HEAR Now Festival Director

Cynthia Allen has been the NATF / HNF Festival Director for over 6 years, assisting program development, fund-raising and helping coordinate Festival event activities. For over 17 years, she has been a new media professor at New York University, teaching such courses as Art & New Media; Music &New Media; Marketing & New Media; the History of Animation; and Trends in Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality & Mixed Reality. Professor Allen did her doctoral work at FSU in their Humanities Ph.D. program. In addition, for more than 35years, she has produced feature films, documentaries, and plays. In film, she has worked with the Coen Brothers, Martin Scorsese and PBS – to name a few. She was the Producer of NYU’s Digital Archive-Website Projects. She produced and directed 7 one-hour documentary interviews. Subjects included noted theatre actors, sports figures and comedy writers: Fyvush Finkel, Dutch Garfinkel, and Bill Persky. She was Director of Research for Smithsonian World, 6 one-hour PBS documentaries on the Smithsonian’s activities. Also, for over 10 years, she has been a theater and media art critic for the Outer Critics Circle, Theater Scene, Stage and Candor and Modern Theatre Online. She is also Program Director for HoloJam VR, Inc., a company that develops virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality software and program content (virtual reality stories, animations, and documentaries).