Michael Epstein

Michael is a screenwriter, journalist, and expert in immersive storytelling. Michael’s audio production career began when he was 10 years old as co-anchor of radio station K-R-A-P broadcast on a dual-tape-deck boombox in his friend’s attic. Michael’s next gig was with NPR’s “Morning Edition” filing stories about digital culture in Silicon Valley. Michael’s writing has appeared in Wired and Filmmaker Magazine focusing on interactive and participatory media.

Michael is also a media scholar fascinated with how technology is changing the way we tell stories. He has a degree in Comparative Media Studies from M.I.T. where he developed several interactive documentary projects about human connection in the digital age. In 2006, Michael founded Walking Cinema (www.walkingcinema.org), a digital storytelling studio comprised of filmmakers, developers, and designers specializing in travel and history productions. Walking Cinema’s stories connect compelling characters to places around the world and have been distributed by the Venice Biennale, Detour, The Smithsonian, and PBS. For Audible, they have developed and produced Pen and Place, The Curious Case of the Pheromonophone, and The Ralph Steadman Interactive Experience. Michael’s work has been honored by The American Alliance of Museums, The Boston International Film Festival, and The National Endowment for the Humanities. He is currently working on a series of walkable stories about immigrant neighborhood in San Francisco for the California Migration Museum, an NEH-funded podcast and immersive series about the dawn of the Civil Rights movement, an immersive theater project about a small jazz club in San Francisco, and a podcast series about rethinking innovation with PRX. He is an Adjunct Professor of immersive media at the California College of Arts and developing a curriculum on walkable, immersive media in conjunction with several design professors at CCA.