Advisory Board

Evelyn McDonnell

Professor of Journalism/Faculty Director of MAJS 

Evelyn McDonnell is a journalism professor at Loyola Marymount University and faculty director of the Media, Arts & a Just Society initiative. She has been writing about culture and society for more than 25 years. She is the author of five books: The World According to Joan Didion, Queens of Noise: The Real Story of the Runaways; Mamarama: A Memoir of Sex, Kids and Rock ‘n’ Roll; Army of She: Icelandic, Iconoclastic, Irrepressible Bjork; and Rent by Jonathan Larson. She coedited the anthologies Women Who Rock: From Bessie to Beyonce. Girl Groups to Riot Grrrl, Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Pop and Rap and Stars Don’t Stand Still in the Sky: Music and Myth, and her work is included in several anthologies. She has been the editorial director of www.MOLI.com, pop culture writer at The Miami Herald, senior editor at The Village Voice, and associate editor at SF Weekly. Since 2016 she has been the editor for the Music Matters series published by University of Texas Press.

Evelyn’s writing on music, poetry, architecture, theater, and culture has appeared in numerous publications and anthologies, including the Los Angeles Times, Ms., Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Spin, Travel & Leisure, Us, Billboard, Vibe, Interview, Black Book, and Option. For Random Lengths News, she writes Bodies of Water, a series of articles about people’s relationship to oceans, lakes, and rivers. She codirected the Grrrls on Film festivals at LMU and the conference Stars Don’t Stand Still in the Sky: Music and Myth at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York in 1998. Her Billboard obituary of Aretha Franklin won first place for obituaries in the 2019 National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Awards and first place in the Southern California Journalism Awards for entertainment news or feature. Her 2004 Herald expose of hip-hop cops, written with Nicole White, was awarded first place for enterprise reporting by the South Florida Black Journalists Association and second place in the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sunshine State Awards. In 2013 she was inducted into the Beloit Memorial High School Hall of Fame.

Evelyn earned her Master’s in Specialized Journalism, the Arts, from USC, where she received an Annenberg Fellowship and was made a member of Phi Kappa Phi, and her BA in American Studies at Brown University. She lives in San Pedro, California, with her husband, son, cats, and a fantastic view of the ocean.

 

Vanessa Díaz

Associate Professor of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies | Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies

Dr. Vanessa Díaz is an interdisciplinary ethnographer, filmmaker, and journalist. Her research focuses on race and gender in the production of media and popular culture across the Americas. Díaz’s award-winning book, Manufacturing Celebrity: How Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters Build the Hollywood Industrial Complex, was published with Duke University Press (2020). Grounded in her experience as a red carpet reporter for People magazine, Manufacturing Celebrity focuses on hierarchies of labor as well as ethnoracial and gender politics in the production of celebrity-focused media. The research for Manufacturing Celebrity was supported by numerous grants and fellowships, including those from the Ford Foundation Fellows/National Academy of Sciences, the Smithsonian Institute, and the Historical Society of Southern California, among others. Díaz is also a co-author of UCLA’s 2017 Hollywood Diversity Report. In addition to her research on media and popular culture in the United States, she has also done extensive research on cultural production in the Caribbean and among its diasporas. In 2006, she completed her independent feature-length documentary Cuban HipHop: Desde el Principio (From the Beginning), which recounts the history of the Cuban HipHop movement while exploring how Afro-Cuban youth use HipHop to defy misconceptions about censorship in Cuba by delivering social critiques of racism and poverty on the island. Díaz teaches the course "Bad Bunny and Resistance in Puerto Rico" and is the co-creator of the Bad Bunny Syllabus Project, which seeks to educate the public on Bad Bunny's global impact & how it reflects political, artistic, and cultural triumphs and struggles within Puerto Rico. Díaz is called upon by publications ranging from The Atlantic, to the Los Angeles Times, to NPR to comment upon major events in popular culture. She is able to provide necessary context to understand how and why particular events capture the American popular imagination, while simultaneously revealing the hidden labor and racial struggles involved in the production of popular culture.

