Ann Theis

Ann Theis came to community media through documentary filmmaking, discovering at Antioch College that teaching people to express their own voice mattered more than documenting them from the outside. She began her career at Manhattan Neighborhood Network, moving from production assistant to Director of Production and Education, and later guided the Open Media Foundation's community media efforts at Denver Open Media for twelve years, developing user-driven tools designed to reduce the staffing and operational costs that constrain smaller stations. She also managed station operations, educational programming, community outreach, and grant work at Brookline Interactive Group in Massachusetts, and has since served as film liaison and community media leader in Raton, New Mexico.

Her career has moved through some of the field's most distinctive models, from a major urban access center to a technology-forward open-source operation to a small market station, accumulating a body of work focused on lowering the barriers between communities and the tools they need to tell their own stories.

Ann's thread across all of it has been the same: that media education is not a technical exercise but a civic one, and that the point of teaching production is to give people the means to speak for themselves.