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Our Team

We are a team of archival activists collaborating with human rights defenders and at-risk communities worldwide. We work to create responsive, secure, and ethical archiving technologies to advance justice and accountability.

Team Members

Natalie Cadranel

Founder and Executive Director

Natalie is an archivist and ethnographer working at the nexus of human rights, design, and technology. She aims to protect and amplify evidentiary media and those who create it by working closely with them to make usable and secure archival tools. She is a practical idealist who believes sousveillance is one of very few levers that can shift power dynamics to foster justice, accountability, and harm-reduction. In the spirit of IndyMedia, she is driven by a similar motivation: "Don't hate the tech, make the tech!".

She consults with human rights-focused organizations worldwide and was a 2019 fellow at Stanford's Digital Civil Society Lab. Over the last two decades, she shaped initiatives dedicated to improving access to information for social and environmental justice organizations. She holds a Masters from the UC Berkeley School of Information and a Bachelors in International Relations from UC Davis.

Alex Esenler

Deputy Director

Alex is a data and database nerd who is passionate about knowledge sharing and building systems that amplify impact, improve workflows, and facilitate collaboration. She’s been active in the digital and human rights, media and democracy, and communications spaces for nearly a decade through work with mission-oriented organizations such as Global Voices, the Center for Global Communication Studies, and Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania. Recent projects include Global Voices' Civic Media Observatory which uses deep qualitative analysis from local researchers to increase understanding of what is going on in regional media ecosystems. She holds a Masters of Public Administration from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelors in History and Communications from McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

Lauren Salim

Program Director

Lauren is an avid reader, swimmer, and human rights advocate based in Nova Scotia, Canada. Her research interests include online harms, public participation rights, and access to information. She received her Masters in Human Rights from the University of London where her research focused on advocacy efforts for African Nova Scotians’ rights to participate in public affairs and land title issues. She was previously awarded a Bachelors in International Development Studies from Dalhousie University.

Richard Puckett

Technology Director

Richard is an accomplished technologist who is committed to utilizing his expertise to drive positive change and build solutions that benefit society. When not exploring the latest technological advancements, Richard enjoys spending time outdoors in the beautiful Pacific Northwest and connecting with people from all walks of life.

David Aragort

Decentralized Archivist Community Manager, Latin America

David is a Venezuelan digital rights advocate and researcher working at the intersection of technology, democracy, and human rights, with a focus on the internet, freedom of expression, and digital authoritarianism. He actively collaborates with organizations that protect freedom, democracy, and human rights regionally and globally. David has also been a Democracy Tech Fellow of the Alliance of Democracies, Early Career Fellow of the Internet Society, and Open Internet Leader for Democracy with the Center for International Media Assistance.

Vani Chitkara

Website Manager and Researcher

Vani is a web developer, UI and graphics designer, and aspiring software developer. She is also an active member of several tech communities. Vani has led the Google Developer Student Club at her university and has volunteered at several initiatives that uplift and support women in tech. She was a student fellow at Reboot, which focuses on the intersection of tech, humanity, and power. She is interested in technology, reading, and writing. You can connect with her here.

Emily Henderson

Communications Director

Emily writes, researches, and consults on projects at the convergence of art, writing, and communications. She has served as a curator, program manager, editor, and consultant at non-profit organizations such as the Center for Contemporary art and Culture, Stelo Arts, and the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art. Her research takes a multidisciplinary approach with a focus on poetics and storytelling, artist residencies and cultural mobility projects, and digital and internet rights. She centers care, community, and sustainability in her communications work and is passionate about fostering free, inclusive, and democratic access to archives and data.

Marios Isaakidis

Senior Researcher in Decentralized Technologies for Archiving Communities

Marios is a hacktivist developing technologies, mechanisms and policies that secure our freedoms in the Information Age. Currently, he serves as the director at infotropic specializing in blockchain, privacy engineering and protocol design.

Chrystalleni Loizidou

Senior Researcher in Decentralized Technologies for Archiving Communities

Chrystalleni’s work centers on care and the study of communication, community and the commons. She is a researcher, curriculum creator, and instructor with a focus on cultural studies who organizes hackathons and unconferences as well as builds and supports libre technology, alternative education and art cooperatives.

