NCAC 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.

Justin Goldberg oversees NCAC's web site and is the editor of Censorship News. After graduating from Princeton University in 2002, Justin came to New York to work for PEN American Center. Before joining the staff of NCAC, he spent a year traveling the country, freelancing as a web and print designer for non-profit organizations, progressive political causes, visual artists, and literary journals. The author of a short collection of poetry, Speaking Past the Tongue (featured in the Poetry Society of America's chapbook series), Justin maintains a portfolio of his work at www.justingoldberg.com.

Stephanie Elizondo Griest, the coordinator of the Youth Free Expression Network, has been published in journals ranging from the New York Times and Washington Post to Latina Magazine and Travelers' Tales. She has worked at an orphanage in Moscow, taught journalism at the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing, and danced with the rumba queens of Havana. Those and other experiences are the subject of her first book, Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana (Villard/Random House, 2004). Check out her Web site at www.aroundthebloc.com. Prior to her work with YFEN, Stephanie was a national correspondent for The Odyssey: U.S. Trek, which sent her driving some 45,000 miles across the nation in a beat-up Honda, documenting alternative U.S. history for a website for kids at www.ustrek.org on a budget of $15 a day.

Claire Karpen is NCAC's coordinator for Youth Programs and the Free Expression Network. She is currently in the process of running NCAC's Youth Film Contest, with its record number of over 150 contestants from all over the country. A recent graduate of Brown University, where she majored in Theatre and English, Claire has also worked extensively in theatre and arts entertainment as a performer, activist, and educator.

Svetlana Mintcheva is NCAC's Director of Arts Advocacy. 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 graduate school days at Duke University 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, published in Spring 2006 by The New Press. She also has a not-so-distant memory of censorship in the former Eastern Bloc where, in the little Balkan country of Bulgaria, she grew up a dissenter.

Marvin Rich is Program Director for the National Coalition Against Censorship. Before joining the staff he was a member of the NCAC Board of Directors for 15 years. From 1959 to 1965, he was Community Relations Director of the Congress of Racial Equality and from 1965 to 1972 he was Executive Director of the Scholarship, Education and Defense Fund for Racial Equality. Subsequently he served as Director of Development at the New School for Social Research, Queens College and Mercy College. Marvin is Treasurer of The Africa Fund, a member of the Executive Committee of Americans for Democratic Action (and President of the New York City ADA) as well as President of the Lincoln Guild Housing Cooperative.