Vanessa's Profile

Bio

Hello! I'm Vanessa Bertozzi and I'm an Etsy Admin.

I mainly work with Alison and Tara and Eric B on Etsy's blog http://blog.etsy.com. Though we do lots of other things at Etsy too. Some PR and marketing and event organizing and helping out our fellow-team members.

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 fan cultures. I have a special interest in learning environments, entertainment, and documentary. I also do freelance video, photography, and simplistic web design for friends. I collect people's funny stories. Guilty pleasure: www.cuteoverload.com

Here's my background and all that jazz:
I just finished a grad program at MIT called Comparative Media Studies. My thesis research is about the history of unschooling and participatory media. I did interviews with unschooling families who use and make media. I also co-authored, with my professor Henry Jenkins, a chapter about youth participation in the arts in an anthology due out spring 07, 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 made a video portrait of my brother, Nick who is a cartoonist, with accompanying educational materials. I was a TA for MIT's Terrascope program, an interdisciplinary learning environment for MIT freshmen, interested in the earth sciences and sustainability. I TAed for the radio documentary part of the program. 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.

In tandem with Etsy:
My filmmaking collaborator, Hanna Rose Shell, and I are finishing our short experimental documentary movie about the history of used clothing and immigration. It's called Secondhand (Pepe) (www.secondhandfilm.com) and it focuses on Haitian pepe dealers and turn-of-the-century Jewish rag peddlers.

Female, Born on June 12