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About

Digital Media Connecticut (DMCT), takes a broad approach toward digital media. Within Connecticut, there are over 5,500 monthly posts on social media that reference the term. Topics expand across multiple fields, including advertising/PR (15%), culture/society (8%), education (7%), and design/creativity (6%)*. Partners within the DMCT collaborative have narrowed the focus toward four branches; motion design and animation, marketing and communications design, live action content production, and interactive media.

Monthly Social Posts in CT
Mentioning Digital Media

As digital media continues its expansion unabated, these four branches serve a variety of needs within Connecticut’s industries; these include marketing and communications, as well as the production of content for a growing number of media companies that now call Connecticut their home.

The DMCT collaborative works in partnership with many of these organizations to produce an extensive information campaign, that includes an annual summit, speaker series, and varying online learning experiences that connect high school and university students to real stories and real people from Connecticut's digital media industry.

Leadership Team

Matthew Worwood

Matthew Worwood

Associate Director
of Digital Media & Design
at University of Connecticut
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Matthew Worwood is a professor of Digital Media Design at the University of Connecticut. He also leads Digital Media CT, a statewide collaborative dedicated to furthering Digital Media education in Connecticut. Matthew's research focuses on teacher creativity and design thinking inside the context of teaching and learning. He has also published on design-based practices that influence the development and implementation of technological solutions in education.

Matthew blogs at DadsforCreativity.com and co-hosts the Fueling Creativity podcast. He is also an active contributor to Creativity and Education and produces the occasional low-budget documentary film. Matthew currently serves on the Advisory board at St Gregory the Great Elementary School in Danbury, CT; and runs a professional learning website called Teacher's Innovation Studio.

Heather Elliott-Famularo

Heather Elliott-Famularo

Department Head
Digital Media & Design
at University of Connecticut
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Heather Elliott-Famularo is an award-winning filmmaker and artist active internationally in the fields of broadcast television, computer graphics and interactive multimedia, with a focus on collaborative digital humanities and public education through digital media. Her documentary, Bearing Witness: The Voices of Our Survivors, won the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Palm Beach International Film Festival and was nominated for an Emmy award by the National Association of Television Arts & Sciences – Lower Great Lakes chapter. She received a Fulbright-Hays Group Project Abroad Program grant for her work on the collaborative project, Walking Witness: Civic Responsibility in the Shadow of the Holocaust, and an Ohio Humanities Council grant for the Bearing Witness Summer Institute, an ongoing inquiry-based research project developing 21st century interactive, digital curricular materials based on extensive historical research and collaboration with community partners and students. She has presented, and her work has been published and exhibited, internationally in Canada, Hungary, Italy and Poland as well as at iDMAa and SIGGRAPH, where she has also acted as curator and juror of numerous exhibitions.

Carl Marvin Louis

Marvin Louis

Lead Coordinator
at Digital Media Connecticut
.
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Passionate about Communications, Education, and Process.

Marvin Louis is currently the Lead Coordinator for Digital Media Connecticut (DMCT) a collaborative of Connecticut higher education institutions focused on fostering a digital media talent pipeline for Connecticut.

In his previous role as Project Coordinator at the Business Council of Fairfield County, he engaged and organized peer groups related to Professional Development, Diversity & Inclusion, Human Capital, Education, and Workforce Development. Further, he developed and re-launched a young professional program (The Emerging Leaders of Fairfield County; now, The Emerging Leaders) of 500+ members through events based around volunteering, professional development, and networking.

Marvin earned his Bachelors’s Degree in Communications and Media Studies from the University of Connecticut.

Collaborative Members

Wayne Edwards

Wayne Edwards

Distinguished Lecturer
at University of New Haven
.
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Wayne Edwards is an Emmy award winning production leader with over twenty years of experience in Broadcasting and Multi-media Production.

He is currently a Distinguished Lecturer at the University of New Haven teaching content production, live broadcasting, and journalism. During his time on campus, the university has won 7 New England Regional Emmys; he’s implemented a Sport Communication minor; developed Race, Gender, and Class in the media and Electronic News Gathering and Reporting courses.

Wayne’s career began at ESPN leading the live production of professional, collegiate, and amateur sport events. He produced multiplatform content in the roles of Feature Producer, Field Producer, and Post-production Editor. He also aided in the training and development of on-air personalities. Afterwards, he was part of the executive team that launched Back9Network, a golf lifestyle channel. Wayne continues to function as a freelance producer for various national and regional networks and is also a consultant in the creation of live multiplatform shows.

Andrea Wollensak

Andrea Wollensak

Professor of Art
at Connecticut College
.
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Andrea Wollensak is an artist/educator and Professor of Art at Connecticut College. Themes in her work explore place-based narratives on environment and community. Her work spans media from traditional and digital fabrication, to generative-interactive systems and includes collaborations with computer scientists, musicians, poets, and scientists.

Wollensak has exhibited internationally, most notably at the Göteborg International Biennial, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Brno Design Biennial Moravian Gallery, Akademie der Kunste Galleries in Berlin, University of West England at the Bristol Gallery, Center for Visual Art in Denver, Granoff Center Gallery at Brown University, and the Burchfield Penney Arts Center in Buffalo.

Selected awarded grants and artist residencies include Banff Centre for the Arts (1995), National Science Foundation (1999), Rockefeller Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy (2000), Weir Farm Art Center and National Park (2005), International Artist Studio Program in Sweden, (2007), Hafnarborg Art Museum, Iceland (2011), Connecticut Artist Fellowship (2005 and 2011), Connecticut Sea Grant (2021), and the Anchorage Museum (2021-22). She has presented her work at numerous conferences including ISEA, ACM SIGGRAPH, Generative Art, CAiiA, College Art Association, among others.

