Maria Rodriguez Production and Editorial Advisor

Maria Teresa Rodriguez is a first generation Colombian/Irish American film and video maker living in Philadelphia. Screenings of her most recent independent work, From Here to There/De Aqui a Alla won her a First Place Award for Short Documentary at the XVII International Film Festival of Uruguay. This program was also chosen as one of thirty-two works to be part of The Smithsonian Institution Contemporary Latino Filmmakers Series. The documentary has aired on PBS affiliate WGBH and WYBE. Maria's prior independent films have earned her prestigious screenings and numerous national and international awards.

Maria Teresa also recently completed five half-hour programs on Literature and the Arts for LiteracyLink, a partnership between PBS, Kentucky Educational Television and the National Center on Adult Literacy. She has been an Instructor of film and video at Scribe Video Center since 1995 and has taught at Temple University and The University of the Arts. She is on the Advisory Board of the Philadelphia Independent Film and Video Association (PIFVA). For WYBE Public Television, she produced Through the Lens (1996), a ten hour award-winning series of independent film and video. In addition, she was the 1997-1998 season producer of Conexion Latina, a weekly half-hour show focusing on issues of importance to the Latino community. Maria Teresa is the recipient of a 1996, 1998 and a 2000 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Media Arts Fellowship and most recently a 2001 Pew Fellowship in the Arts.

Sharon Mullally Production and Editorial Advisor

Sharon Mullally began her career with 10 years in staff positions at broadcast television stations in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Since leaving the commercial broadcast industry to pursue documentary work, Sharon has edited several national PBS programs for WHYY-TV 12 in Philadelphia, including The Dinosaurs!, Furniture on the Mend, and Remember When. For her editorial work on Yearbook--The Class of '65, produced by Fox Philadelphia, she received an Emmy Award in 1996. Her most recent editorial work includes I Witness, a one-hour documentary on the anti-abortion violence in Pensacola, Our Food Our Future, a look at community food projects, and Daring to Resist, a beautiful and compelling portrait of three young women who resisted the Holocaust. All three of these programs have been shown on public television.

As Producer/Director, Sharon has just completed Rufus Jones: A Luminous Life, a documentary on a visionary American Quaker. She has also completed New Voices, a documentary on women moving from welfare to work; Peace Theater and Building a Peaceful Community, teaching self-respect and conflict resolution skills to children; Walk With Me, Sisters (winner of the Silver Apple Award from the National Educational Media Network), for women with HIV; and Connecting the Pieces: A City's Response to the AIDS Quilt. Sharon has also maintained an active role as an instructor, teaching media literacy to middle school children in Philadelphia. She has taught editing classes at Scribe Video Center and is on the Advisory Council of the Philadelphia Independent Film/Video Association.

Chip Gagnon Historical Advisor

Chip Gagnon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics, Ithaca College, and a Visiting Research Fellow in the Peace Studies Program, Cornell University. He received his PhD in International Relations from Columbia University. He has been working on the Balkans region since the early 1980s, and has published in such journals as Foreign Affairs, the Journal of Democracy, and International Security on issues related to the wars in Yugoslavia. He spent the academic year 1994-95 in Zagreb and Belgrade and has visited the region -- Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Kosovo, and Albania -- numerous times since then. His current projects include a book that looks at the political roots of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, questioning the focus on ethnic identity that dominates many accounts. Another project is a critical look at US international assistance programs in the Balkans. Chip, his wife, and their two children live in Ithaca, NY. For Chip's website, please click here.

Azra Hromadzic Cultural Advisor

Azra came to the United States in 1996 from the town of Bihac in Bosnia. In 1998, she received a B.A. in cultural anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania. In May of 2001, she completed her Master's Degree coursework in Anthropology also from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently working to complete her Master's thesis "Rape as a War Strategy: Rape as a System of Communication in Bosnia." Currently, she is pursuing a Ph.D. in Anthropology with a focus on culture and conflict at the University of Pennsylvania. Azra's academic and personal works stem from her desire to understand the Bosnian tragedy and the history of conflict in the Balkans, as well as to do comparative, academic analyses of similar tragedies worldwide.

During the spring of 2000 through The School for International Training, Azra spent four months studying peace and conflict in the Middle East, moving between Israel, Palestine, and Jordan. This summer Azra attended the Institute at the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethno-Political Conflict at the University of Pennsylvania, immersing herself in a cross-cultural examination of the social realities and human experiences of ethno-political conflict.

Working papers include: "Rape as a War Strategy: Rape as a System of Communication with the focus on Bosnia." Master's Thesis, which examines the creation and destruction of Bosnian female identities in the context of ethno-political warfare, "Identity and Identification of Refugees." A comparative approach focused on different aspects of identity creation and "Exploring Ethnic Fault lines and Escalations of Conflict Situations: The Role of Leadership, Identity and Coalitions."

Ashok Gangadean, Ph.D. Advisor

As co-founder/co-director of the Global Dialogue Institute, Ashok works to promoting deep-dialogue through intercultural, interreligious understanding and creative collaboration. Ashok Gangadean is Professor of Philosophy at Haverford College (Haverford, PA) where he has taught for the past thirty years. He was the first Director of the Gest Center for Cross-Cultural Study of Religion at Haverford beginning in the late l970's. Throughout his career he has been concerned with testing and clarifying the dynamics of deep dialogue between worlds. One primary concern has been to clarify the universal logos or common ground out of which diverse worldviews are generated and held in mutual relation and interaction. He finds that this primal logos is at the heart of the dynamics of human reason and deep dialogue whenever diverse perspectives engage each other. His book, Meditative Reason: Toward Universal Grammar (Peter Lang, Revisioning Philosophy Series, l993) attempts to open the way to global reason, and a companion volume, Between Worlds: The Emergence of Global Reason (Peter Lang, l997) further opens the way to global philosophy and the dialogical common ground between diverse worlds. He is also the Co-Convenor of the World Commission on Global Consciousness and Spirituality which brings eminent global leaders together in sustained deep dialogue.