Chrystalleni’s interest in information politics and non-exploitative technology advocacy crystalized when her mother was targeted online for her work against international financial crime. Her approach centers restorative contributions to local and networked communities with whom she practices connective, community-focused, and trauma-informed research and facilitation.

Along with camping, foraging, dancing and playing, Chrystalleni is always writing, which she sees as a world-building, transformational craft.

Angélica Pagés

UX/UI Designer

Angelica is a UX/UI designer, photographer and front-end developer. She is also a community manager at Argentina-based nonprofit Fundación Todavía es Tiempo. Her passion is to help others fight against poverty, misinformation, and to create a safe space where history can be preserved for the next generations.

Purvi Shah

Developer

Purvi holds a Master's degree in Computer Applications and over 16 years of experience in Testing and Quality Assurance. She started her career with companies like Infosys and Cognizant Technology Solutions, and worked as Software Testing Lead. She has vast experience in testing mobile apps, software, web applications in various domains and industries. Testing and QA is not just the daily work but a passion for her.

Joselyn Villarroel

Social Media and Communications Manager

Joselyn is passionate about communications, new technologies, and human rights. She holds a Master's degree in International Cooperation for Development and has a background in the digital rights field, having previously worked with Access Now. In her role, she led their communications efforts to engage with diverse audiences in Latin America. Joselyn has also supported other international organizations, such as UNICEF and the Organization of Ibero-American States, contributing to enhancing their communications strategies. She is currently based in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Advisory Board

Harlo Holmes

Harlo is the CISO and Director of Newsroom Digital Security at Freedom of the Press Foundation. She strives to help individual journalists in various media organizations become confident and effective in securing their communications within their newsrooms, with their sources, and with the public at large. She is a media scholar, software programmer, and activist; and contributes regularly to the open source mobile security collective The Guardian Project.

Micah Lee

Micah Lee is a computer security engineer and an open-source software developer at The Intercept. He writes about technical topics like digital and operational security, encryption tools, whistleblowing, and hacking using language that everyone can understand without dumbing it down. An avid user of Qubes and Linux, he develops security tools such as OnionShare. Before joining The Intercept, he worked as a staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where he explained how technologies work to journalists and lawyers, and worked to encrypt the web. He is also a founder and board member of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

Nicole Martin

Nicole Martin is the Senior Manager of Archives and Digital Systems at Human Rights Watch where she established the organization’s first digital archive. She holds a master’s degree in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation from New York University, and teaches Digital Preservation as an adjunct professor in the same program. Nicole has worked with several nonprofit community media organizations, including Democracy Now!, The Lesbian Herstory Archives, and Deep Dish Television. She received an undergraduate degree in Film and Digital Media from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she studied early interactive web design, electronic music, and queer film theory.

Beatrice Martini

Beatrice is the Education Coordinator for the Access Now Digital Security Helpline. Previously, she led the Human Rights Technology program at Aspiration and worked at the Open Knowledge Foundation and on several projects leveraging open source technology in support of justice and rights endeavors. She is also a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, where she explores the implications of Internet infrastructure design on human rights, and serves in a formal advisory role with the Center for Tech Cultivation. Learn more about about her projects here

Yvonne Ng

Yvonne is the Archives Program Manager at WITNESS, where she trains and supports partners on collecting, managing, and preserving video documentation for human rights advocacy and evidence. She develops training resources related to archiving and preservation, such as the groundbreaking Activists' Guide to Archiving Video. Before joining WITNESS in 2009, Yvonne worked as a Research Fellow on the Preserving Digital Public Television Project, and at NYU Libraries, New York Public Library, and the Canadian Filmmakers' Distribution Centre. Yvonne holds an MA in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation from New York University, where she has also taught a course on Personal Digital Archiving. She holds a BA in Cinema Studies from the University of Toronto.

