The Aronson Awards

Social Justice Journalism & Cartooning with a Conscience

# Advisory Committee

Kelly Anderson's most recent film is My Brooklyn, a documentary about gentrification and the redevelopment of Downtown Brooklyn. My Brooklyn won the Audience Award at the Brooklyn Film Festival, was broadcast on the PBS World series America ReFramed, and had a 3-week sold out run at ReRun Theater through IFP. Her other work includes Never Enough, a documentary about clutter, collecting and Americans’ relationships with their stuff, and Every Mother’s Son, a documentary she made with Tami Gold about mothers whose children have been killed by police officers and who have become national spokespeople on police reform. Every Mother’s Son won the Audience Award at the Tribeca Film Festival, aired on POV, and was nominated for a national Emmy for Directing. Kelly’s other documentaries include Out At Work (also with Tami Gold), which screened at the Sundance Film Festival and was broadcast on HBO. She is the author (with Martin Lucas) of Documentary Voice & Vision: a creative approach to non-fiction media production (Focal Press, 2016). She is a Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Hunter College (CUNY), where teaches undergraduates and in the MFA program in Integrated Media Arts.

Award winning international business journalist Sissel McCarthy is a Distinguished Lecturer and director of the Journalism Program at Hunter College. She has been teaching reporting, multimedia writing and news literacy to undergraduates for more than 12 years at Hunter College, NYU and Emory University. Her areas of expertise include news literacy, broadcast journalism, and news writing and production across all media platforms. Prior to her job in academe, McCarthy spent more than a decade reporting business news for CNN, CNBC and PBS from New York, London, and Atlanta. She anchored CNN International’s flagship business programs, World Business Today and World Business This Week from London. Before joining CNN International, McCarthy worked for CNBC in London as a correspondent and anchor covering international business and politics. She began her career in journalism as a writer and producer for CNN’s Moneyline in New York and won an ACE award in 1992 for the Moneyline special report, “Michael Milkin: Out of Jail Early.” Most recently, she worked for PBS and GPTV, producing, writing and reporting stories from Atlanta for the national PBS business program, Nightly Business Report. Before her career in television news, McCarthy worked on Wall Street where she was vice president of proprietary trading at both Lehman Brothers and Bankers Trust, trading foreign exchange and non-dollar government bonds. McCarthy holds master’s degrees in both Journalism and International Affairs from Columbia University in New York. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in Government and Romance Languages from Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H.

Larry Shore teaches courses on Global Communications; Media Sports & Society; and Internet & Society in the Department of Film & Media Studies at Hunter College. For many years he has regularly team taught a course on South Africa After Apartheid in the Thomas Hunter Honors Program. He is a member of the faculty committee of the Human Rights Program at Roosevelt House. He made a documentary film, together with Tami Gold, RFK in the Land of Apartheid: A Ripple of Hope. The film has been screened widely in the US and South Africa. Larry grew up in South Africa and emigrated to the United States in the 1970’s where he was active in the US Anti-Apartheid Movement. He has an MA in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in Communications from Stanford University. He had the privilege of sharing an office with Jim Aronson when he first came to Hunter and being a part of Jim’s tennis group.

Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga approaches art as a social practice that seeks to establish dialogue in public spaces. Having been born of immigrant parents and grown up between Nicaragua and San Francisco, a strong awareness of inequality and discrimination was established at an early age. Themes such as immigration, discrimination, gentrification and the effects of globalization extend from highly subjective experiences and observations into works that tactically engage others through popular metaphors while maintaining critical perspectives. Ricardo’s work has been exhibited at international venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York Hall of Science; Matadero Madrid, Spain; Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile; National Center for Contemporary Art, St. Petersburg, Russia; Museum of Image and Sound, Sao Paulo, Brazil.