Antonio Mendoza

ANTONIO MENDOZA

I started working for The MY HERO Project in 1995 as a designer and HTML coder. Since then I have written about my heroes José Martí and writer Gabriel García Márquez, done numerous Flash features, special projects, edited videos, translated hero stories into Spanish for the Mi Héroe Web site, and have represented MY HERO as a Media Arts Educator throughout the world.

In 2003 I made my first MY HERO video after visiting the Central Juvenile Hall Court School in downtown Los Angeles as a Media Arts Educator. The occasion was that the Community College Foundation was going to park their Digital 'n Arts (D'nA) eBus on the campus of the detention center to offer a chance to selected youths involved in the InsideOUT Writers program to experiment with digital technology. The synergy between the InsideOUT Writers, the eBus and MY HERO was an experience I will never forget.

In 2004 I joined the MY HERO Team at the 11th Annual iEARN International Conference that was held in Kosice, Slovakia, where we taught people from all over the world how to use the MY HERO Web site to tell stories using writing, images and movies. During our week stay in Kosice we met Rashid Peters, a young peace activist and musician from Sierra Leone, West Africa, whose exceptional story we captured on video, won a Special Hero Award in the 2005 MY HERO Film Festival.

In 2005 MY HERO Film Festival Director Wendy Milette and I went to the TechEd Event in Pasadena, California, where we held a series of workshops in the eBus with teachers from all over the world. As part of the workshops, we produced a short video interviewing the participating teachers about their heroes.

That same year I went with Victoria Murphy, curator of the MY HERO Gallery, to Taft High School in Woodland Hills, California, where we met with art teacher Kathi Flood and made a short film about her student's hero artwork. This piece was later included in the 2006 MY HERO Report, which was made with the generous support from the American Legion Child Welfare Foundation and the California Arts Council.

Wendy Milette and I returned to Taft High a couple months later to help teacher Jerrilyn Jacobs and her students complete a series of short media projects about their heroes.

In 2006, as part of a California Arts Council grant, we expanded this program and, together with Geeta Malik, we rejoined Ms. Jacobs to help her advanced media class complete their group video projects, three of which, Express Your Emotions, Friendship and the Hero Within and Breaking the Chain, won awards in the 2006 MY HERO Film Festival.

That same year MY HERO was also awarded a Cultural Arts Exchange Grant from the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State to introduce the MY HERO Web site and media arts education skills to students, educators and artists in the Balkans, Senegal and Jordan. In the fall the Global Exchange partners from six countries came to Laguna Beach for a week of intense workshops. The workshops included value-based storytelling, camera exercises, editing using Final Cut Pro, and Photoshop and Flash tutorials.

In early 2007, I went to the Women in Sports Foundation's Billie Awards Ceremony with MY HERO Student Reporter Tori Degen and we made a piece about athletes, celebrities and their heroes.

In May 2007, as part of the U.S. Department of State arts exchange program, I travelled with fellow video artist Skip Blumberg to four countries in the former Yugoslavia -- Macedonia, Kosovo, Bosnia & Herzegovina, and Montenegro -- to conduct video and media workshops for the MY HERO/GLOBAL EXCHANGE Project. During this month-long journey, I established several life-long friendships and we managed to produce over 25 short videos, several of which have been entered into the 2007 MY HERO Film Festival.