Urbino Faculty

Our faculty bring a blend of study abroad teaching experience and superb professional credentials. Two of our Urbino instructors are Pulitzer Prize winning journalists.

Steven D. Anderson, Ph.D. (Multimedia/Video) is a professor of converged media and the director of the School of Media Arts & Design at James Madison University. Prior to entering academe, Anderson was the environmental reporter and weekend weathercaster for KCNC television, a network O&O station in Denver, Colorado. He also worked as a news photographer, weathercaster and news reporter at stations in Fresno, California and Fargo, North Dakota. He is an author of a textbook entitled “Exploring Electronic Media: Chronicles & Challenges” (Wiley-Blackwell Publishing). His websites have won top awards from the Broadcast Education Association (BEA Best of Festival) and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC Best of the Web Competition). Anderson is a former President of the Broadcast Education Association (BEA), the association for electronic media professors and industry professionals. He taught video in Urbino in 2011 and created the Eppy Award-winning website for presentation of student work. He returns to Urbino in 2012.

Francesca Carducci (Italian Language/Interpreter Supervisor) received her degree in Pharmacy at the University of Urbino. She teaches English and is a lecturer (CEL) in the Department of Modern Literature and Philological-Linguistic Sciences at the University of Urbino. She is a member of the CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) staff of the faculty of Computer Science and teaches in the English master’s program for Italian primary school teachers offered by the Department of Foreign Languages. Fran is originally from Buffalo, New York, and became interested in content-based teaching methodology as a consequence of her scientific background. She has revised and edited scientific articles to be published in English for years, and has created science and math courses in English for Italian students at almost every level. Francesca truly enjoys teaching both on-line and in the classroom and, after more than 20 years of living and working in Urbino, considers herself a bona fide “Urbinate.” She taught Italian language and supervised interpreters in Urbino in 2009 through 2011 and returns again in 2012.

Dennis Chamberlin (Photography) is an assistant professor of journalism at Iowa State University and a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist. He has more than 20 years experience as a newspaper and magazine photojournalist and has worked for publications such as TIME, The New York Times Sunday Magazine and National Geographic. Most of his professional career was spent living in Eastern Europe, where he covered the fall of communism and reintegration of Europe for various publications over a 15-year period. He has spent most of his life shooting slide film but is now a strong advocate of the power of multimedia as a storytelling tool and focuses his own work and teaching on multimedia. He taught photography in Urbino in 2009 and 2011 and directed the multimedia program there in 2011.

Andrew Ciofalo (ieiMedia Founder and President) is professor emeritus of communication/ journalism at Loyola College Maryland, where he arrived in 1983 to found what is now The Communication Department. In 2002, he founded the Cagli Program in International Reporting, a multimedia study-abroad program in Cagli, Italy, which laid the foundations for the Institute for Education in International Media. In keeping with his interest in experiential learning, he is the founder of Apprentice House Press, a student-run book publishing company at Loyola University. Prof. Ciofalo, who earned a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, has taught courses in Travel Writing, Book Publishing, Magazine Publishing, Magazine Writing, and Opinion Writing. He has taught in Cagli (2002-2006, 2008), Armagh (2007) and Urbino (2010 & 2011).

Doug Cumming, Ph.D. (Reporting) is an associate professor of journalism at Washington & Lee University with 26 years experience at metro newspapers and magazines. Since getting a Ph.D. at UNC-Chapel Hill in mass communications, he has taught multimedia reporting and feature writing at Loyola University-New Orleans and at W&L in Virginia. Earlier, he worked at the newspapers in Raleigh, Providence and Atlanta, was editor of the Sunday Magazine in Providence and helped launch Southpoint monthly magazine in Atlanta. He won a George Polk Award and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. His book The Southern Press came out in 2009, and more recently, he edited and wrote the foreword to Bylines, a selection of magazine articles by his father Joe Cumming, who was Newsweek’s Southern bureau chief in the ’60s and ’70s. He taught Reporting in Urbino in 2011 and returns in 2012. He will also be the program director for the Salamanca program in 2012. Read professor Cumming’s 2011 Urbino blog at: http://docurbino.wordpress.com

