Staff
Sara Chapman has been executive director of Media Burn since 2009, and has been an integral part of the organization since its founding in 2003. You can catch her online at Media Burn’s biweekly Virtual Talks with Video Activists series on Thursdays. A scholar of early video and television, her article “Guerrilla Television in the Digital Archive” was published in the Journal of Film and Video. She was the producer of the feature-length experimental film, Ghosts in the Machine, which toured internationally. She’s also an avid swimmer and former co-chair of her Masters swim team, the Chicago Smelts.
Senior Archivist Dan Erdman is responsible for the reformatting of Media Burn’s videotape holdings, encompassing a wide variety of obsolete and at-risk formats. He received his M.A. from NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program. He has been involved with media preservation projects at The American Genre Film Archive, The New Museum, Bijou Video, The Explorers Club, Boo-Hooray, and Mercer Media. He has participated in the Audiovisual Preservation Exchange program, traveling to Colombia and Uruguay to both learn from and advise local media conservationists. His book Let’s Go Stag was published by Bloomsbury.
Adam Charles Hart is the curator of the Guerrilla TV Project at the Media Burn Archive. He is the author of the book “Monstrous Forms: Moving Image Horror Across Media” (Oxford University Press, 2019) and the forthcoming books “The Living Camera: The History, Style, and Politics of Handheld Cinematography” and “Raising the Dead: The Work of George A. Romero” (both from Oxford University Press).
Archivist Max Hart is responsible for performing digitization and preservation procedures for legacy magnetic tape media. He assists external clients by advising them on preservation decisions and also works with filmmakers to license footage for reuse. His chapter “An Adult Nightmare: Garbage Pail Kids and the Fear of the Queer Child,” will be published in Horrifying Children: Television, Literature & Popular Culture from 1966 to 1998, York St John University, forthcoming 2023.
Website development by Michael Cannon, Axelerant