Chris Finlay

Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Communication Studies

Dr. Christopher J. Finlay is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Loyola Marymount University. He holds a PhD in Communication from the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in digital media cultures, sports communication, global media industries and political communication. He has a particular interest in the Olympics media and Chinese media industries.

Dr. Finlay has authored over a dozen scholarly works, including, most recently, “Real Men, Himbos, And Bros: Continuity And Change In The Portrayal Of Masculinities In Sport-Dirtied Beer Advertising” with Dr. Lawrence Wenner, “The Right to Profitable Speech: Olympians, Sponsorship, and Social Media Discourse” and “Building a Better Winter Dream: Beijing 2022 and the International Olympic Committee”. In addition, Chris regularly contributes to popular media through expert commentary and original think pieces. His most recent is “Powering Down” for LMU Magazine. See full profile >>

 

 

Lawrence Wenner

Von der Ahe Professor of Communication and Ethics

Lawrence A. Wenner (Ph.D., University of Iowa, 1977) is the Von der Ahe Professor of Communication and Ethics in the College of Communication and Fine Arts and the School of Film and Television at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where he directs the Forum on Media Ethics and Social Responsibility and teaches media ethics in Philosophy sport and culture courses in Sociology, and narrative ethics in the University Honors Program.  Dr. Wenner’s research includes ten books and approximately 140 scholarly journal articles and book chapters.  He has lectured in more than 30 countries on research focusing on critical assessments of media content, ethical dimensions of race and gender portrayals in advertising, audience experiences with television in the family context, and the values and consumption of mediated sports. His most recent book, the Oxford Handbook on Sport and Society, is the premier work on the socio-cultural dynamics of sport in society and features 57 chapters and 85 leading international authors. His other recent books include American Sport in the Shadow of a Pandemic: Communicative Insights (with Andrew Billings and Marie Hardin) which examines how mediated sport changed during the pandemic, and Sport, Media and Mega-Events (with Andrew Billings) which examines the media-sport interface for the world’s largest sporting events. Dr. Wenner served as founding Editor-in-Chief (2012-2021) of the bi-monthly scholarly journal Communication & Sport (which was named Best New Journal in the Social Sciences) and is a former two-term Editor-in-Chief of both the International Review for the Sociology of Sport and the Journal of Sport and Social Issues. With Andrew Billings and Marie Hardin, Dr. Wenner edits the “Communication, Sport, and Society” book series for the Peter Lang Publishing Group. Dr. Wenner has garnered honors for his research on media and sport in international scholarly societies in communication, media studies, and sport studies. He has been interviewed on media and society topics by major news organizations across the world. 

Tom Nelson

Director of Student Media 

Tom Nelson is the Director of Student Media at Loyola Marymount University where he has advised students for more than 20 years. Tom supervises three award-winning college media outlets: the Los Angeles Loyolan student-run newspaper, ROAR Studios documentary film and podcast house, and The Tower yearbook.

In addition to his day-to-day work with media students, Tom is a recognized expert in college media and journalism education and is a frequent presenter at national conferences. Tom serves on College Media Association’s Diversity and Inclusion committee and Associated Collegiate Press’ Conference Planning Committee. Prior to entering the field of education, Tom worked for newspapers, magazines and websites as a writer, editor and content creator.

Tom firmly believes in collecting experiences over accumulating stuff; in friends who are family and family who are friends; and that the value of puppy therapy is vastly underrated.

Juan Devis

Colombian born Juan Devis is the CEO of the newly formed Ninetythree Media, a cross-cultural content studio he founded with Jeff Berg. Before the creation of Ninetythree Media he was the Chief Content Officer in charge of creating and scaling Los Angeles’ PBS content studio, KCET. The series he developed and produced have garnered local and national acclaim, with over 30 Emmys, James Beard Awards, National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Awards, to name a few.