America 24/7 | About Us

America 24/7 Series Staff

Administrative
Katya Able, Operations Director
Gina Privitere, Communications Director
Lael Weyenberg, Partnership Director
Chuck Gathard, Technology Director
Julio Garcia, Content Mangement Director
Kim Shannon, Photographer Relations Director
David Carrier, Publicity Director
Josh Haner, Photography and Technology Coordinator
Annie Polk, Publicity Manager
John McAlester, Website Manager
Alex Notides, Office Manager
Rita Dulebohn, Accounting

Design
Brad Zucroff, Creative Director
Karen Mullarkey, Photography Director
C. Thomas Hardin, Photography Director
Judy Zimola, Production Manager
David Simoni, Production Designer
Mary Dias, Production Designer
Heidi Madison, Associate Picture Editor
Don McCartney, Production Designer
Diane Dempsey Murray, Production Designer
Jan Rogers, Associate Picture Editor
Bill Shore, Production Designer
Peter Truskier, Workflow Consultant
Jim Birkenseer, Workflow Consultant

Editorial
Maggie Canon, Managing Editor
Curt Sanburn, Senior Editor
Sean Kelly, Seior Editor
Teresa L. Trego, Production Editor
Lea Aschkenas, Writer
Olivia Boler, Writer
Korey Capozza, Writer
Beverly Hanly, Writer
Bridgett Novak, Writer
Alison Owings, Writer
Fred Raker, Writer
Joe Wolff, Writer
Elise O'Keefe, Copy Chief
Daisy Hernandez, Copy Editor
Jennifer Wolfe, Copy Editor

Katya Able, Operations Director
Katya Able has had a diverse career bringing order to chaotic environments. She has negotiated barter deals with heads of former communist mining and raw materials plants in Russia, Ukraine and Bulgaria and led groups of technology, operational and production teams in the execution of worldwide photojournalistic events. She has held a variety of leadership positions in 24 Hours in Cyberspace, One Digital Day and Planet Project. Katya is currently the Vice President, Business Strategy and Operations of Against All Odds Productions and the Operations Director for 24/7 Media.

Lea Aschkenas, Writer
Lea Aschkenas, a writer and traveler, has written for The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, Outside, salon.com and the books, Two in the Wild, The Unsavvy Traveler, Travelers' Tales Central America, and Travelers' Tales Cuba. For the past two years, she has been teaching poetry to elementary school children through the California Poets in the Schools program. For seven months in 2000 and 2001, she lived, wrote, and traveled in Cuba and is currently at work on a memoir entitled, Es Cuba: Life and Love on an Illegal Island.

Olivia Boler, Writer
Olivia Boler earned her master's degree in Creative Writing from the University of California at Davis. Her first novel, Year of the Smoke Girl (Dry Bones Press, Inc. 2000), was a Booklist bestseller. Poet and activist Gary Snyder describes Smoke Girl as a "dense weave in the cross-cultural multi-racial world of complex, educated hip contemporary coast-to-coast America...It is a fine first novel, rich in paradox and detail." Her freelance work has been published in Poets & Writers, The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, ForeWord, and Facets Magazine, among others. In addition, she is an associate editor of The Noe Valley Voice. A recipient of grants from the Ragdale Foundation and the Vermont Studio Center, Olivia is currently working on a new novel, a memoir, and various screenplays. She lives in her native San Francisco.

Daisy Hernandez, Copy Editor
Daisy Hernández is the co-editor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism (Seal Press, 2002), a collection of 28 personal and political essays. A former columnist with Ms. magazine, she's reported for The New York Times, Newsday, and Colorlines. A proud native of New Jersey, Daisy moved West in 2003 and now resides in San Francisco.

John McAlester, Website Manager
After graduating with a degree in creative writing from the University of Colorado in May 2002 John moved to San Francisco in order to take advantage of the numerous employment opportunities for writers in the post-dot-com bay area. In eight short months he stumbled through several survival level jobs and miraculously found himself with the America 24/7 team. He is currently working on his first novel and teaching himself the ins-and-outs of web site mastery.

Karen Mullarkey, Photography Director
Karen Mullarkey began her career in photography when she was working at Life Magazine in the mid-sixties. Here under the tutelage of the Director of Photography, she worked as the onsite producer for Life's coverage of Apollo Space Program. She has directed the photography departments at Rolling Stone Magazine, Sports Illustrated and Newsweek where she was the first woman to head the photography department at any of the major news magazines. Mullarkey has produced and directed a series of HDTV documentaries and in 1995 began working on the Internet when she was the director of assignments and photography for the groundbreaking project, 24 Hours in Cyperspace. In 1999, she became the Vice President of Creative/Editor in Chief of Zing.com an online consumer photography site. She has recently served as a photographic consultant for Designer Roger Black; the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Ft. Worth, Texas and the National Constitution Center due to open in Philadelphia in 2003.

