Board Members

Alle Aufderhaar
Senior Vice President, General Manager, Organic, Inc.

Alle leads the San Francisco office of Organic, Inc, a Top 10 global digital marketing agency.  In her role, she serves as senior strategic client lead and manages all aspects of development and operations for the SF team.  Before joining Organic, Alle served as Senior Partner, Managing Director of Ogilvy & Mather San Francisco.  She has led large-scale relationships with clients like NatWest/RBS, Barclays Global Investors, Yahoo!, the Intercontinental Hotels Group, Sony Electronics, GlaxoSmithKline, Wells Fargo, Williams-Sonoma, Inc, and others.  Prior to working at Ogilvy, Alle spent 11 years with Digitas, Inc, most recently as SVP, Marketing Capability, in the London and San Francisco offices.  She holds a BA from Dartmouth College, where she double majored in English and French.

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Brenda has worked in interactive media since 1976. Before taking on her current position, she chaired the Graduate Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems Labs. Based on her research in gender and technology at Interval Research, in the early 1990s she co-founded a company called Purple Moon to create interactive media for girls. Her books include The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design (1990), Computers as Theatre (1991), Utopian Entrepreneur (2001), and Design Research: Methods and Perspectives (2004). She earned a BA from DePauw University and an MFA and PhD in Theatre from Ohio State University.

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Denise Boston, PH.D.
Core Faculty, Expressive Arts Therapy, California Institute of Integral Studies

Denise Boston is currently on the faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies. She is a theatre artist, psychologist, and expressive arts therapist whose work supports and affirms individuals affected by social justice issues as homelessness, violence, poverty, HIV/AIDS, and substance abuse. She has designed and taught courses in arts program management, cross-cultural psychology, and “flow” psychology; and chaired and presented at numerous higher education conferences and seminars. Denise’s more than 20 years of teaching experience includes faculty positions at Catholic University Metropolitan College in Washington, DC; Coppin State University in Maryland; the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and Marymount University in Virginia. Denise holds a PhD in Counseling Psychology from Walden University.

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Emily Paulos
Managing Director, Center for Digital Storytelling

Emily is a practicing visual artist who grew up in a large family in Iowa. Her MA thesis took the form of a website entitled The Mom Project, which examines issues of family narrative and the use of technology in the art classroom. In addition to her experience assisting University of Iowa faculty and student teachers with the development of multimedia and Electronic Portfolios, Emily taught high school art teacher for five years, specializing in web design, video production, and photography before joining the Center in 2002. She received a BFA in painting and printmaking and completed an MA in Art Education at the University of Iowa, with an emphasis on narrative and technology.

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Erin Egan
Senior Marketing Manager for Windows Phone, Microsoft Corporation

Erin currently resides in Seattle and works for Microsoft, in charge OEM of partner marketing for Windows Phone. Her youthful days growing up in Honolulu gave her a deep appreciation for sunny skies, and she is an avid fan of documentaries and good storytelling. She graduated with honors and Phi Betta Kappa from Lewis & Clark College. After a seven-year career in the aerospace industry and stints living in Toulouse, France, Munich, Germany, and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Erin landed in Boston, where she obtained an MBA at Harvard University and an MA in International Affairs at Tufts University. 

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Jennifer Cobb
Vice President, Marketing and Development, World Affairs Council

Jennifer is Vice President of Marketing and Development for the World Affairs Council. She has worked as a strategic marketing and communications consultant and team member for a variety of entrepreneurial and corporate companies. In addition to her work with a series of venture-backed technology companies, her corporate clients include BEA, Sybase, IDG, Lotus Development and Hewlett-Packard. In the nonprofit arena, Jennifer was the founding director of the Computerworld Smithsonian Awards Program, a co-founder of the Rockwood Leadership Institute, and the founding director of the Haas Jr. Fund’s Flexible Leadership Award program.  In 1998, Jennifer’s book Cybergrace: The Search for God in the Digital World was published. She attended Amherst College and the University of California, Berkeley and holds an MA from Union Theological Seminary.

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Joe Lambert
Executive Director, Center for Digital Storytelling

Born and raised in Texas, Joe has been active in the Bay Area arts community for the last twenty-five years as an arts activist, producer, administrator, teacher, writer, and director. He founded the Center for Digital Storytelling (formerly the San Francisco Digital Media Center) in 1994, with wife Nina Mullen and colleague Dana Atchley. Together they developed a unique computer training and arts program that today is known as the Standard Digital Storytelling Workshop. Prior to his career in the arts, Joe was trained as a community organizer and assisted in numerous local, statewide, and national public policy campaigns on issues of social justice and economic equity. He has a BA in Theater and Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley.

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Robin Willig
Director of External Affairs & Development, Roosevelt Institute

Robin is currently the Director of External Affairs & Development with the Roosevelt Institute in New York City. She has amassed a 20+ year history of working in the development field, specializing in fundraising and communications. As Vice President of External Affairs for the Community Service Society (CSS) of New York—a nonprofit devoted to fighting poverty through a range of service and policy efforts—she created a staff position that is dedicated to seeking out and developing stories of clients served by the organization. Robin has devoted her “non-work” life to the development of personal narratives; she is a published fiction writer and frequently attends and supports New York storytelling venues including The Moth and StoryCorps. She has also provided pro-bono fundraising support for ducts.org, the webzine of personal stories. Robin has a B.A. in Literature and Rhetoric from Binghamton University in New York.

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Stuart Gannes
Independent Technology Consultant

Stuart currently serves as Director of the Earthpledge Foundation in New York, whose ’sustainability’ initiatives highlight the connections between everyday choices, personal well being, and a healthy world. Taking advantage of the increasing availability of powerful, low cost personal computers, Stuart founded Books That Work, which developed award-winning software tools that made it possible for non-professionals to design and visualize projects with 3-D graphics. Following the sale of the company in 1997, Gannes accepted a position as Vice President of Internet Applications for AT&T Labs in Menlo Park, California. In early 2002 Gannes was recruited by Stanford University as the inaugural Director of the Digital Vision Program at the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI). He has a BA from the University of Michigan and an EdM Harvard University.

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