Adrianne Furniss

Adrianne Furniss served as Executive Director of the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society, a Washington-based public interest organization that has worked since 1981 on communications policy, digital equity, and the civic use of media and technology. Her leadership positioned the Benton Institute at the intersection of community media advocacy and the emerging digital equity field, connecting the older argument for public access television to the newer argument for affordable, universal broadband as civic infrastructure. In 2015 she received the ACM's Dirk Koning-George Stoney Award for Humanistic Communication.

The Benton Institute's work under her leadership included public engagement, policy research, and coalition-building across the communications advocacy community, helping make the case that communications access is a public interest matter whether the medium is a cable channel or a broadband connection.

Her recognition by the ACM placed her in the tradition of people the field has honored for the intellectual and policy work that gives community media its civic grounding and its arguments for public investment.