vanberto's photostream  

I live in Brooklyn and work at Etsy, an online marketplace and community where artists and craftspeople and vintage collectors sell their items. I have a special interest in education, entrepreneurship, art, and documentary.

I was a grad student at MIT's Comparative Media Studies program. My thesis research is about the history of unschooling and participatory media. I did interviews with unschooling families who use and make media. I also co-authored, with my professor Henry Jenkins, a chapter about youth participation in the arts in an anthology due out spring 07, Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America's Cultural Life. I had a research assistantship at MIT for Project New Media Literacies, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, where I developed interactive tools for media literacies K-12. I made a video portrait of my brother, Nick who is a cartoonist, with accompanying educational materials. I was a TA for MIT's Terrascope program, an interdisciplinary learning environment for MIT freshmen, interested in the earth sciences. I TAed for the radio documentary part of the program. You can listen to the students' work at PRX.

I worked for a summer at Open Source, a public radio show/website with host Christopher Lydon.

Before going to grad school, I worked in new media documentaries in NYC. I worked on The Sonic Memorial Project, a collaboration between public radio producers and new media designers.

My filmmaking collaborator, Hanna Rose Shell, and I are finishing our short experimental documentary movie about the history of used clothing and immigration. It's called Secondhand (Pepe) and it focuses on Haitian pepe dealers and turn-of-the-century Jewish rag peddlers.