BOSTONChapter Head: Matt Weinberg and David SchragContact: boston@harvardwood.org
Matt Weinberg, ALM '09 (Museum Studies) is a fiction and screenwriter who runs the Harvardwood Writers Program's Features Workshop in Cambridge. Currently he is completing work on MOTH, a screenplay about college ambition and awkward love in the disaster age. Matt is also a consultant in museum and arts administration, and Associate Project Manager of Harvard's ARTS FIRST festival, April 29-May2, 2010.
David Schrag '89 is a playwright, actor, and other various artistic things. His short plays have won awards in New York, Los Angeles, and points in between. Recently he's been acting in independent films (including one by a Harvard undergrad in 2010) and has even done a little modeling. By day, David serves as the IT Director for about two dozen small businesses and nonprofits in the Boston area. David received his MBA in 1995 from Boston University's Public and Nonprofit Management Program and spent eight years in the public sector before moving into the IT field. His website is www.davidschrag.com.
CHICAGOChapter Head: TBDContact: chicago@harvardwood.orgGEORGIA
Chapter Head: Ashley Filip
Contact: georgia@harvardwood.orgLONDON / UKChapter Heads: Uzma Hasan, Winnie LiContact: london@harvardwood.org
Uzma Hasan, GSAS '03 is Development Producer at Slingshot Prodcutions where she has worked across project selection, development and packaging on all of the company’s films and most recently was Associate Producer on Slingshot’s latest feature TORMENTED. She is currently in post production for THE INFIDEL, her first feature as Producer. Uzma sits on the selection committees for Mira Nair’s MAISHA Labs and the British Independent Film Awards.
Prior to joining Slingshot, Uzma was producing music promos and commercials. Whilst in New York, she supported the Executive Producer and Special Events team at the 2004 Tribeca Film Festival and worked with Focus Features and Mirabai Films on the post production of Mira Nair’s film VANITY FAIR. Before moving into film, Uzma was a public relations consultant to international corporations such as NEC and Verizon and helped launch mCubed Magazine in the US, an arts and cultural magazine aimed at young Muslim professionals. She graduated from University of Wales, Cardiff with a First in English Literature and went on to study Film and Literature at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
Winnie Li ’00 (AB Summa Cum Laude) is Head of Development at Ugly Duckling Films/Left Turn Films, an independent film production company in London. She served as Associate Producer on their upcoming feature film CASHBACK (2006), which screened at Toronto, San Sebastian, and AFI Fest in Fall 2006, and is due for cinematic release across Europe in Spring 2007. She was also involved in their original short film CASHBACK (2004), which was nominated for a 2006 Academy Award® and won the top award at the Tribeca and Chicago International Film Festivals. Winnie’s first turn as full producer was the short film, VAGABOND SHOES (2005), winner of over ten international festival prizes, including two BAFTA awards. At Harvard, Winnie studied Folklore & Mythology and Co-Chaired the 1999 show of AN EVENING WITH CHAMPIONS, Harvard’s nationally-televised figure skating exhibition. Chosen as a Mitchell Scholar for graduate studies in Ireland, she got her start in film there while volunteering at the Cork Film Festival.
NEW JERSEY
Chapter Head: Mariam Nazarian
Contact: nj@harvardwood.org
Mariam Nazarian is an accomplished pianist/producer. Since making her debut
(at the age of eight) with the National Chamber Orchestra of Armenia, Mariam
has performed with the St. Petersburg Symphony (Grand Philharmonic Hall, St.
Petersburg, Russia), Philadelphia Chamber Orchestra (Pennsylvania Convention
Centre, Philadelphia), Princeton Symphony, Bach-Collegium Stuttgart (Richardson
Auditorium, Princeton), and the Boston Pops (Symphony Hall, Boston), among
others. In 1999, at the age of
sixteen, Mariam made her Carnegie Hall debut (under stage name Marie Nazar) as
the youngest pianist in Carnegie’s history to have performed J.S. Bach’s
Goldberg Variations BWV 988. In the same year, she recorded her debut CD of the
Goldberg Variations, released by Ardani Classics. She graduated cum laude from the Mannes College of Music
(New York), in 2005, completing her studies in three years; she holds an M.A.
in performance practice from Harvard.
