Joe Lambert

Joe Lambert is the Founding Director of the Center for Digital Storytelling. Joe founded CDS (formerly the San Francisco Digital Media Center) in 1994, with wife Nina Mullen and colleague Dana Atchley, as a community arts center for new media. Together they developed a unique computer training and arts program known as the Digital Storytelling Workshop. This process grew out of Joe's long running collaboration on Dana's solo theatrical multimedia work, Next Exit.

Since 1993, when the first Digital Storytelling Workshop was presented at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, Joe has been the lead in offering the process in 45 U.S. states and 20 countries, assisting in the completion of more than 10,000 video works. In addition to adapting Digital Storytelling for use in web sites, CD-ROMs, mural projects, and social issue campaigns, Joe has authored and produced curricula in many contexts, including the Digital Storytelling Cookbook, the principle manual for the workshop process, and the text entitled Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community, which is now in its third edition.

Lambert has spoken at countless conferences and presentations including keynotes at the Stanford Educational Technology Conference, the Society for Information Technology National Conference, the National Writing Project Texas Statewide Conference, the Univ. of Wisconsin Digital Storytelling Conference, the Fast Forward Conference Bristol England, and each of the seven Digital Storytelling Festivals, and both of the International Digital Storytelling Conferences in Cardiff and Melbourne.  His work is cited in countless dissertations and books including Fostering Community through Digital Storytelling: A Guide for Academic Libraries (Fields/Diaz, 2008), Digital Storytelling, Mediatized Stories: Self-representations in New Media (ed. Knut Lundby, 2008), and Storycircles: Digital Storytelling Around the Globe (Hartley, McWilliams 2009).

Prior to his career in the arts, Joe was trained as a community organizer and assisted in numerous local, statewide, and national public policy campaigns on issues of social justice and economic equity. He earned a B.A. in Theater and Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1983.

http://www.storycenter.org/