Valery Alzaga (MEX) 2006
Valery has been active with the Youth Organizing Institute since its inception. She is a labor organizer, an immigrant and indigenous rights advocate and a social justice activist. She has worked for 8 years in the Justice for Janitors Campaign in the U.S. and recently coordinated the London cleaners campaign for a living wage. She is currently working as a global organizing coordinator throughout Europe focusing on low-income workers in the service sector. Valery has extensive training and community organizing experience with political and social campaigns in the U.S., Mexico and Europe. She studied international relations and development at the University of Denver and the Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Internazionali in Rome. She currently resides in Hamburg, Germany.

Branka Curcic (SRB) 2008
Branka Curcic works as an editor in the Infocentre department at kuda.org, New Media Center from Novi Sad in Serbia (www.kuda.org) and as coeditor in the publishing department of the New Media Center, called "kuda.read". Her work focuses on examining critical approaches towards new media culture, technologies, new cultural relations, contemporary artistic practice and the social realm. At the moment, she is attending post-graduate studies on Art and Media Theory at the University of Arts in Belgrade. She is been one of the researches in the "Global Scan on Open (Collaborative) Content Project" initiated by Information Program of Open Society Institute, Budapest, Hungary, which deals with mapping open content project all over the world. She is collaborator, correspondent in the project "Transform" of the European Institute for the Progressive Cultural Policies, Vienna (www.eipcp.net). She's been involved in project "Mapping Rightwing Exstremism" gathering youth activists, artists and movie directors from Serbia and Germany collaborating on this theme. She is one of the coordinators of the Youth Center project in Novi Sad, an alternative youth center dedicated to culture, politics and activism of young practitioners in Serbia (www.ck13.org).

Janna Graham (UK) 2007 | 2008
Janna Graham is a writer, educator and organizer. She worked for many years at the Art Gallery of Ontario, developing projects with artists and community activists. Experimenting with modes of improvisation, hospitality and cross-cultural negotiation, while there she produced projects including a ballet on skateboards, a gallery improv theatre troupe, a temporary arctic media lab, a rez house drop-in and a series of large scale performances on urban issues. She has worked on freelance writing, curating and educational projects with 16 Beaver Group; Ultra-red; Project Art Centre, Dublin; the Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff; Mercer Union, Art Metropole, Toronto; Whitechapel Art Gallery London; Igloolik Isuma/Artcirq, Igloolik; Debajehmujig Theatre, Wikwemikong, among others. She has written for the Journal of Visual Cultures, the Journal of Cultural Studies, Daniel Arnaud Gallery, FUSE Magazine and Feedback and is currently a Visiting Tutor and Phd Candidate at Goldsmiths College.

Valeria Graziano (IT) 2007 | 2008
Valeria Graziano is currently a visiting tutor and Phd candidate in Curatorial/Knowledge at Goldsmiths College, University of London and a member of the Commitee for Radical Diplomacy. She is an organizer, cultural mediator, artist, and theorist, with a taste for collaborative endeavours. Her work is concerned primarily with "instituent practices" - those relational and affective artistic projects that strategically inhabit processes of social transformation. She has been involved in a number of interventions whose implications extend at the crossroad of artistic media, knowledge production and play. Among others, she developed projects for the Pistoletto Foundation, IT; Van Abbemuseum, Netherlands; Atelier Marionbourg, Norway; Area10, London; House Gallery, London; World Summit on Information Society (WSIS),Tunis; 51.Venice Biennale; Human Rights Nights Film Festival, Bologna; Turin -UNESCO World Book Capital, Italy-. Her texts have been published in Italy, Spain and UK.

Susanne Lang (D) 2006 | 2007 | 2008
Coming from a grass root youth organizing background in East Germany, Susanne has been active in small town communities since 1991, trying to introduce a notion of democracy in regions that suffered strongly from the influence of neo-right-winged groups. Together with colleagues and friends she organized many campaigns against the raise of neo-fascist ideologies and organizations. One of the campaigns, "Emergency Entrance" was awarded with the Aachener Peace Award in 2000. For the last four years Susanne has been working with Florian Schneider on setting up a network of active young people from all over Europe, to struggle against xenophobia and exclusion with the means of new media. She completed her university degree in 2001 at the Department of Psychology, Humboldt-University of Berlin. She is an organizational psychologist, media consultant and festival producer who brings together new media, philosophy and activist engagement (http://neuro.kein.org, http://borderlineacademy.org).