Michael Gold (Reporting/Writing) has been a writer, editor, and manager at award-winning publications, in print and online. He started his career as a reporter at the Bergen County (NJ) Record and the Boston Herald American. He was a founding writer and editor for Science 80, which won three National Magazine Awards while he was there. In 1986, Gold co-founded Hippocrates, now called Health, where he served as managing editor and executive editor. As a consultant for West Gold Editorial, he helped conceive and launch University Business and Dwell magazines as well as Thrive, an online health network produced by Time, Inc. and AOL. Gold has consulted for Inc, PC World, Consumer Reports, Executive Travel, and others, offering management advice, guiding major renovations, and coaching editorial staff. He has served as the editor of Strings magazine, edited several jazz arranging books for Berklee Press, and helped lead the magazine launch projects and online track for the Stanford Professional Publishing Courses. He is the author of A Conspiracy of Cells, a popular, nonfiction account of a scandal in cancer research. He taught in the 2011 magazine program in Urbino and will return in 2012.

Greg Luft (Video) is chair of the Journalism and Technical Communication department at Colorado State University. He has a diverse career as a television news reporter and anchor; documentary, educational, and corporate video producer; freelance video journalist; teacher, and academic administrator. Luft began his career in local TV news as a general assignment and investigative reporter, and news anchor while working at television stations in Wyoming, Florida, Oklahoma and Colorado. He also became an independent producer and freelance photojournalist. Luft has worked for ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News, and Discovery networks, among others. His documentaries, and educational programs focusing on television writing, editing and photography, as well as journalistic behavior, have earned top awards from the Associated Press, Broadcast Education Association, National Council on Christians and Jews, and the Florida Bar Association, among others. These programs are used in classrooms at hundreds of colleges and universities worldwide. Luft also has served in leadership roles for the Broadcast Education Association, College Media Advisors, and the Colorado Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Greg will teach video in Urbino in 2012.

Bob Marshall (Reporting) is the veteran reporter, feature writer and columnist whose work at The Times-Picayune has earned two Pulitzer Prizes. He was co-author of the series “Oceans of Trouble: Are the World’s Fisheries Doomed?” which won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service from the Society of Professional Journalists. In 2006 Marshall’s investigations into the engineering missteps that led to the levee failures during Hurricane Katrina were among the stories for which the newspaper was honored with The Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. In 2007 Marshall was co-author of the series “Last Chance: The Fight to Save a Disappearing Coast,” about Louisiana’s coastal erosion problems, which won the 2007 John H. Oakes Prize for Environmental Reporting from Columbia University, and The National Academies of Sciences Communications Award for newspaper and magazine reporting. Marshall’s wide-ranging career has included covering professional and college sports, Olympics, and the outdoors beat, as well as working on special environmental projects. In addition to his newspaper work, Marshall’s professional credits include writing for Field&Stream Magazine,Men’s Journal, National Geographic Adventure. He taught reporting in Cagli in 2008 and in Urbino 2009 and 2011 and will return to Urbino in 2012.

Susan West (Reporting/Writing) is an award-winning writer and editor who launches and advises magazines and websites. With an M.S. in science journalism from the University of Missouri at Columbia, West started her career as a staff writer at Science News and Science 80. In 1986, she co-founded a popular health magazine called Hippocrates (now known as Health and owned by Time Inc.), which won four National Magazine Awards during her tenure. As a principal at West Gold Editorial consulting, she has launched magazines such as Dwell, trained online editors at websites such as BabyCenter, provided strategic guidance to publications from the New England Journal of Medicine to Acoustic Guitar, and conducted workshops for Cooking Light, Southern Accents, and many others. In 2009, she served as the founding editor of the travel magazine Afar, which last fall was named Best Travel Magazine in North America by the Society of American Travel Writers. She has also been the executive editor of Smithsonian magazine and for many years oversaw the magazine launch projects at the Stanford Professional Publishing Course. She directed the 2011 magazine program in Urbino.

Pawel Wyszomirski (Photography) is a freelance photographer from Gdansk, Poland, and cofounder of the photo community Testigo, a collective of photographers and videographers focusing on visual journalism. He participated in the international documentary photo project that dealt with complex Polish-German relations “Wie du es siehst?” and has exhibited his work in Poland and Germany. Over the past few years he has coordinated and taught at several photography workshops and courses for students from Poland, the United States and Scandinavia. Pawel interned at Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland’s premier national newspaper, and currently teaches photojournalism and documentary photography at the Sopot School of Photography. He taught photography in Urbino in 2011. Check out professor Wyszomirski’s photo blog at: http://www.pawelwyszomirski.blogspot.com