A Pulitzer prize-winner, an expert in data governance and technology policy, an innovative data journalist, two award-winning filmmakers and an interrogator of digital identities and narratives will all join the faculty of American University School of Communication (AU SOC) this fall. Below is a brief introduction to them all – watch for other opportunities to engage with and learn about them in the coming months.

Chelsea Butkowski, Assistant Professor 

Chelsea Butkowski is a media researcher studying the performance, datafication, and infrastructure of identity online. They examine digital identity through a political lens, which has led to recent projects on voting and vaccine selfies as well as user imaginaries of the Election Day social media feed. Butkowski’s research has been recognized with support from major funding organizations and awards at national and international conferences. Their work can be found in a number of leading communication journals. Butkowski draws from a background in art history, material culture, and museum studies to situate contemporary digital and visual media within wider historical contexts of communication practice. To address their research questions, they also specialize in media research methods, including content analysis and in-depth interviewing. Currently, Butkowski is developing research on the everyday politics of LGBTQIA+ Reddit communities and building a coalition of qualitative and mixed methods political communication researchers.

Fun fact: Butkowski’s favorite museum is the Corning Museum of Glass in Upstate NY. For the past few months, she’s been trying to learn to make her own stained glass art.

Whitney Christopher, Professorial Lecturer 

Whitney Christopher is an award-winning multimedia journalist, researcher, and voiceover artist. Whitney’s expertise is shooting, writing, editing, reporting, and producing broadcast news stories for local television network affiliates. She also uses this expertise in TV news as the basis for her research and publications exploring hair-based discrimination in the broadcast news industry, particularly for Black women and women of color. Before entering the education field, Whitney was an anchor, reporter, and multimedia journalist for several local news affiliates including ABC, NBC, and CBS. She received an Associated Press award for her multi-platform coverage of a news story and her work has been nominated for several other awards such as regional Emmys and Murrow awards. Whitney previously taught for nearly five years in the Digital Media department at the University of the District of Columbia and served as an adjunct professor at AU. In addition to her work in video broadcasting, Whitney also serves as a professional voiceover artist for a local government contracting company.

Fun Fact: Christopher doesn’t like chocolate.

Megan Finn, Associate Professor

Megan Finn’s cutting-edge scholarship focuses on complementary streams in data and computing governance, and post-disaster communication. She has an impressive track record of externally funded research and has engaged in high-profile public scholarship. Megan is recognized as a leading innovator in the area of technology policy. Her work has been published by MIT Press, appeared in top communication journals, received accolades and awards at major international conferences, and received funding from some of the foremost scientific and philanthropic grant-making bodies. Much of this externally funded work has involved leading international teams of researchers. She currently leads an NSF-funded collaborative project on research ethics governance projects in computer science that will run until 2026 and is also working on collaborative book projects.  

Fun Fact: Finn will be teaching COMM-704 Media, Technology & Democracy this fall. 

Chung-Wei Huang, Professorial Lecturer 

Chung-Wei Huang is an award-winning film director who grew up in a small town in Taiwan. She is currently based in Baltimore, Md. Her creative work focuses primarily on narrative films and dance for the camera videos. Her thesis film, Midnight Carnival (2018), premiered at the Asian American International Film Festival and has been selected by film festivals across the nation. Her second narrative short film, Buck (2021), premiered at the LA shorts international Film Festival. Most recently, she received Rubys Artist Grant to produce a dance for the camera video titled Days without End. She was a semifinalist for the Sondheim Artscape Prize in 2018 and an awardee for the Baker Artist Awards in 2021. Currently, she is working on the post-production of her next short film, Squeegee Boy, which is supported by the Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund. Huang received her MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University, with the support of the Presidential Fellowship.

Fun Fact: Huang worked in a traveling carnival in California for one summer break while she was a college student in Taiwan. The experience was later adapted into her thesis film.  

Wesley Lowery, Associate Professor and Executive Editor, Investigative Reporting Workshop

Wesley Lowery, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and best-selling author, widely regarded as one of the nation’s leading journalists covering issues of law enforcement, race and justice, will be an associate professor of investigative journalis and executive editor at the Investigative Reporting Workshop, the nonprofit, editorially independent newsroom based in SOC. As a national correspondent for The Washington Post, in 2015, Lowery pitched and helped lead Fatal Force, an unprecedented real-time database to track annual fatal shootings by American police officers. The database, which remains the most reliable public data on police shootings, won the Pulitzer Prize, a Peabody Award and George Polk Award and was named one of the decade’s top 10 works of journalism. His 2018 project Murder With Impunity, with Kimbriell Kelly, Ted Mellnik and Steven Rich, a look into police failure to solve homicides, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Student journalists from IRW and a graduate practicum inside The Washington Post contributed to gathering and reporting on the data that underpins each of these major investigations. 

Aarushi Sahejpal, Professorial Lecturer

Aarushi Sahejpal is one of the youngest professors in AU history, transitioning from his former SOC position as adjunct professor to become a professorial lecturer in quantitative methods and data journalism. He will hold a dual appointment as data editor at the Investigative Reporting Workshop—a position he’s held since last year. At IRW, he launched and runs a computational journalism lab that builds unprecedented datasets and is also a data reporter on The Accountability Project at The Center for Public Integrity, one of the oldest nonprofit newsrooms in the country. In 2021, Sahejpal helped build the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic, which became one of the most-trustworthy sources of COVID-19 data and information in the United States, and was utilized by federal agencies like the CDC, and two presidential administrations. He’s also an alum of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Biden-Harris administration and Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting. Sahejpal is the faculty advisor for the AU chapter of the Asian American Journalists Association, and very passionate about making data science accessible to everyone.

Fun Fact: Sahejpal rides a motorcycle, and the license plate reads “data.”

Jamie Sisley, Assistant Professor 

Jamie Sisley is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker whose work addresses issues like opioid addiction, immigration rights, and the normalization of queer love. He recently wrote and directed Stay Awake, a narrative feature film that premiered at the 2022 Berlin Film Festival, where it won the AG Kino Gilde Auteur Award and was Honorable Mention for the Crystal Bear. Starring Chrissy Metz (This Is Us), Wyatt Oleff (Apple’s City on Fire), and Fin Argus (Max’s Queer As Folk), Stay Awake is a personal exploration of the roller coaster ride that families go on while trying to help their loved ones battle addiction. Sisley also received an Emmy Nomination for his feature documentary, Farewell Ferris Wheel. The film won the Creative Promise Award from the Tribeca Film Institute, received an Imagen Award Nomination for the positive portrayal of Latinos in entertainment, and was nationally broadcast on PBS and Netflix. Sisley’s work has been supported by the Sundance Institute, SFFILM, Tribeca Film Institute, Film Independent, ITVS, and The Smithsonian Institute.

Fun Fact: Before filmmaking, Sisley was an artist manager in the music industry, working with artists such as Tim McGraw and Faith Hill.