Hello! I'm Vanessa Bertozzi and I'm the Program Manager for Etsy Wholesale, a new platform we'll be launching soon. It will be a way for boutique owners and other retailers to connect with makers, designers, and vintage sellers whose items weren't easily found before. I'm very excited to build out a new area of business for our sellers who want their pieces in brick and mortars — and for those pro buyers who want to carry unique work.

Prior to Wholesale, I was on maternity leave. Lucky, my son, really is the cutest baby in the world. Not just saying that cuz I'm his mom. Before that, I was Director of Community and Education at Etsy. I led a team of talented folks to create our Seller Education program, grow our Teams program, amongst other things. I also did outreach to art schools and museums.

Previously, I was the Editorial Director, launching the Etsy Blog http://blog.etsy.com in 2007. In the early days of Etsy, when we all wore a lot of hats, I did a mix of grassroots PR and marketing and community stuff.

I live in Brooklyn and grew up in Providence, RI/Southern Massachusetts. But really, I live as a nerd at the intersection of media, technology and creative culture. I have a special interest in learning and documentary. I used to do a lot of photography and filmmaking but it's hard to find the time these days.

Guilty pleasures: chocolate and more chocolate

Motto to live by: "Too much is never enough." (This was a bumpersticker on my car in high school.)

Here's my background and all that jazz:
I got my Masters at a grad program at MIT called Comparative Media Studies. My thesis research is about the history of unschooling and participatory media. I also co-authored, with my professor Henry Jenkins, a chapter about youth participation in the arts in an anthology called Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America's Cultural Life. I had a research assistantship at MIT for Project New Media Literacies, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, where I developed interactive tools for media literacies K-12. I really loved MIT.

I worked for a summer at Open Source, a public radio show/website with host Christopher Lydon. After college, I'd worked at a small new media company called Picture Projects, where I worked on an interactive documentary called the Sonic Memorial Project. Before that I was a filmmaking major at Harvard. Before that I was a nerdy high school student at Dighton-Rehoboth Regional High who hung out a lot with her art teacher mom.

As a side project, I sell DVDs of the documentary I made with my friend and filmmaking collaborator, Hanna Rose Shell. Secondhand (Pepe) is a short experimental documentary movie about the history of used clothing and diaspora communities. It focuses on Haitian pepe dealers and turn-of-the-century Jewish rag peddlers. It's available for personal viewing on DVD in my shop here on Etsy, but if it's for institutional (library, museum, school) viewing, please contact our distributor ThirdworldNewsreel twn.org. They are a great organization.

(www.secondhandfilm.com)