Elise O'Keefe, Copy Chief
Elise O'Keefe is a freelance proofreader, copyeditor and writer for magazines, nonprofits, university presses, publishing houses, startups and corporations. She began her career as an ESL teacher in Asia and, upon returning to the States, taught art at museum schools as well as in inner-city public high schools through grant programs. She resides in Oakland, California. An oil painter who paints in the Old Masters-style, she can be found in her converted-garage studio painting and listening to very loud music.

Annie Polk, Publicity Manager
America 24/7 is Annie's first major book project. Born in El Paso, Texas and raised in Santa Fe, New Mexico, her connection to the art world started early. She has worked with both the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and SITE Santa Fe in Santa Fe and at the Musee National De La Cooperation Franco-Americain in Blerancourt, France. Annie's work with photography began at Civilization Magazine, New York and most recently Annie served as the assistant to the President of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. After gaining a proficiency in Spanish while living on Spain's northern coast, Annie landed in San Francisco where she enjoys the mild weather, ceramics, and drinks with little umbrellas.

Curt Sanburn, Senior Editor
Early in his career, Massachusetts-born Curt Sanburn was an editor at Gentlemen's Quarterly and Harper's Bazaar magazines, and a reporter at Life magazine. More recently, in Hawaii, Sanburn's involvement in environmental politics led to a three-year stint as managing editor of the influential Honolulu Weekly newspaper. Over the past 20 years, Sanburn has been an editor/writer on several award-winning photojournalism book projects, including A Day in the Life of Hawaii (1983), A Day in the Life of America (1986), A Day in the Life of the Soviet Union (1987), Jews in America (1989) and A Day in the Life of Hollywood (1992). Sanburn now lives in San Francisco.

Kim Shannon, Photographer Relations Director
Kim began working with Rick Smolan in 2000 as the Web Producer on the Planet Project-the largest global real-time Internet poll ever taken of the human race reaching 1.26 million people in 241 countries. Kim also spent over three years in Colorado directing and producing videos and interactive educational programs. She wrote and produced promotional videos for the INVST (International and National Volunteer Service Training) Program, and for the Boulder Senior Citizens Awards Program where she directed middle school children who interviewed senior citizens about their lives and accomplishments. One of Kim's favorite past times is teaching and being a mentor for young minds. Creating a platform for self-expression, she started "KIDVERSATIONS: Conversations with Kids" a summer camp and after-school program where children were empowered to create their own television shows both in front of and behind the camera.

David Simoni, Production Designer
David Simoni's personal and professional interests come together in his passion for digital photography and all things book related. Currently, he teaches classes on digital photography and eBay through the Learning Annex in San Francisco. Other hats he wears include: Mac Consultant, Photoshop and InDesign Teacher & Tutor and Freelance Desktop Publisher. An early adopter of Adobe InDesign, David is also a freelance production artist. His career path has taken him from Kinkos to MacUser Magazine to his present job at America 24/7.

Jennifer Wolfe, Copy Editor
Jennifer Wolfe has been a copy editor and proofreader for a variety of Bay Area publications since 1992. She is also an exhibiting jewelry artist who has lent her editing skills to the Bay Area Metals Arts Guild and the Society of North American Goldsmiths. Jennifer has lived in Vienna, Grenoble, and Prague and continues to travel to indulge an insatiable curiosity about her world. Her love of visual, written, and spoken language makes her an ideal member of the America 24/7 team.

Brad Zucroff, Creative Director
Brad has a broad background of over 25 years experience in journalism, photojournalism, content creation and editing, high-end publication concept and design, branding and brand management, user interface, information architecture, workflow analysis and design, and interactive digital design. As a Principal Consultant and Creative Director for the Global Content Management practice of Price Waterhouse Management Consulting's Entertainment, Media, and Communications group, Brad worked on projects for clients such as Sony Pictures Entertainment's Digital Studio, 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Datacast, Disney Studios' Televentures group, and France's Canal +. He has also worked as a magazine Art Director, directing the art, design, and photography for several magazines at Whittle Communications, National Geographic Traveler magazine, and Sunset Magazine. During the dot-com years, he was a Director and Customer Experience Architect/Strategist in the San Francisco office of the e-business consulting firm, Scient. Before coming to America 24/7, he was an independent consultant in the field of constituent experience architecture and IT strategy, offering his services to both online and print clients, based in Palo Alto, California.