Florian Schneider (D) 2006 | 2007
Florian Schneider is a filmmaker, writer and developer in the fields of new media, networking and open source technologies. In his work he focusses on bordercrossings between mainstream and independent media, art and activism, theory and technology. As a filmmaker he directed several award-winning documentaries and designed and realized two theme-evenings for the german-french tv station arte on the topics of migration and activism. As a writer he has worked for major german newspapers and magazines such as Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Florian is also one of the initiators of the KEIN MENSCH IST ILLEGAL (no one is illegal) campaign at documentaX and subsequent projects such as the "noborder network". He founded, designed and supported countless online-projects, such as the european internet platform D-A-S-H and the online-network KEIN.ORG. He is the director of the new media festivals MAKEWORLD (2001), NEURO (2004) and works currently as the director of the multimedia performance project "DICTIONARY OF WAR". He has lectured at universities, museums, and conferences worldwide.

Scott Silber (USA) 2007 | 2008
Since 1994, Scott Silber has worked as a multi-lingual organizer in social, environmental, and economic justice campaigns throughout the US and Latin America. His labor union organizing efforts have spanned dozens of cities among immigrant rights and industrial organizing campaigns with workers in the Justice for Janitors campaign, as well as in public & social service, hospitals, construction sites, slaughterhouses, airports, office buildings, and collective farms. He is the co-founder and Director of Converge, a Colorado-based non-profit organization creating local models of community-rooted social, environmental, and economic justice reference points independent of corporate culture or neo-colonial control, and interconnecting them to links in a global chain of similar, community-based efforts. He aims to add his human rights campaign experiences as a student, community, and labor organizer in solidarity with the most exploited or economically impoverished regions --from American Indian communities, to landless Brazilian farm workers-- to the international solution for a survivable and sustainable human evolution. Currently, he is developing a PhD program researching the contempory starvation of the body as well as the soul, and the educational role of ancient indigenous spiritual wisdom & music for the modern global networks uniting to heal and feed that which hungers most.

Dont Rhine (USA) 2007
Dont Rhine is co-founded the art organization Ultra-red in 1994. With members in North America and Europe, Ultra-red include artists, researchers and organizers from different social movements including the struggles of migration, anti-racism, participatory development, and HIV/AIDS. Rhine has participated in many Ultra-red projects including the AIDS activist project SILENT|LISTEN (2005 - 2006) and BLOK70, a two-year investigation of changes in migrant politics in ex-Yugoslavia (2004 - 2005). His work as an artist, writer and teacher seeks to develop an art practice informed by conceptual art and popular education. As a sound artist and composer, Rhine has contributed to Ultra-red's record releases for labels like Mille Plateaux (Germany), FatCat (UK), Comatonse (Japan), Beta Bodega (US) as well as Ultra-red's own fair-use online label, Public Record (www.publicrec.org). Rhine has worked with various social movements including ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), Clean Needles Now (harm reduction), and Pride at Work/AFL-CIO (queer labour). Most recently, Rhine has joined the Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project as a community organizer based in Los Angeles.

Peter Wagenknecht (D) 2007 | 2008
Peter Wagenknecht (Germany) works for 15 years in political education. Together with colleagues he founded in 1998 the "Bildungsteam Berlin-Brandenburg", an independent organisation dedicated to educate and train youth in topics as non-violent conflict resolution, intercultural learning, gender awareness and participatory democratic culture. Related to these topics, the team also offers counselling, advanced trainings, and coachings to multipliers. Peter completed his university degree in 2002 at the Political and Social Science Department, Humboldt-University of Berlin.

Jade Jossen (IT/CH) 2006 | 2007 | 2008
Jade Jossen is Project Coordinator and Assistant Director at CCSDD. She graduated in 2000 at New York University - Interactive Telecommunications Program, Tisch School of the Arts with an MA in New Media Studies. She is also a Certified Music Together teacher and Center Director and currently manages the daily operation of an Early Childhood Music Education Center (www.musictogether.it) with 200 registered families. Her research focuses on the use of technology for social and sustainable causes primarily in developing countries. During her graduate studies she first started working with the Downtown Community Television of New York (www.dctvny.org) as a production assistant and web consultant. There she increased her passion for grass roots media projects and enhanced her belief that expanding public access to the electronic media arts invigorates our national's democracy. Practically she was able to serve individuals who could not otherwise afford a media arts education by introducing members of the local community to the basics of electronic media. Later she worked as a Community Manager for an online teenage girl interactive magazine of 3.2 million users (www.gURL.com) handling all community activities from discussion boards to health education chat rooms and devising strategies to create remote interaction among teen girls all around the world.