Kurt Opsahl

Kurt Opsahl is the Associate General Counsel for Cybersecurity and Civil Liberties Policy at the Filecoin Foundation. He was formerly was the Deputy Executive Director and General Counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In addition to representing clients on civil liberties, free speech and privacy law, Opsahl counsels on EFF projects and initiatives. Opsahl is the lead attorney on the Coders' Rights Project, and is representing several companies who are challenging National Security Letters. Before joining EFF, Opsahl worked at Perkins Coie, where he represented technology clients with respect to intellectual property, privacy, defamation, and other online liability matters, including working on Kelly v. Arribasoft, MGM v. Grokster and CoStar v. LoopNet. For his work responding to government subpoenas, Opsahl is proud to have been called a "rabid dog" by the Department of Justice. Prior to Perkins, Opsahl was a research fellow to Professor Pamela Samuelson at the U.C. Berkeley School of Information Management & Systems. Opsahl received his law degree from Boalt Hall, and undergraduate degree from U.C. Santa Cruz. Opsahl co-authored "Electronic Media and Privacy Law Handbook." In 2007, Opsahl was named as one of the "Attorneys of the Year" by California Lawyer magazine for his work on the O'Grady v. Superior Court appeal. From 2014 to 2022, Opsahl served on the USENIX Board of Directors. Opsahl is a member of the Filecoin Foundation Advisory Board and the CISA Cybersecurity Advisory Committee’s Technical Advisory Council.

Cooper Quintin

Cooper is a security researcher and Senior Staff Technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He has worked on projects such as Privacy Badger, Canary Watch, and analysis of state- sponsored malware. He has also performed security trainings for activists, nonprofit workers and ordinary folks around the world. He previously built websites for nonprofits, such as Greenpeace, Adbusters, and the Chelsea Manning Support Network. He also was a co-founder of the Hackbloc hacktivist collective. In his spare time he enjoys playing music and participating in street protests.

Teague Schneiter

Teague serves as the Sr. Manager of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Oral History Projects department, where she is responsible for new video productions and the acquisition of a collection of over 2,000 legacy interviews with filmmakers (1948-present). As the initiative's founder, she has been responsible for strategic planning; developing born digital video production, research, description, metadata and access practices specific to oral history; collection development; digital preservation planning; curatorial projects; cross-institutional initiatives; and outreach. She has been involved in multiple grants projects, including co-developing an oral history project dedicated to documenting the stories of Latina/o/x and Latin American filmmakers which resulted in a richly searchable multilingual website using OHMS for the Getty's 2017 PST:LA/LA cultural festival.

Teague is a graduate of the University of Amsterdam's moving image preservation program, and worked in the early part of her career with oral history, human rights and other cultural heritage materials in Australia, the Netherlands, Canada, and the United States with organizations such as WITNESS and IsumaTV. Since November 2016, Teague has served on the Board of AMIA, served as Vice President, and co-founded: AMIA's CEA Task Force, ADIFP Fellowship Task Force, Advocacy Committee of the Board, and Oral History Committee. She is an active member of the Oral History Association's Archives Interest Group and founder of a best practices collective with the craft guilds called the MICD Alliance. She proudly serves on the board of OpenArchive.

Caroline Sinders

Caroline is an award winning critical designer, researcher, and artist. For the past few years, she has been examining the intersections of artificial intelligence, intersectional justice, systems design, harm, and politics in digital conversational spaces and technology platforms. She has worked with the United Nations, Amnesty International, IBM Watson, the Wikimedia Foundation, and others. Sinders has held fellowships with the Harvard Kennedy School, Google’s PAIR (People and Artificial Intelligence Research group), Ars Electronica’s AI Lab, the Weizenbaum Institute, the Mozilla Foundation, Pioneer Works, Eyebeam, Ars Electronica, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Sci Art Resonances program with the European Commission, and the International Center of Photography. Her work has been featured in the Tate Exchange in Tate Modern, the Contemporary Art Center of New Orleans, Telematic Media Arts, Victoria and Albert Museum, MoMA PS1, LABoral, Wired, Slate, Hyperallergic, Clot Magazine, Quartz, the Channels Festival, and others. Sinders holds a Masters from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

Join our team

OpenArchive is an experienced research and development nonprofit organization dedicated to the ethical collection and long-term preservation of mobile media. We work to promote freedom of expression and privacy on the internet by creating tools, guides, and workshops to protect human rights defenders and their media.

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