Wollensak’s creative and critical writings have appeared in numerous publications including Computers and Graphics, Zed, Visible Language, Artbyte, Parachute, Fuse, Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers, by Karen O’Rourke [MIT Press, 2013], Acting Bodies and Social Networks, A Bridge Between Technology and Working Memory, edited by B. Pirani and I. Varga, chapter “Social Bodies and Locative Technologies” by Gianni Corino [UPA, 2010]. Wollensak received her BFA from University of Michigan (1983), MFA from Yale University (1990).

Barnes

Todd Barnes

Artistic Director
FTMA at Sacred Heart University
.
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Todd Barnes is an award-winning filmmaker with a law degree. In his 25+ years in the business, he has been an actor, director, producer, writer, and editor. His films have been awarded Best of Next at the Sundance Film Festival (Homewrecker), nominated for a Palm D’or at Cannes (My Blind Brother), and presented on the Showtime Network by Spike Lee (Engine Trouble).

Commercial clients include IBM, Adobe, Lenovo, Victorinox, Springer (DE), Maverick Publishing (UK), and Canal+ (FR). In his time as an entertainment attorney for Rudolph & Beer LLC in New York City, he worked with clients Britney Spears, Backstreet Boyz, N’Sync and the Wu-Tang Clan among many others.

In 1979, Brian Barnes (father) brought home a Betamax video recorder and his sons, Brad and Todd, have been making movies ever since. Brad has become a Professor at NYU, Columbia and USC in Los Angeles. Todd is a Professor at Sacred Heart University and the Artistic Director of Connecticut’s only graduate film school (FTMA).

Todd was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, received his BA from Middlebury College in Vermont and got his JD from Boston College in Massachusetts. He lives in Fairfield with his lovely wife Kim and two sons, Augie and Maverick. He is thinking about getting a dog.

Julie

Julie Casper Roth

Assistant Professor
of Film and Television
at Norwalk Community College
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Julie is an award-winning filmmaker interested in hidden histories, the unseen, and the ignored. Her documentary and experimental work has been screened nationally and internationally. She is a two-time finalist for the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, the recipient of a NYSCA Individual Artist grant, the recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship in Video, and a recipient of the College Art Association Professional Development Fellowship. Julie attended Smith College and received her MFA from the University at Albany. She has taught documentary production at the University at Albany and Skidmore College, and she is currently an Assistant Professor of Film and Television at Norwalk Community College.

Elena

Dr. Elena Bertozzi

Professor & Director, Game Design &
Development, Chair, Visual & Performing Arts
at Quinnipiac University
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Dr. Elena Bertozzi is the co-founder of SolitonZ Games, Director & Professor of Game Design and Development, and Chair of Visual and Performing Arts at Quinnipiac University. Her work focuses on using play to communicate information, often about sensitive topics, that empower players to make pro-health choices. Her current work is on a game to address vaccine hesitancy.

As a professor, Elena has developed numerous courses in the developing field of game design. In addition to practical coding and design courses, she seeks to provide a foundational understanding of games that is grounded in theory and in a historical understanding of the importance of play in the development of culture. Students are encouraged to engage critically with texts and play experiences and produce analytical writing and games that demonstrate their developing expertise. This analysis specifically includes thinking about the way that play can establish and reinforce power structures that exclude historically marginalized groups. The playground also provides a fertile environment for pushing back against these structures and experimenting with ways they can be opposed and dismantled.

As a game designer and developer, she works with teams of physicians, scientists, artists, and programmers to make games that help people help themselves. These games often intersect with research interests in the areas of gender, technology, and sexuality.

Karen Ritzenhoff

Dr. Karen A. Ritzenhoff

Professor in the
Department of Communication
at Central Connecticut State University
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Dr. Karen A. Ritzenhoff is a Professor in the Department of Communication at Central Connecticut State University where she is also affiliated with the cinema studies and honors program. She teaches classes in visual communication, film and media studies, documentary and women & film. Ritzenhoff is co-Chair of the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program.

She has published several coedited volumes on war films and also studies Stanley Kubrick. Her most recent publications are Mediated Terrorism in the 21. Century (2021) with Elena Caoduro and Karen Randell as well as Afrofuturism in Black Panther: Gender, Identity, and the Re-Making of Blackness (2021) with Renée T. White.

terry bloom

Terry L. Bloom, PhD

Associate Dean
in the School of Communications
at Quinnipiac University
.
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Terry Bloom is the Associate Dean in the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University. She also serves as the program director for the 3+1 accelerated dual degree program where outstanding high school students are invited to completed both their bachelor’s and master’s degrees in 4 years, and QU Academy, where high school students can earn college credit for courses taken while in high school.

Bloom began her teaching career at Barry University in Miami Shores, FL in 2003. She became an assistant professor at the University of Miami in 2004 and was promoted to associate professor in 2010. She served as program director for the electronic media, media management and broadcast journalism programs as well as chair of the department of journalism and media management at the University of Miami. She joined Quinnipiac in 2014.

Bloom earned her bachelor of science in communication from the University of Miami, her master of mass communication from Arizona State University, and her PhD in mass communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was a Park Fellow.

Are you working in higher education and would like to join or learn more about the collaborative? Contact us here!

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