Meet Our Advisory Board 2025
Christopher Ali
Christopher Ali is the Pioneers Chair of Telecommunications and Professor of Telecommunications at the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State University. He holds a PhD in Communications Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and his work focuses on broadband and digital equity in rural and remote communities. He is the author of the book Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity and has been published in the New York Times, Washington Monthly, The Hill, Realtor Magazine, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Heather Baumgarten
Heather Baumgarten is honored to sit on the Board of Directors of The Centre Film Festival as treasurer. She is currently a board member of Chabad of Penn State and the former President of State College Hadassah. Heather is also the author of the soon-to-be-published children’s book, “Bubby Takes a Train.” She and her husband, Tom, live in State College and are the grateful grandparents of granddaughters Sawyer, Finley, Zoe, and Olivia.
Leah Carraway-Justice
Leah Carraway-Justice is a project and change manager in the Office of Enterprise Change & Transformation – Office of the President. Member of University Staff Advisory Council (USAC) and World Campus Alumni Leadership Society.
Charles Dumas
Charles Dumas has directed, written, produced and acted in more than three hundred plays, films and TV shows. He has also appeared or voiced over a hundred commercials for TV and radio. He is an ensemble EMMY Award recipient for his appearance in Separate But Equal with Sidney Portier. He was awarded the Beverly Hills/Hollywood best actor award for B.C. ASTORIA. He received a PA award for playwriting and was the first Hendler Fellow in screenwriting at the American Film Institute. Dumas is a professor emeritus from Penn State University where he was the first African-American to receive tenure in the theatre department.
Jo Dumas
J. Ann Dumas is an Associate Teaching Professor of Media Studies for the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State University, with an expertise in information and communication technology policy. Her work in broadcast engineering led her to lecture at Stellenbosch University in South Africa from 2002 – 2003. Her experience includes being communications and outreach consultant for the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Gender Caucus in Geneva and becoming a research fellow for bridges.org in South Africa. Also a producer of Three Minutes from Broadway and The Garden, her work in research, writing, digital media, and theatre production continues with her partner Charles Dumas.
Yoav Friedman
Yoav Friedman is a lecturer and researcher in the fields of International Relations, Higher Education Policies and Creative Economy and an alum of the Fulbright Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship at Penn State University. Friedman has established and directed the Research and Development Authority of Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. In addition, he co-founded JLM-IMPACT – an inter-institutional design-driven academic entrepreneurship center in Jerusalem, chaired the European Jean-Monnet REACTIK research network on cultural diplomacy and co-founded The Centre for the Studies of Holocaust Visualization.
Pearl Gluck
Pearl Gluck, Co-Founder and Artistic Director of the Centre Film Festival, is a filmmaker whose work explores identity, class, and faith through narrative and documentary film. She is also the Penn State Laureate (2025–26) and an Associate Professor of Film Production at Penn State. Her films have screened at Cannes, Tribeca, Sundance, and international festivals. Her feature documentary Divan received a Fulbright to Hungary and premiered at Tribeca; her hybrid film, The Turn Out, won awards for its engagement with human trafficking awareness. Most recently, her short Castles in the Sky (2023) won Best Short at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival, and her forthcoming Stars and Bars is in post-production. She is also developing A Place with No Men, a feature documentary supported by two Fulbright awards (Poland and Israel), expanding her ongoing work with women’s stories and Jewish history.
Kevin Hagopian
Kevin’s been teaching film in college since he was 20 years old- and he’s loved the movies since he was a lot younger than that. He teaches film studies at Penn State, where his research specialties include the Hollywood cinema and the colonial & post-colonial cinemas of the world. He’s very proud to work with the Centre Film Festival team to bring the art, the ideas, and the community of film to Central Pennsylvania.
Grace Hampton
Grace Hampton has taught undergraduate and graduate art, art education, and Integrative Arts Courses at Illinois State University, Northern Illinois University, California State University at Sacramento, The University of Oregon in Eugene, Jackson State University in Mississippi, and The Pennsylvania State University at University Park. She also served as Assistant Director of the Expansion Arts Program at the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D. C. before arriving at Penn State.
Rebecca Inlow
As a member of the Board of Directors of the Rowland Theatre Inc., I have had the privilege of being a part of the amazing story of the historic Philipsburg theatre. I have also had the privilege of being a part of the Centre Film Festival since its inception.
