MEET THE TEAM

Ines Novačić is a Media Fellow at the Harman Academy. She is an award-winning international documentary filmmaker and producer currently working on a forthcoming documentary series with ABC Studios.

Her films tackle defining issues impacting communities across the globe through innovative and unconventional perspectives. Her vision and passion as a director and producer is informed by her heritage as a third-generation journalist from a family uprooted by the 1990s Balkan Wars from their native Yugoslavia.

A sample of her films include Playing God: CRISPR, Border Business, An Emerging Women’s Movement, and The War on Science. Novačić’s expertise includes conceptualizing premium content for brands and outlets such as MasterClass.

As a journalist and filmmaker, Ines has investigated issues related to disinformation and social media. She has focused her work over the past five years on topics like censorship on social media, the rise of conspiracy movements including QAnon, and the ethics of the sharing economy on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. 

Brennan Cusack is an Emmy-award winning political journalist and producer. She’s spent the past decade following stories from Istanbul to Cairo to New York and, finally, to Washington D.C. where she arrived in February 2020 just in time to cover a pandemic lock-down, sweeping BLM protests, and one of the most heated presidential elections in the country’s history. She is currently away from the Hill to get her MFA in Screenwriting at USC. 

Tara McPherson is the HMH Foundation Endowed Professor in USC’s School of Cinematic Arts and Director of the Sidney Harman Academy for Polymathic Study. Her scholarship engages the cultural dimensions of media, including the intersection of gender, race, affect, and place, with a particular interest in digital media. She is author of Feminist in a Software Lab: Difference + Design (Harvard UP: 2018) and the award-winning Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Duke UP: 2003), co-editor of Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Duke UP: 2003) and of Transmedia Frictions: The Digital, The Arts + the Humanities (California, 2014), and editor of Digital Youth, Innovation and the Unexpected, part of the MacArthur Foundation series on Digital Media and Learning (MIT Press, 2008.) She was the Founding Editor of Vectors, a multimedia peer-reviewed journal affiliated with the Open Humanities Press. She was the founding PI on the authoring platform, Scalar. Her research has been funded by the Mellon, Ford, Annenberg, and MacArthur Foundations, as well as by the NEH.