The Brown Institute at Columbia is pleased to announce three fellows for 2014-2015. Each has a very different kind of engagement with narrative – from new experiments in longform storytelling, to the development of journalistic technology, to finding story by tracing a black line on a white wall.
Jennifer 8. Lee is a journalist and entrepreneur. She is co-founder of a literary studio called Plympton, which focuses on publishing serialized fiction for digital reading. Its mobile reading app, Rooster, launched in March of 2014. She serves on the boards of the Center for Public Integrity, Hacks/Hackers, the Asian American Writers Workshop, Nieman Foundation, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Committee. Jenny was a reporter at the New York Times for nine years and is the author of “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles,” a book documenting the history of Chinese food in America that was #26 on NYT bestseller list. She also produced “The Search for General Tso,” a documentary which premiered at the 2014 TriBeCa Film Festival. She is a cofounder of Newsdiffs and Spark Camp.
Aram Chung joins us from a Google Journalism Fellowship at IRE (Investigative Reporters and Editors) where she explored ways to apply graph database techniques to investigative reporting and contributed to DocumentCloud, IRE’s online document management platform. Aram is a 2014 graduate from the dual Master of Science degree program between Columbia’s School of Journalism and the Department of Computer Science. During her fellowship period, Aram will create a graphic, interactive textbook explaining computational methods in terms of journalistic applications, helping journalists and students both select approaches for their stories as well as dig deeper into the underlying metaphors and abstrations motivating their design.
Shantell Martin draws – black ink on white surfaces. Her illustrations transform everything from walls, found objects, sneakers and even faces into a visual narrative. Shantell’s work is a meditation of lines; a language of characters, creatures and messages that invite her viewers to share a role in her creative process. Her creations bridge fine art, commercial and the everyday experience. Martin has been featured on the Jimmy Kimmel Show, the cover of the New York Times Home Section, and Creative Review Magazine. She was named French Glamour’s New York’s “coolest it girl” in 2011 and her collaboration with fashion brand Suno was featured in Vogue in 2013. She regularly creates live digital drawings at conferences, musical performances, and museums including MoMA.