Cynthia Chris is an Assistant Professor of Television Studies in the Department of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island/City University of New York. Prior to joining the faculty of CSI, Dr. Chris held a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in Television Studies, a joint position in the Program in Film & Media Studies and the Program in American Culture Studies at Washington University in Saint Louis. She is currently completing a book on the history of nonfiction images of nature and animals in film and television, which will be published as Watching Wildlife by the University of Minnesota Press in 2006. Dr. Chris is also the co-editor of an anthology to be titled Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting (under contract with New York University Press), and has published peer-reviewed articles on the political economy of contemporary television in Television and New Media (2002) and The Communication Review (forthcoming in 2005). She has presented her work many times at international conferences sponsored by the Center for Twentieth Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the International Communication Association, the Society for Cinema & Media Studies, and Console-ing Passions: An International Conference on Television, Video, and Feminism. Dr. Chris's writing has been recognized by the Society for Cinema Studies Student Writing Award (second place, 2002) and the Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Fund for Video Criticism Award (1997); she also received awards for excellence in teaching while a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. During her career as a media historian and critic, Dr. Chris has also authored a PBS viewer's guide for the documentary The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords, by Stanley Nelson, as well as numerous essays and reviews on art, film, performance, documentary and experimental video for Afterimage, exposure, High Performance, and Texte zur Kunst, among others. She also acted as a co-editor and co-author for one of the first published works to address the impact of the HIV/AIDS crisis on women, Women, AIDS, and Activism by the ACT UP/NY Women and AIDS Book Group (Boston: South End Press and Toronto: Between the Lines, 1990).