Project Advisors

  • Anna Cronin

    Anna Cronin joined Channel 4 in April 2011 in the newly-created role of Commissioning Editor: Convergent Formats. Responsible for developing future formats for the next generation of television, Anna is focused on exploring the creative potential of connected TVs.

    Obsessed with experimenting, Anna has been causing chaos combining the worlds of television and technology for the last 12 years. Prior to joining Channel 4, Anna was the Development Associate at ITV Studios Digital Productions. Responsible for creative, content & business development for ITV’s brands in a digital environment. Anna worked on many of ITV’s flagship programmes including Coronation Street, I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here and Dancing on Ice where she developed interactive experiences and products across a range of emerging platforms.

    Photo of Anna Cronin, Head of Convergent Formats, Channel 4
    @AnnaCronin
  • Bill Thompson, Head of Partnership Development, BBC Archive Development Group

    Bill Thompson has been working in, on and around the Internet since 1984 and spends his time thinking, writing and speaking about the ways digital technologies are changing our world. A well-known technology journalist, he is Head of Partnership Development in the BBC's Archive Development Group, building relationships with museums, galleries and other institutions around ways to make archive material more accessible, and a Visiting Professor at the Royal College of Art.

    Bill appears weekly on Click on BBC World Service radio, writes a monthly column for Focus magazine and is an advisor to a range of arts and cultural organisations on their digital strategies. He is a member of the board of Writers' Centre Norwich and of the Collections Trust, and was for many years a Trustee of the Cambridge Film Trust. He built and manages the Working for an MP website.

    During the 1990's Bill was Internet Ambassador for PIPEX, the UK's first commercial ISP where he developed websites for Comic Relief, the Edinburgh Fringe and Anne Campbell MP, before moving to Guardian Newspapers as head of new media. He established the paper's first website in 1994 and was responsible for many online projects including Eurosoccer.com in 1996.

    Biog Photo of Bill Thompson, BBC
    @billt
  • Catherine Catton, Senior Commissioning Editor, UKTV

    With over ten years’ experience in TV, including marketing, brand development and running channels, Catherine is currently senior commissioning editor for Factual and Features at UKTV. She has been responsible for a strong slate of features programming across the channels at UKTV including returning formats such asMy Flatpack HomeandNick Knowles’ Original Featuresas well as food series such asThe Roux Scholarship 2013andHairy Bikers’ Mississippi Adventure.For Factual, Catherine was responsible for Find My Past, winner of a Broadcast Digital Award and the UK’s first Factual product placement deal. She has also commissioned a number of films focusing on the 1940s and 1960s including WAGs of ’66, Arctic Convoysand After the War was Won, as well as two series of David Attenborough’s Natural Curiosities.

    Catherine began her career in the art market, before moving into marketing and working in Factual Brand development at BBC Worldwide.  In 2003 she joined UKTV to launch factual channels, then becoming Head of UKTV Style and UKTV Gardens, driving growth for both channels. In 2008 she completed her MBA and sought a move into commissioning, becoming Senior Commissioning Editor in 2011.

    Photo of Catherine Catton, Senior Commissioning Editor, UKTV
  • Daniel Burwen, Creative Director, Cognito Comics

    Daniel Burwen is a storyteller working at the intersection of art and technology. Since 2001, Daniel has worked across a variety of creative industries from Design to Console Gaming (EA, Activision), to Interactive Media (Disney Imagineering).

    Daniel is currently Creative Director at Cognito Comics. Cognito recently shipped CIA : Operation Ajax, an award winning revolutionary 210 page interactive graphic novel for the iPad. Daniel is an international speaker on interactive storytelling, and has presented at venues such as SXSW, San Diego Comicon, Culture Tech, Ambulante, and IDFA.

    Photo of Daniel Burwen, Creative Director, Cognito Comics
    @DanielBurwen
  • James Richards, Director, Chromatrope

    James Richards is Director of Chromatrope, a multiplatform consultancy with a particular interest in strategy, innovation and special projects. James was previously a development executive for the BBC where he set up and ran both the Vision Multiplatform Product Development and Learning Development teams. He is interested in the creative applications of technology and the development of new narrative forms as a way to reach new or hard to reach audiences. James has produced projects on behalf of the BBC for TV, radio, online, interactive TV and pervasive media platforms.

    @kidhelios
  • James Touzel, Partner, TLT LLP

    James is head of the Technology & Media Group at UK law firm TLT. He has been with TLT for over 14 years, throughout that time working with established and early-stage technology and media organisations. He is known for his work with digital media and mobile telecoms businesses, covering social networking, location based services and new media collaborations, where he advises on the contractual, intellectual property and privacy issues. He also deals with technology development and licensing arrangements, IT procurements and managed service solutions. James is actively involved in the development of early-stage media businesses and the related support networks. He is a trustee of Watershed Arts Trust Limited and non-executive chair of iShed CIC, who have a mission to pioneer innovation and new technologies in the creative industries. He is also a member of Science City Bristol.

  • Katrina Dodd, Senior Consultant, Contagious Communications

    As a consultant and writer at Contagious, Katrina has worked on diverse projects for BBC Worldwide, Universal Music, Louis Vuitton and Diageo while also contributing to the company’s quarterly magazine, and delivering trend briefings and presentations.  She was the launch editor of Contagious FEED, a bespoke intelligence service delivering targeted news and insight on technology, consumer culture and marketing innovation to a wide range of agency and brand clients. Katrina has been writing and reporting on advertising and creativity since 1996, but her longstanding obsession with music videos now co-exists with a fascination for the impact of digital tech on education, the weird psychology of retail, and the deft and elegant use of available media to make things better.

