Here you will find a list of the current CM staff/faculty as well as courses they regularly teach at SPS.
Nina Hien:
Dr. Nina Hien is a cultural anthropologist specializing in visual and media cultures. Her doctorate comes from Cornell University with a dissertation based on ethnographic research in Ho Chi Minh City that explored the ways Vietnamese people, and political and media institutions use photographic images. She also has an M.A. in print journalism from The University of Missouri-Columbia, an M.A. in Anthropology from The New School for Social Research and a B.A. in English Literature from SUNY at Stony Brook. Beyond teaching at SPS (since 2012), she has taught at NYU and Cornell. She also has practical experience working as a journalist and a photographer, and for 10 years, she owned and managed a restaurant in Ithaca, NY.
The courses I commonly teach at SPS are:
CM 309 Communication and Cultural Change
CM 499 Senior Capstone: From Capstone to Career
CM 308 The Mediated City
CM 330 Frameworks of Photography (forthcoming)
COM 110 Digital Literacy
Sarah Ruth Jacobs:
Dr. Sarah Ruth Jacobs received her doctorate in American literature and new media from the CUNY Graduate Center and her MFA in creative writing from the New School. She teaches Writing for Digital Media at SPS. Her writing and research interests include innovative pedagogies, the demographics of American media consumption and representation, the history of media, and how media compete and cooperate with one another. She is one of the founding members of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, andInsideHigherEd. She currently contributes to articles for HigherEdJobs.com. She has worked in book publishing and editing for two years and is the recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, Poets House, Poets & Writers, and the Leon Levy Center for Biography.
Dino Sossi:
I have had the great pleasure of teaching at CUNY since 2018. I have taught Adolescent Education, Cognition & Educational Technology, Corporate Communication, Social Media, and Writing for Digital Media at SPS and Hunter College.
In terms of my professional work, I have produced media for AOL, CBS newsmagazine “60 Minutes,” CNN, the New York Times, the United Nations, and Viacom’s vh1. My documentary films have screened at festivals in New York and Los Angeles, academic institutions such as Berkeley, Cambridge, Columbia, Harvard, Oxford, and Pennsylvania, as well as the United Nations headquarters in New York. My work has been broadcast on CBC, CTV, Discovery USA, Globe & Mail, IFC, Life, MTV Canada, MuchMoreMusic, One, Pridevision, and PrimeTV. My digital storytelling has been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
I was previously a digital media consultant at Columbia. I also taught digital storytelling at Adelphi University as well as a short workshop at Harvard. In the tri-state area, I have taught at Adelphi, Columbia, CUNY, Hunter College, NYU, OCAD, The College of New Jersey, and the University of Toronto.
In terms of academic training, I earned a Doctorate, Master of Arts, and Master of Education in Instructional Technology and Media at Columbia University. I earned first class honors for my Master of Philosophy thesis at the University of Cambridge where I also performed with the Footlights comedy troupe. No joke! I previously studied at Columbia Law School’s School Law Institute and the Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Programme. I was previously a research fellow and affiliate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
I have performed storytelling at the Moth StorySLAM in New York as well as across Toronto. I have performed stand up in Boston, Calgary, Montreal, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Shanghai, and Toronto. I was selected to perform standup at the Calgary Comedy Festival.For more information, please visit www.DinoSossi.com or www.TheHomeFilm.com.
