication theories applied to conceptualizing the Internet, and media representations of labor disputes in the media industries. Ryan earned his M.B.A. from San Francisco State University and his B.A. in Communication from UC Davis.