    Photo of Katrina Dodd, Senior Consultant, Contagious Communications
    @konfectious
  • Kenton O'Hara, Senior Researcher, Microsoft

    Kenton O'Hara is Senior Researcher in the Socio Digital Systems Group at Microsoft Research in Cambridge where he is interested in social and behavioural practices of tangible and embodied interaction with pervasive technology. He has looked at a wide range of technologies applications in public settings, including crowd based games with large displays, location based experiences, mediascape authoring, cross media alternate reality games, interactive tabletops and collaborative jukeboxes.

    Kenton has authored over 60 publications and two books on public displays and collaborative music consumption. He has previously worked at at CSIRO in Australia as Director of the HxI Initiative, HP Labs, Rank Xerox EuroPARC and the Appliance Studio. He has worked on numerous award winning projects including the BBC's BAFTA and Royal Television Society award winning "Coast" location based experience.

    Kenton O'Hara
  • Mandy Rose, Director, Digital Cultures Research Centre, UWE Bristol

    Mandy Rose has been involved with participatory and interactive media for twenty years. Now Senior Research Fellow at the Digital Cultures Research Centre, University of the West of England, Bristol; her practice-based research looks at the intersection between documentary and networked culture. 

    She has been responsible for award-winning projects across TV and New Media. She co-founded and produced the ground-breaking Video Nation project for BBC 2 (1994-2000). She Executive Produced ‘Voices’; a pan-BBC investigation of language, accent, and dialect in the UK (Webby nominated), the Capture Wales digital storytelling project (BAFTA Cymru), and ‘My Science Fiction Life’, a web-based collective biography of science fiction fans for BBC Four (Webby Honoree). Mandy’s work as a documentary director includes Hilda at Darleeling for Channel Four and Meeting the Masai Mob for BBC2. 

    Mandy has written for books and publications including the New Statesman and The Independent. She speaks, teaches and curates on emergent documentary in the UK and internationally. Mandy blogs at CollabDocs and is a contributing editor to i-Docs.

    Photo of Mandy Rose
    @CollabDocs
  • Mark Cosgrove, Head of Programme, Watershed

    Mark Cosgrove has worked in independent film exhibition for over 20 years. He is currently Head of Programme at Watershed in Bristol. Mark has curated and toured film seasons on amongst other subjects New European Cinema, he has written about the issues relating to independent exhibition, served on the Europa Cinemas Jury at Cannes, Berlin and Venice Film Festivals and picked up the Europa Cinemas Entrepreneur of the year in 2010. Over recent years, he has worked with musicians on live music performances to silent film including Adrian Utley's (Portishead) and Will Gregory's (Goldfrapp) new score to The Passion of Joan of Arc and co-curated Filmic, a new festival dedicated to the various creative connections across music and film. He is also Artistic Director of Encounters Short Film and Animation Festival (encounters-festival.org.uk).

    Photo of Mark Cosgrove, Head of Programme, Watershed
    @msc45
  • Nicole Yershon, Director of Innovative Solutions, Ogilvy

    Nicole Yershon began her career in advertising 25 years ago at Simons Palmer and GGT, two of London's most renowned creative agencies. In 2000, she joined Ogilvy London where she now works as the Director of Innovative Solutions. In her first four years at Ogilvy she overhauled the agency's broadcast and video capabilities, taking them from analogue to digital, with the creation of RedWorks Broadcast. Consolidated in 2007 into the Ogilvy Digital Innovation Lab (part of a worldwide network), the agency's innovation activities have seen Nicole build partnerships between industries and across media channels to fuel unprecedented creative campaigns, and educate, both within the agency and beyond, speaking at global conferences and building clients Labs of their own.

    @nicoleyershon
  • Paula Le Dieu, Digital Maker, Mozilla

    Paula has worked with many media and cultural organisations such as the BFI, BBC, Guardian, Fairfax and Ofcom as well as international digital activism and film making communities. Her experience spans making digital products & experiences, shaping the future of public service media, shaping the role of archives in the digital age and leading international communities of volunteers. She also sits on the executive boards of Sheffield's Doc/Fest and the Open Knowledge Foundation. Most recently Paula was the Digital Director at the BFI. Paula is currently working with the Mozilla Foundation on their Webmaker programme in the UK as well as continuing to develop her own projects.

    Photo of Paula Le Dieu, Digital Maker, Mozilla
    @archiville
  • Sandra Gaudenzi, Creative Director, i-Docs

    Sandra Gaudenzi started her career as a television producer, she then moved in interactive television, and has been teaching interactive media theory at the London College of Communication (University of the Arts London) since 1999. Her research interests include interactive documentary, transmedia storytelling, locative experiences and games for change. Sandra is one of the initiators and conveners of i-Docs 2011 and 2012, a conference totally dedicated to interactive documentaries, and is creative director of  i-Docs.org. She is also the author of www.interactivedocumentary.net, a website that she started in 2009 in order to document her own experience of doing a PhD in Goldsmiths (University of London). Her PhD - The Living Documentary: from representing reality to co-creating reality in digital interactive documentary – is now finished and she is looking forward to act as a mentor and adviser in new challenging interactive factual projects.

    Photo of Sandra Gaudenzi, Creative Director, i-docs
    @SGaudenzi