Savita Iyer
Savita Iyer is the senior editor of the Penn Stater Magazine, Penn State’s alumni magazine. A seasoned features journalist of 30 years, her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Teen Vogue, Vogue India, SELF.com, and Yahoo Lifestyle, among others. Born in Calcutta, India and raised in Geneva, Switzerland, Savita has lived in State College since 2012.
Pablo Lopez
Pablo Lopez is a Certified Film Commissioner and Film Production Manager for Centre County, Pennsylvania, with The Happy Valley Adventure Bureau. A graduate of Penn State University’s Bellisario School of Film and Video, Pablo is deeply committed to empowering the next generation of filmmakers. He designs and leads film bootcamps, panels, and workforce training programs to cultivate technical skills, business acumen, and professional opportunities for students, emerging filmmakers, and underrepresented voices across Pennsylvania. With a slate of original projects, and a vision to make Happy Valley a filmmaking destination, Pablo Lopez continues to champion creativity, community, and industry growth in the region.
Cynthia Mazzant
Cynthia is a director/choreographer, teaching artist, educator, playwright, producer and performer. She is a member of the Society of Directors and Choreographers, an independent national labor union, and a member of The Dramatists Guild, Inc. Cynthia currently serves as the Co-Artistic Director for Tempest Productions, is a registered consultant artist for the PA Council on the Arts and a lecturer at Penn State University. She has been the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts grants for her work in creative drama and drama-in-education. She has spent the last 30 years working in Theatre-in-Education (TIE), Drama-in-Education (DIE) and Conflict Resolution Through Drama (CRTD).
Walter T. Middlebrook
Walter T. Middlebrook, a former assistant managing editor at The Detroit News who led an award-winning metro news desk and investigations team, is the Foster Professor of Practice at The Pennsylvania State University. A senior editor and newsroom manager, his four-decade career also includes editing and working with staff and freelance writers producing stories and special sections in opinion, features, fashion, entertainment, news and business for such publications as The New York Times, Newsday/New York Newsday, USA Today and the St. Paul Dispatch and Pioneer Press. He was inducted into the Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame in 2023 and was among the staff at Newsday that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for spot news.
Patrick Lee Plaisance
Patrick Lee Plaisance is the Don W. Davis Professor in Ethics at the Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State. His research focuses on media ethics theory, moral psychology theory, and applications of the philosophy of technology to media practice. He is Editor of the Journal of Media Ethics. He is author of Media Ethics: Key Principles for Responsible Practice (Cognella, 3rd Ed., 2021), and Virtue in Media: The Moral Psychology of Excellence in News and Public Relations (Routledge, 2015). He edited The Handbook of Communication & Media Ethics (De Gruyter Mouton, 2018) and has published two dozen journal articles.
Sam Rudy
Meet our PR pro Sam Rudy! A Native of Centre County, Sam fell in love with the arts while attending Penn State. After 40 years on Broadway in public relations, he is happy to be back for more of the same.
Yermiyahu Ahron Taub
Yermiyahu Ahron Taub is a poet and writer in English and Yiddish, a translator of Yiddish literature into English, and a lifelong cinephile. He is the author of two books of fiction and six volumes of poetry, including A Mouse Among Tottering Skyscrapers: Selected Yiddish Poems (2017). His recent translations from the Yiddish include Dineh: An Autobiographical Novel by Ida Maze (2022) and Blessed Hands: Stories by Frume Halpern (2023). Please visit his website at https://yataubdotnet.wordpress.com.
Melissa Wright
Dr. Wright is a scholar of social justice movements within Mexico and the Mexico-US borderlands, and in the southern Americas. As a critical geographic scholar with foundations in interdisciplinary feminist, critical race, solidarity, and political economic studies, Dr. Wright examines how social movements that articulate human rights, social justice, and landscape stewardship subvert the necropolitical convergence of anti-immigrant, extractive economies, and racist governance systems that threaten the well-being of the borderlands beyond the human domain. She has authored foundational pieces in studies of feminicidio and the social movements against it in Mexico and beyond, of social justice campaigns against state terror and labor exploitation, and of the formation of solidarity in support of social and ecological diversity in the Mexico-US borderlands. Her current research examines how critical race, ecological, and indigenous movements throughout the borderlands have gained steam through “border thinking” combined with solidarity movements that prioritize the merging of social justice with ecological well-being.