Kathy Bisbee

Kathy Bisbee is a community media leader, documentary and immersive filmmaker, educator, and digital equity advocate whose work connects public access values to emerging questions of technology, participation, and inclusion. Before leading Brookline Interactive Group in Massachusetts, she ran two community media centers in central California for seven years - CMAP TV and CTV - developing youth media programs and working to bridge the digital divide. At BIG, where she served as Executive Director for nine years, she helped build a next-generation community media arts center rooted in storytelling, media literacy, civic dialogue, and creative public participation. Under her leadership, BIG was recognized in 2017 as the top public access channel in the United States.

Her work also brought community media into emerging technology. As co-founder and director of the Public VR Lab - the first publicly-funded, publicly-accessible nonprofit XR content creation and training center in the United States, a project of BIG launched in 2015 - she advocated for community-based access to virtual and augmented reality not just as commercial technology but as another set of tools people should be able to use, question, and shape. She co-produced VR content presented to world leaders at the United Nations Environment Assembly in Nairobi in 2017, was a fellow at the MIT Open Doc Lab, and received the 2019 Nextant Legacy Prize from the Virtual World Society for her work building the community XR field. The Public VR Lab ran through 2023 and collaborated with partners including the UN Environment Programme, the Boston Globe, Emerson College, and the Alliance for Community Media.

Since leaving BIG in 2023, she has continued that access work as Director of the Alliance for Digital Equity at Baystate Health, leading a grassroots coalition of more than 70 organizations across four counties in western Massachusetts focused on digital inclusion and health equity. Her career reflects the bridge from cable access to digital inclusion: keeping the field's core promise alive as the tools change.