About

Corrine grew up in a small town in Colorado often mocked in the television show South Park. She was lucky enough to attend the Jefferson County Open School from about ten years old through to University, where she developed into a passionate learner, integrating the personal and social values she gained as she grew to adulthood into her intellectual and academic understanding of the world.

At some point during high school, Corrine started paying attention to things that were going on outside her country. Buying a copy of her local newspaper every day to follow the beginning of the civil war in the DRC, when Laurant Kabila’s forces overthrew Mbutu Sese Seko, left a particularly strong mark. The struggle to disseminate this kind of information, and make real its relevance to people throughout the world remains a primary motivation in her life.

She attended the United States International University and earned a BA in English with a minor in international relations. She chose the school because of the opportunity it provided for her to study for an academic year in Nairobi, Kenya, and Mexico City, Mexico, respectively, and for it’s very diverse student population.

After graduating, Corrine took some time to work for AmeriCorps in a program that essentially subsidized a non-profit organization to provide her with a stipend in order to volunteer. She spent a year working on youth programs with the Louis August Jonas Foundation in the Mid-Hudson Valley of New York with artist Alex Schein, and participating in an eight week international leadership “camp” for 14 to 16 year-olds. During this intense period, she created her first film with Alex Schein, a short documentary exploring and celebrating the history and philosophy of the program. An avid stills photographer since high school, she began to learn and develop a love of shooting and editing video.

After a delay due to the end of her AmeriCorps service and the timing of the school year, Corrine kept pushing to incorporate the things she cares about, attending the University of Westminster in London to earn an MA in International Journalism. Studying alongside students from Tanzania, India, Indonesia, Sweden, France, Jamaica, China, and the Philippines, to name a few, she cut her teeth doing student broadcast assignments during protests of the war in Iraq and participating in NATO exercises as Simulated Press (reporting as if NATO’s theoretical situation were real from ships at sea, helicopters, de-mining training, and live fire exercises).

Returning to the United States with something like USD 75 in her pockets, Corrine found work canvassing for a political campaign in Colorado, aiming to create a legal Domestic Partnership status for gay couples in the state. In addition to genuinely hoping to make a difference in the lives of her many gay friends, knocking on doors throughout a large American metropolitan area and its suburbs to talk to strangers about what can be a sensitive topic remains one of the most fascinating and surreal jobs she has ever had.

After a couple months back working with the Louis August Jonas Foundation’s Camp Rising Sun program in New York over the summer, which she was able to videoblog for her Denver newspaper, Corrine continued to work on the campaign in the field offices until the November, 2006 elections. Participating in the campaign (which lost), and witnessing the catastrophic voting problems of that year in the Denver area brought Corrine a great deal of perspective on local politics and electoral issues in the US.

In 2008, Corrine began to be an active volunteer for a small, non-profit, citizen journalism organization in Minnesota called TheUpTake.org, bringing tools, training, and editorial guidance to citizen journalist volunteers covering the 2008 electoral cycle, and sheer, stubborn will to the organization’s own coverage. She was able to cover events from the Iowa and Nevada caucuses to a hot local congressional race in Colorado, while getting into a strategic position to cover the Democratic National Convention in Denver, and the Republican National Convention in Minnesota. TheUptake’s coverage of the conventions, using bleeding edge technology from crowdsourcing via Twitter to livestreaming via qik.com, broke ground in the industry, and led to wonderful coverage opportunities for the organization during TheUpTake’s home state’s prolonged legal battle over their Senatorial election.

Since the elections, Corrine has been freelancing in a variety of areas, and has been very proud to be a part of launching a book about her alma mater, the Jefferson County Open School, by Dr. Rick Posner, a mentor and friend from her time at the school. She runs his website on WordPress and is constantly excited to be learning new skills online, from picking up new plug-ins and tweaking some CSS here and there to taking her first tentative steps into JavaScripting.

Feeling that her student loans, exchange rate based emergency student loans, and credit card debt are insufficient, she has recently taken to using her local library to accrue overdue book fees. She is currently a self-professed economic refugee back in her childhood home in Evergreen, amongst elk, deer, bears, and her mother’s small flock of day-care children.

While keeping up constant vigilance for such potentially dangerous wildlife, Corrine is also constantly on the look-out for her next opportunities to pursue her avocation in journalism.