As a member of Northampton Community Television, you can vote for candidates to serve on our Board of Directors. We have 2 open spots this year. The candidates and their bios are below.

Email up to 2 choices to nctv@northamptontv.org (click to send now!) with the subject “2016 NCTV Election” by January 13th, 2017.

Mary Alice Crim (Current Board Member)

Mary Alice’s interest in supporting and sustaining our local media ecosystem in the Pioneer Valley drives her involvement with the Northampton Community Television board of directors. She’s also involved in the burgeoning Western Massachusetts Media Justice Network. Her interest in our media system is also national in scope, and she currently serves as the field director for Free Press (freepress.org), a nonprofit organization dedicated to fighting for our rights to connect and communicate. When she’s not thinking about or consuming media, Mary Alice can be found playing sports, hanging out with her dog, experimenting with allergy friendly cooking, home brewing, gardening or working toward becoming a community herbalist.

Fateh Slavitskaya

Fateh Slavitskaya is part of the Urchn media collective (urchn.org) and loves community-driven media and technology. As the Co-Founder of the Urchin Libre media group, Fateh works at the juncture of free/open tools and culture to explore new modes of animated and live-action filmmaking. She maintains Urchin’s industrial consultancy and campaigns on behalf of a variety of software freedom issues and projects. Her work with Bassam Kurdali has been supported by grants from private donors, the Robeson Fund for Independent Media, the Massachusetts Arts Council, and substantial crowdfunding.

Eric Danton

 A rock critic, has deep connections to the local music scene, Eric Danton as written articles for the like of Pitchfork, Salon, Paste, Flavorwire, Myspace, M Music & Musicians and this blog, which he started in 2009. He has also contributed to “Schools That Rock: The Rolling Stone College Guide,” The Bluegrass Situation and American Songwriter, as well as the bygone publications No Depression, Performing Songwriter and Ironminds.com. He appears every Wednesday on the Best New Song of the Week segment on WRSI-FM (93.9) in Northampton, Mass., and occasionally on “The Colin McEnroe Show” on WNPR-FM (90.5) in Hartford. He was rock critic at The Hartford Courant from 2002-2012.

Melissa McClung

Melissa McClung is a filmmaker, writer, educator and proud NCTV member. Melissa teaches HDSLR video production to high schoolers at Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter School in South Hadley, and she is currently pursuing her MFA in Film from Vermont College of Fine Arts in their low-residency program. With NCTV, Melissa coordinates the monthly Focus Locus film series, contributes to Paradise City Press and teaches screenwriting classes. Melissa’s short film, Sports: An Inspirational Story (8 min., 2014), was made for the NCTV 7-Day Film Sprint, going on to win Best Original Drama/Comedy at the ACM Hometown Media Awards 2015. Her most recent film, Gale and the Fish (17 min., 2016), was produced with a NCTV production grant and features an all-Western Massachusetts cast and crew. Melissa is currently writing another community-oriented script, set in a not-so-fictional-but-slightly-sci-fi Northampton (ask her about it!). To see some of Melissa’s work, please visit melissamcclung.com.