SPARK’s leadership team exists to create the scaffolding for Sexualization Protest: Action, Resistance, Knowledge. We are a growing list of thought leaders, progressive organizations, media experts, and policy makers committed to creating the enabling conditions for healthy sexuality by pushing back on media sexualization of girls and young women.  To find out more about how SPARK ignited, click here.

Staff

Dana Edell, PhD. Executive Director, SPARK  Dana is an activist-scholar-artist and has been the executive director of SPARK since May 2011. From 2002-2012, she was co-founder/executive director of viBe Theater Experience.  Since 1998, Dana has produced and co-directed more than 60 plays, 7 CDs of original music, 8 music videos and 3 radio episodes all written and performed by girls. She has over 15 years of experience as a teacher and leader in arts and advocacy programs with teenage girls. Before moving to New York City, she co-founded and directed Inside/Out Performing Arts, a theater-making program for girls affected by the juvenile justice system in San Francisco and worked for three years as a theater artist-in-residence in NYC public elementary and middle schools.She has spoken as an expert on girls’ issues on ABC’s 20/20, Al Jazeera, Fox News, Fox & Friends, BBC and NPR. Dana teaches education, qualitative research methods, and theater and social change courses at New York University and the City University of New York. She has a BA with honors in Classics/Ancient Greek from Brown University, an MFA in Theater Directing from Columbia University and a PhD in Educational Theater from NYU.

 Christin Bowman, SPARK Research Blogger, is a twenthy-something doctoral student in social-personality psychology at The Graduate Center, CUNY (CIty University of New York) and the SPARK Research Blogger.  Bowman received her M.S. in Teaching from Pace University and her B.S. in Biopsychology and Cognitive Sciences from the University of Michigan. As part of the Teach for America program, Bowman spent two years teaching underprivileged high school students in the Bronx, where after assessing her students’ needs to understand sexuality and sexual health better, she developed and implemented a comprehensive sexual education curriculum.

Co-Founders

Jamia Wilson is a feminist media activist, organizer, and storyteller. Jamia is currently Vice President of Programs at the Women’s Media Center where she works on amplifying women’s voices and changing the conversation in the media. She trains women and girls so they are media-ready and media-savvy, exposes sexism in the media, and directs the WMC’s social media strategy. Before joining the Women’s Media Center team, Jamia worked for Young People For the American Way, the Planned Parenthood Action Fund and Planned Parenthood Federation of America where she managed their youth outreach program Vox: Voices for Planned Parenthood.

After working with coalition partners and campus organizations to help bring thousands of students to the historic March for Women’s Lives, Jamia was honored as one of the “Real Hot 100” by the Younger Women’s Taskforce. After growing up as an expatriate in Saudi Arabia, Jamia Wilson graduated from American University in 2002. Jamia received her M.A. in Humanities and Social Thought at NYU, where she focused on research and writing inspired by critical race theory. Her words and works have been featured in GOOD Magazine,  CBS News, Alternet, GRIT TV,  The Today Show, Fox.com,  and more.

Julie Burton is the President of The Women’s Media Center.  The Women’s Media Center, founded by Jane Fonda, Robin Morgan, and Gloria Steinem, has the goal of making women visible and powerful in media.  The Women’s Media Center is beginning to create a level playing field for women and girls in media through our monitoring, training, original content, and activism.  Julie served as the youngest Chief Executive Officer of a national pro-choice political action committee, Voters For Choice, where she helped elect and train hundreds of pro-choice candidates at the Federal and State levels. She co-founded and was the founding executive director of Choice USA, a national organization focused on developing the next generation of activists and leaders, expanding voter registration, and countering right wing efforts to limit women’s reproductive freedom.  Julie also created the Women’s Council of People For the American Way and developed and ran Project Kid Smart to promote policies and political efforts for voluntary preschool education for all American children. Her international work has included climate change work for US Climate Action Network at the G-20 and for the Bank Information Center.  Early in her career, she worked with pioneering legal and policy activists at the National Women’s Law Center.

Lyn Mikel Brown, Ed.D. is a community activist, professor, and SPARK co-founder.  She is co-author, with Carol Gilligan, of Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girl’s Development, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year that helped spark an international debate the lives of girls and redefined our understanding of female development.  Lyn has written four other books in which she investigates the relationship between girls’ anger and social class, examines the cultural phenomenon of “girlfighting,” and critiques the messages that media and marketers direct at both girls and boys.  Her most recent work focuses on scaffolding girls’ resistance and activism.  She co-founded Hardy Girls Healthy Women, a nonprofit that educates about and supports girls as social change agents, and in collaboration with HGHW’s Girls Advisory Board, created Powered By Girl (PBG), a media activism website for teen girls. Lyn received her doctorate from Harvard University in Human Development and Psychology and was a founding member of the Harvard Project on Women’s Psychology and Girl’s Development.  She is Professor of Education at Colby College in Maine. She’s super proud that her daughter, Maya, is a SPARKTeam blogger.