Passionate about music, film, and socio-cultural entrepreneurship,
Mariam (currently, Assistant Director of the Scheide Fund) produces benefit
concerts in Princeton, presenting sold-out performances by the Vienna Chamber
Orchestra, Bayerische Kammerphilharmonie, New Jersey Symphony, Bach-Collegium
Stuttgart, and Festival Strings Lucerne.
She is very excited about heading the NJ Chapter of Harvardwood and
keeping the Crimson spirit alive in the Garden State!
NEW YORK CITY
Chapter Heads: Suwen Cheong, Spence Porter
Contact: nyc@harvardwood.org
Suwen Cheong '99 was born in Singapore and raised in New York City, where she attended Stuyvesant High School. She burst into the media and entertainment world as a youth journalist when she won Emmy and Peabody awards for reporting on the 1988 Presidential campaign, including an interview with then Vice Presidential candidate Dan Quayle. Since then, she has been following her journalist's nose for trouble, and writing stories in water. At Harvard she concentrated in Applied Mathematics and interned for "Shoeless Trader" Vic Niederhoffer during the Asian financial crisis. She went on to trade derivatives at a white shoe, bare knuckle investment bank, where she learned such performance art skills as voice projection and throwing phones. Later she became a lady of the night, trading Japanese bonds at a hedge fund from five to three. Most recently she attended law school at the Benjamin N Cardozo School of Law in New York City. During that time, she collected a rich variety of experiences at entertainment and fashion companies, including working for an avant garde shoe design company in London whilst narrowly escaping the tube bombings*, pursuing luxury handbag counterfeiters, drafting license contracts for six foot high blowup Frosty the Snowman lawn ornaments, writing nasty letters to publishers in book contract disputes, and investigating the regulatory landscape for web media companies in Asia. She currently lives in lower Manhattan with her husband and their two bikes.
*see Chapter Three: "Bombings I Have Survived"
Spence Porter says he likes to write plays that are mostly somewhere on the outskirts of conventional theater—he loves using puppets and masks and dancers and onstage musicians, and basically he has a lot of fun doing all the things that people keep trying to tell him not to do. He was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and, in the course of a peripatetic childhood, lived in Minnesota, Georgia, Puerto Rico, Georgia again, and finally the Bronx, where he went to the Bronx High School of Science. At Harvard, he graduated with honors in Applied Math and Physics. This was followed by a year of wandering around Europe at Harvard's expense on a Henry Russell Shaw Fellowship, and then, after being expelled from the Iowa Writers Workshop(!), by theater school at Ohio University, where he got an M.F.A. in Playwriting. He then returned to the Bronx where he continues to experiment with work that fuses dance and puppetry and masks and music and theater.
SAN FRANCISCO / BAY AREAChapter Head: Julia Ogrydziak
Contact: sf@harvardwood.org
San Francisco Chapter Head
Julia Ogrydziak GSD '05 grew up in Northern California and Paris. As an entrepreneur, media artist, and concert violinist, her pursuits center on visual design and sound informed by advanced technologies. She is a founding partner of Blacksquare, a wired design and technology agency, and a published expert in internet solutions. She has won international acclaim for her client work, including three Webby Awards. Classically trained on the violin, Julia continues to perform professionally in venues from Tanglewood to Berlin. A vocal proponent of contemporary music, she has collaborated with diverse groups such as the MIT Media Lab, Steve Reich, the Harvard New Music Group, and the Kronos Quartet. As a media artist, her pieces have won the List Prize and been exhibited at the MOMA in New York. Julia conducted her graduate work at the Harvard Design School, earning an M.Des. with distinction. She received double bachelor degrees in Physics and Music from MIT and was honored as most outstanding woman in her graduating class.
