Board of Directors
Patricia Almeida – Creator, Co-founder (Brazil)
Journalist, MA in Disability Studies at the City University of New York (CUNY). Training in Easy-to-Understand Language. Co-founder of Movimento Down, founder of news agency Inclusive – Inclusion and Citizenship, Gadim Brasil and coordinator of MetaSocial Institute, that works with media in Brazil to promote the rights of persons with disabilities.
Cátia Malaquias — Co-founder (Australia)
Lawyer, Non-Executive Director and advocate for human rights and inclusion of people with disability. Malaquias sits on the Boards of Down Syndrome Australia and the Attitude Foundation (Australia), which seeks to shape a new understanding of disability through the promotion and development of media content that provides authentic portrayals of people with disability. She is also the founder of Starting With Julius, a non-profit project to promote the inclusion of people with disability in mainstream advertising and media. She is undertaking a doctoral degree with the Centre for Human Rights Education at Curtin University, Western Australia, and is an External Affiliate Member of the Centre for Inclusive Education at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT).
Beth Haller — Co-founder (USA)
Media & disability scholar and retired Disability Studies and Media Studies professor at Towson University in Maryland; the City University of New York (CUNY); and the University of Texas-Arlington. Her 2023 book with Taylor & Francis, Disabled People Transforming Media Culture for a More Inclusive World, will be available in November. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 Routledge Companion to Disability and Media (with Gerard Goggin of the University of Sydney and Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is the author of Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She posts about disability in the news here. She was formerly co-editor of the Society for Disability Studies’ scholarly journal, Disability Studies Quarterly, (2003-2006) and has written dozens of articles and book chapters on media and disability. Haller was a Fulbright Specialist at the University of Sydney, Australia, and Curtin University, Australia in February 2015 for the project, “Disability, the Media, and Digital Technology: Issues, Challenges, and Future Research.” Haller maintains a blog of disability issues in the news, Media dis&dat.