Staff

Laurie Block, Executive Director
Co-founder and Executive Director of Straight Ahead Pictures, Block oversees program design, content development, and implementation for all SAP projects including the Disability History Museum. Her first film, FIT: Episodes in the History of the Body, is regarded as a groundbreaking essay on the representation of the body. Block produced, with Jay Allison, the four-hour NPR radio documentary series, Beyond Affliction, winner of the 1999 Robert Kennedy Radio Journalism Social Justice Award. On behalf of the National Library of Medicine, she recently researched and wrote Cognitive Disability, A Bibliographic Guide to 20th Century Resources in the United States(National Institutes of Health, 2008). Block served on the Board of Directors for the Community Genetics and Ethics Project, a Vermont organization funded by NIH that developed educational programs to explore the ethical implications of genetic medicine. Currently, Block is working on developing the Education and Museum sectors of the site in conjunction with the launch of Becoming Helen Keller, a documentary broadcast for public television and national education project.

John Crowley, Writer and Editor
Co-founder of Straight Ahead Pictures, Crowley provides scriptwriting and editing skills to the organization and has long experience in developing teaching tools. He has co-written many documentary film scripts with Block, and has worked with numerous independent film and television producers. In addition to his film work he is a novelist, and teacher of fiction and screenwriting at Yale University. Crowley’s film work has won many awards including Academy Award nominations, presentation at the Berlin, New York Film Festival, and on PBS and HBO.

Graham Warder, Director, Education Materials Development
Warder has worked with the Disability History Museum project since 2002. He began as its Library Cataloguer and Acquisitions Director, and helped create and catalog a study collection of artifacts related to many aspects of disability cultural history in the United States. Warder is now taking on the lead role developing education materials for the Becoming Helen Keller project designed for use by secondary school and higher ed professionals and their students. Warder serves on the advisory board for The Encyclopedia of Disability History, to be published by Facts On File. He is a member of the History Department at Keene State College in New Hampshire, and his other research interests include temperance and commercial culture in antebellum America. Warder received a Ph.D in History from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2000.

William Francis Kuracina, Online Digital History Collections & Project Information Manager
Kuracina is responsible for cataloguing documents and artifacts for the Disability History Museum. He is also involved in developing secondary and post-secondary education materials. New to the company, Kuracina is proficient in American sign language, and has extensive teaching and grant writing experience. He received a Ph.D. in History from Syracuse University in May 2008.

Mary Irwin, Marketing & Development Coordinator
Irwin has worked in corporate marketing and non-profit development in Europe and in North America. She received a B.A. from the National University of Ireland, and pursued graduate work at New York University. She is actively involved in local history projects and brings a great calm and sense of humor to any day.

Zach Iannazzi, Production Assistant
Iannazzi provides technology and media support for the Disability History Museum. He received his B.A. from Hampshire College in 2008 where he studied non-fiction filmmaking under Abraham Ravett and Bill Brand. He served as a visiting artist for John Slepian's Art/Nature/Technology course at Hampshire College and his 16mm short film To Be Regained was recently selected for both legs of the 8th Annual Bearded Child Film Festival, in Minneapolis and Grand Rapids.

Erik Haugsjaa, Technical Director
Haugsjaa is this project's lucky find, otherwise described as the steady technical center of the project, the individual who develops the 'backend', and manages the web application -- the database and content management system. Haugsjaa began working with SAP staff when they were making the Beyond Affliction: Disability History Project's NPR website. As the millennium turned, he helped dream into being a virtual museum. With an MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Haugsjaa also has a life outside the web, developing scientific software (used for the ecological modeling of Rocky Mountain forests) at the University of Massachusetts.