The Project
StoryBorders is a digital storytelling project whose aim is to collect documentary impressions and experiences of home from youth artist and storytellers from around the world.

Developed by the Urbano Project for the TransCultural Exchange's 2008 conference Here, There and Everywhere: Anticipating the Art of the Future, StoryBorders is made up of digital artifacts (video, audio, photography) produced by youth artists around themes of home, community, family, and local history. Find out how you can be involved and participate in StoryBorders.

The Urbano Project (www.urbanoproject.org)

The Urbano Project empowers urban teens, professional artists, and community members to effect social change through participatory works of art and performance.

Urbano seeks to foster a philosophy of artistic expansiveness, supporting works that blur boundaries between art and lived experience. Through artistic collaboration, participating teens and adults are challenged to create works that take place both within institutional spaces and in the community beyond the walls of the studio.

TransCultultural Exchange (www.transculturalexchange.org)

TransCultural Exchange is an award winning 501c3 non-profit organization dedicated to promoting international art and the understanding of world cultures, through high quality art exhibitions, cultural exchanges and educational programs at our home base in Boston and throughout the world. Incorporated in 2002, the organization has already received awards from such organizations as the International Art Critics Association and support from such respected world organizations as UNESCO, the State Department's Art in Embassies Program, and the Asian Cultural Council, the Open Society Intitiative, Massachusetts Cultural Council and the LEF Foundation among others.

TransCultural Exchange's mission to bridge cultural, geographic, political and linguistic divides by bringing people together through the arts in order to foster a greater understanding of world cultures. At the same time, TransCultural Exchange seeks to further artistic innovation by creating large-scale, cross-discipline, global art projects and programming. In this way, TransCultural Exchange provides those in the arts with the necessary tools to become active participants in today's increasingly interdependent society.

The Artists

Alex Sherman
Alex is an interactive producer and new media artist living in Boston. Alex holds a BA in Socio-Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Masters in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. As a third culture kid, raised in West Africa and the Middle East, her work has roots in the exploration of identity. Through video, installation, and multimedia works, her artmaking attempts to generate new modes of interaction with electronic media, building immersive environments and tools to move closer to understanding the nature of subjectivity, communication, and what constitutes the encounter.

Sarah Rushford
Raised in western Massachusetts, Sarah Rushford earned a BFA in 1998 from Hartford Art School and an MA in 2001 in Media Studies from New School University. She now lives in Boston's Jamaica Plain, where she makes and exhibits photography, video, drawing, and sculpture in galleries and festivals including The New York Video Festival, and Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. As well as being a professional artist, Sarah has worked as a private college preparatory school teacher, and in several extracurricular multimedia art programs.

"I'm interested in phenomenology; what I understand as the peculiarity and beauty of circumstance. I believe that our secret understandings of time, object, and the strangeness of incident are actually shared perceptions that might be articulated."

Alison Kotin
Alison Kotin holds a BA in English Literature from Brown University ('00) as well as a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate ('04) and Diploma ('06) in studio art and design from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She is currently pursuing an MFA at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design's Dynamic Media Institute ('11). Presently her work explores the intersections of performance, technology, and collaborative artistic expression. A Boston native, Kotin works as a freelance web and graphic designer for several Massachusetts non-profit and arts organizations Trained as a writer, Kotin is a staff reviewer for NoFlyingNoTights.com, an online compendium of graphic novel reviews for teens; and in collaboration with the Harvard AIDS Institute co-authored Global AIDS Crisis: a Reference Handbook (ABC-CLIO, 2005). Currently Kotin works as in-house designer and youth programs coordinator for the Urbano Project, a gallery and studio space in Jamaica Plain dedicated to fostering artistic collaboration among teens, professional artists, and the community. During the school year, Kotin teaches graphic design, printmaking, and mixed-media arts workshops for high school students through Urbano's Artists' Workshops and Teen Curatorial Program.