Staff

Joan E. Bertin, Executive Director of the National Coalition Against Censorship, is a graduate of NYU Law School, where she was a fellow in the Arthur Garfield Hays Civil Liberties Program. After law school, she spent seven years representing indigent clients as a legal services lawyer, and more than a dozen litigating civil rights and civil liberties cases at the ACLU. She has taught at Columbia University, where she remains on the faculty, and at Sarah Lawrence College, where she held the Joanne Woodward Chair in Public Policy, but prefers activism to academia. She frequently speaks and writes on legal and policy issues, and is the author of more than 30 chapters and articles in professional books and journals.

Larry Horne, Development Director. Most recently, Larry served as Associate Executive Director of Development at the Hetrick-Martin Institute here in New York.  Prior to working at Hetrick-Martin, he held the position of Director of Planning and Development at the Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival.  While in Los Angeles, Larry was Director of Development for the College of Arts and Letters at California State University, Los Angeles and Senior Development Officer for the School of Arts and Humanities at Claremont Graduate University.  In addition, he was founder and Executive Director of the Los Angeles  International Gay & Lesbian Film Festival (now called Outfest) from 1982 to 1995. His awards and honors include the 1994 City of Los Angeles Certificate of Tribute for outstanding citizenship and enhancing community betterment, the 1993 Re-Style/LA Community Service Award in recognition of his significant contribution to the  arts of Los Angeles, and the 1992 Gay & Lesbian Alliance against  Defamation Media Award for outstanding service to lesbian and gay media. 

Isabelle Katz Pinzler is Special Counsel at the National Coalition Against Censorship where she works primarily on science and censorship issues.  She was previously taught at New York Law School and was Director of the Project on Federalism at the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund. She is a nationally recognized civil rights and civil liberties attorney.  From 1994 to 1998, Ms. Pinzler was the Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice, developing policy and supervising its work in the areas of education, employment, affirmative action, immigration, welfare issues, etc.  For approximately a year, she served as the acting head of that Division.  Prior to joining the Justice Department, Ms. Pinzler was for 15 years the Director of the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union where she led the litigation of many groundbreaking cases in women’s rights and civil rights.  Previously, she was Deputy Director of the National Employment Law Project, a Legal Services support center and has also worked in neighborhood legal services offices in Cleveland and Boston.  Ms. Pinzler graduated from Goucher College and received her law degree from Boston University.

Teresa Koberstein is the Communications and Youth Programs Coordinator. She coordinates the annual Youth Film Contest and the Youth Free Expression Network, or YFEN, and is responsible for the website, online projects and PR. Teresa received her BA in Theatre from the University of Oregon and her Master of Nonprofit Management from Regis University.

Svetlana Mintcheva is NCAC's Director of Programs. She joined NCAC after years of academic teaching and research on post World War II art and literature. Having spent a large part of her academic career analyzing provocative art and its socio-political contexts, she is now happy to be on the front lines protecting the coexistence of a diversity of voices in the cultural sphere. Svetlana has published and presented multiple papers on contemporary art and writing — most recently, she co-edited Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression (2006, The New Press). She curated the 2007 exhibition Filth, Treason, Blasphemy?: Museums and Censorship, at the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum in Chicago, IL and conceived Exposing the Censor Within, a traveling interactive public art installation, which opened in California in March of 2007. In 2008 she launched the Virtual Coalition Against Censorship, a Second Life group, which hosts exhibitions and discussions about free speech in virtual worlds. An academic turned activist, Mintcheva has taught literature and critical theory at the University of Sofia, Bulgaria and at Duke University, from which she received her Ph.D. in critical theory in 1999. Her academic research and writing focused on postmodern literature and aesthetic provocations.