SECONDHAND (PEPE)

Secondhand (Pepe)/project/FILMMAKERS/place/time/people

Shell & Bertozzi after a long shoot in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 2006.

Hanna Rose Shell and Vanessa Bertozzi are a media production team based in Brooklyn, NY, Cambridge, MA and Grand Manan, New Bruswick. Shell & Bertozzi’s collaboration in Secondhand (Pepe), a production of Fabrik Films, draws on their complementary professional and academic backgrounds in documentary filmmaking, visual & oral history, and new media education. They are currently developing an innovative new media-fashion initiative aimed at Haitian and American youth—MicroPepe—to dovetail with their documentary film. Shell & Bertozzi coauthored a photo-essay "Textile Skin" based on Secondhand (Pepe) and just published in Transition Magazine. Shell & Bertozzi started working on Secondhand (Pepe) in 2003. The collaboration grew out of their friendship and mutual interest in thrifting and filmmaking and photography. They met while at college in 1997.

Sound design for the film is by friend Luke Fischbeck (Lucky Dragons).

HANNA ROSE
SHELL

Hanna Rose Shell, a historian, filmmaker and media scholar, is an Assistant Professor in the Program on Science, Technology and Society (STS) at M.I.T.. Shell received an M.A. in American Studies from Yale University in 2002, and a Ph.D. in the History of Science from Harvard in 2007. A Film Study Center Fellow from 2003-2005, she was elected as a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows in 2007, where she is in residence in 2008-2009. Shell's book Hide and Seek: Camouflage and the Media of Reconnaissance is forthcoming from Zone Books in Spring 2010. Related multimedia work has been exhibited in Boston and Los Angeles. Please click here for more information.

VANESSA
BERTOZZI

Vanessa Bertozzi is a Brooklyn-based documentarian specializing in the interplay between culture, media, technology and learning. She received a Masters Degree in Comparative Media Studies from MIT in 2006 and a B.A. in Visual & Environmental Studies from Harvard in 2001. Recent media projects on which she has worked include: Project New Media Literacy sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation, Christopher Lydon's public radio/web program Open Source, Alan Berliner’s Wide Awake, Frontline's Failure to Protect, Showtime's Same Sex America, The Sonic Memorial Project (winner of the Peabody Award, Gracie Award, and Online Journalism Award), and History Unwired at the Venice Biennale. Bertozzi has lectured on new media and learning at MIT. She now works for Etsy, an online marketplace where artists and craftspeople can selling their handmade items. More about Vanessa on her website.

FILMOGRAPHY:
Locomotion in Water (15min; Videre la Scienza Festival of Science Film 07,Anthology Film Archives 06, Cinema Arts Centre 06, Orphans Documentary Film Conference 06, Center for the Arts at SUNY 05, Margaret Mead Film And Video Festival 05, TopKino! 05, Scinema: International Festival of Science Film 05, Lago International Film Festival 05, Naples International Film Festival 05).

Collections (15min, 2005).

Petticoat Lane at the Venice Biennale (40min; “Cities, Architecture and Society” exhibition at the Architecture Biennale 06).
Aqua Kinema (90min; Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie 05).

The Polyvocal Object: An Interactive Multi-media Exhibit (2004; Installed in the permanent gallery of the Harvard Museum of Historical Scientific Instruments).

The Sonic Memorial Project (interactive web piece, SXSW 03, Media that Matters 03, The Smithsonian Institution’s exhibition— September 11: Bearing Witness to History, 32nd International Film Festival Rotterdam).

History Unwired (interactive mobile media project; 2005 Venice Biennale).