Open Youth Networks believes that in order for youth to have a democratic voice in the decisions and policies that affect their lives, they must also be given opportunities to develop original strategies for organizing and civic participation that harness the power of their own digital native cultures. To this end, Open Youth Networks assists young people and their allies in the design and use of participatory media tools that enable them to create innovative peer-to-peer projects of dialogue, art, education and action.

By providing an array of supports —technology access, multiple teachers and mentors, experiential learning contexts and a youth-centered approach to critical inquiry — OYN nurtures youth to empower innovative micro-enterprises that mobilize their peers from awareness to action. By helping youth imagine new ways of engaging in socially-motivated commons-based peer production, Open Youth Networks aims to strengthen youth participation in democratic decision-making through critical media production and analysis.

About Mindy Faber

The Founding Director of Open Youth Networks is Mindy Faber, an award-winning independent video producer, curator and educator. She is a co-recipient (with Youth for Social Action) of the George W. Foster Peabody Award in 2007 and is the 1996 recipient of the Rockefeller Intercultural Media Fellowship. Before founding Open Youth Networks, Faber taught Media Arts at Evanston Township High School where she more than doubled the enrollment in her courses in three years. Her students went on to gain acceptance at the leading film and TV journalism university programs in the country. Faber served as the Director of Distribution at Video Machete, from 1999-2002, a Chicago based non-profit that helps immigrant and marginalized youth represent their experiences and struggles through video, web and multimedia production. From 1986-98, Faber was the Associate Director of the Video Data Bank at the Art Institute of Chicago, one of the world’s most important and renowned resources for video art and alternative media. Faber also acts as an education consultant and youth media specialist through her firm Faultline Media Services.

Faber has collaborated with a number of youth makers in recent years in helping to produce videoworks about race, gender, class and youth culture including:
Zach Webb’s All I See is What I Know about institutional racism at a Kentucky high school and winner of the Best Young Filmmaker Award at the 2000 Nashville Independent Film Festival;
Race is Race Ain’t… Class Is, Class Ain’t…with Tom Golebiewski and Jerusalem Singleton;
Beyond the Screams: The History of U.S/Latino Punk by Martin Sorrondeguy,
My Name Girl with Emily Green (featured in the NY Times after winning top honors at the Do It Your Damn Self Video Festival)
Here’s Where I’m Comin’ From with Jerusalem Singleton (Grand Prize winner of the HBO sponsored contest, “Crossroads”)
History Lessons (with Daniela Glusberg and Youth for Social Action) Winner of the George W. Foster Peabody Award (Beyond Borders, Listen Up)
Curfew Laws (on permanent display at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy)
Beneath the Surface: Jamaal’s Story with Youth for Social Action

Faber has also taught at the School of the Art Institute, Columbia College and the University of Illinois. She has served on festival and conference juries and panels across the United States and throughout Europe and given dozens of presentations on the history, theory and practice of independent video.

Faber’s own video work uses humor and autobiography to reveal how private conflicts are played out upon stages formed by historical and social conditions. Her most acclaimed work, Delirium is about the history of female hysteria starring her own mother. Delirium was awarded Grand Prize in Video at the 1994 Berlin Film Festival and First Prize at the 1993 Atlanta Film/Video. Faber’s work has been screened at such diverse venues as the Museum of Modern Art, MTV, Showtime, PBS, the Lux Theatre in London and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

In addition to being a videomaker, educator and youth media worker, Faber has curated a number of acclaimed video exhibitions which have toured throughout the US and Europe. These include:

No Cross, No King, No Margaritas in the Sun - Postcolonial Media
The New McLennium
Rages and Rhymes: Voices of the Star-Strangled
Chicago Video: City of Big Shoulders
A Tool, A Weapon, A Witness: The New Video News Crews
Oedipus Interruptus
Rejuvenating Justice
Dreaming Inside History
Da Bomb Mad Media (co-curated with Austin Haeberle)