Istanbul Faculty

 Our 2013 faculty will include:

Mary D'Ambrosio

 Mary D’Ambrosio(Director), the founding editor of Big World Magazine, is an assistant professor of journalism at Central Connecticut State University. She previously  taught at New York University and Columbia University. A writer specializing in international issues, she has reported from the U.K., Turkey, Italy and Latin America. She was an editor at Global Finance magazine in New York, a reporter for the Associated Press in Venezuela and a correspondent and book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Her work has also appeared in Islands, Working Woman, Newsday and the Miami Herald. She holds a B.S. in magazine journalism from Syracuse University, and an M.Sc. in economic history from the London School of Economics. She edited ieiMedia’s Urbino Now magazine in 2010 and has directed the Istanbul program since 2011.

Suzy Hansen (reporting) is a freelance writer who has lived in Istanbul for four years. She has written for The Atlantic, The New Republic, Bloomberg Businessweek, GQ, the New York Times, and many other publications. In 2007, she was the recipient of an Institute of Current World Affairs writing fellowship. Before moving to Istanbul, she was an editor at the New York Observer and Salon.

Kurt Lancaster (Multimedia/Video) is the author of DSLR Cinema: Crafting the Film Look with Video (Focal Press, 2011) and
Video Journalism for the Web: A Practical Introduction to Documentary Storytelling (Routledge, 2012). He is an assistant professor in the School of Communication at Northern Arizona University, where he teaches courses on documentary multimedia and digital filmmaking. His documentary, “Dreams from a Red Planet” (www.redplanetdreams.com) screened at the San Diego Comic Con and in London.

Venise Wagner (Reporting) is an associate professor of journalism at San Francisco State University. She spent 12 years as a reporter for various California dailies, including the Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner and San Francisco Chronicle. While at the Examiner she covered education and issues in the Bay Area’s various black communities. She was also a religion and ethics reporter for the Orange County Register and The Modesto Bee. Her work has also been published in Parade, Mother Jones, and Hope magazines. At San Francisco State she developed a curriculum that focuses on marginalized communities and structural inequities. She is currently co-authoring a book that offers journalists reporting tools and strategies to improve coverage of racial inequities. Wagner graduated with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana and a master’s in Latin American studies from the Monterey Institute of International Studies.