Apollo Outreach Initiative

THE AOI TEAM

Rian Brown, AOI co-founder and co-director, is a filmmaker and video artist who teaches Cinema Studies at Oberlin College. She has two young boys and spends her time in Italy and the U.S. Her short films and video installations have shown around the world at film festivals and museums including the L.A. Hammer Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland, the New York Shorts Festival, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Women in the Director's Chair, and many others. She was recently awarded the 2011 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Claudio Orso, AOI Outreach Coordinator, is an artist from Turin, Italy, who has lived in Ohio for ten years. Recipient of the 2004 Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship, he has long worked with the Zygote Press and the Morgan Conservatory of Art of Papermaking in Cleveland, and he has exhibited his work in the U.S. Deeply committed to using the fundamental principles and process of art-making to help build communities, he has taught diverse artistic practices to students of varying ages and backgrounds—in the Oberlin public schools; for Art House in the Urban Bright and MyCom projects in the Cleveland public schools; and through ArtZreach, a project he created to educate youth in the Lorain County Juvenile Detention Home. Geoff Pingree, AOI co-founder and co-director, is a documentary writer, photographer, and filmmaker who works in Spain and the U.S. and teaches Cinema Studies at Oberlin College. His film work has received an Emmy Award and been broadcast on venues including PBS and Discovery. His photography has been published widely and received National Geographic's 2008 World in Focus Grand Prize. His writing has appeared in newspapers and magazines including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor, The Nation, The Economist, The American Prospect, TIME, Ms., and Cineaste.