SEATTLEChapter Head: Brenda WalkerContact: seattle@harvardwood.org
Brenda J. Walker is a seasoned creative professional and producer with extensive experience acquiring content, negotiating partnerships, managing talent and crafting marketing campaigns. She is the founding principal of Rebel Content, an arts and entertainment consulting firm that develops business ventures and content for kicks and cultural discovery. Most recently she was Director of Content Development for Starbucks Coffee Company, acquiring music for the chain’s stores worldwide. Prior to joining Starbucks, she spent six years as a management consultant working with music companies, recording artists, and nonprofit organizations. Her industry experience includes Island Records, A&M/Perspective Records and Virgin Records where she worked as Director of Artists & Repertoire and Senior Director of Marketing & Artist Development, negotiating deals with Adidas, Delta Airlines, Compaq and the FIFA Women's World Cup. An Ohio native, Brenda leads communications for the Harvard Club of Seattle and is a board member for Seattle’s Central District Forum for Arts & Ideas. Her enduring aspiration is to finally bring an end to her self-imposed angst and suffering that spring from attempting to write the great American novel.
TORONTO / CANADA
Chapter Head: Mark Solovey
Contact: toronto@harvardwood.org
Mark Solovey is a professor at the University of Toronto, in the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, where he teaches and does research in the history of the social sciences and psychology. Currently, he is completing a book manuscript, titled "Follow the Money: The Rise, Decline and Fragmentation of the Social Sciences in Cold War America." He and his wife Marga Vicedo (also a Harvardwood member) write screenplays together and are addicted to watching movies. A long, long time ago, Mark grew up in Hastings-On-Hudson, in Westchester County, not far from New York City. He did his undergraduate studies at Rollins College, his graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin, and then worked at Arizona State University. Not so long ago, he was a visiting scholar at Harvard University, in the History of Science and the History Departments. A passionate amateur tennis player, Mark wonders why there are so few movies (and even fewer good movies) about tennis players. Hoping to fill this startling lacunae, he and Marga have written a screenplay about the first world champion black tennis player, Althea Gibson. Not many movies that feature a black actress as the lead get made either.
WASHINGTON, DCChapter Head: Mark R. Carter, Ph.D.Contact: dc@harvardwood.org
Mark R. Carter, Ph.D. is an actor, producer, director, audio/video engineer and blues/rock guitarist. Harvard awarded him a B.A in Physics and Mathematics. He studied acting for several years under Jean Shelton, the premier acting teacher in the United States, and is generally regarded as one of her all-time best students. His stage roles include: George in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; Alan Felix in Play It Again, Sam; Gerardo in Death and the Maiden; and The Man in the California Premiere of Purgatorio. For the past several years he has led his own theatre company, Mystic Bison Theatre & Dance(TM) which has so far performed exclusively in San Francisco. See www.mysticbison.com. He has also engineered the sound for Barbara A. Brewer's audio blog San Francisco Theatre Scene (TM) at sftheatrescene.blogspot.com. His most recent projects include: starring in and editing the feature film Don't Help Me! (working title); directing Barbara A. Brewer's one-woman shows Flanare and The Grit performed in San Francisco; and participating in almost all of Oakland Public Theater's Richard Wright readings. He was bodybuilder, modern dancer, and choreographer before sustaining disabling whiplash neck injuries in the late 1990's. He has completely recovered. In Washington his artistic focus will initially shift somewhat. He plans to (finally) record a few musical ideas, to (finally) write his film script, and to return to choreography. He will then continue mounting live theatre and acting. In addition to his strictly artistic pursuits, Dr. Carter attends the Georgetown University Law Center part-time J.D. program focusing on intellectual property and entertainment law and practices patent law as a patent agent. He is looking forward to maximizing the interaction among the Harvardwood members in Washington, DC and its surrounding areas. (Photography by Suzanne Bernel.)
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