Studio Team

We are proud that the Studio is guided by a vibrant community of interest made up of more than 50 faculty, staff, and students, along with an advisory team and our co-directors. Together, they help shape the vision, priorities, and direction of The Studio, ensuring it meets the needs of our campus community. Their collective input supports everything from planning the space and selecting digital tools to designing workshops, consultations, and other support services. Led by our co-directors, their collaboration helps make The Studio a hub for digital innovation, creativity, and community-driven projects across Wake Forest.

Meredith Farmer

Faculty Director

(meredithfarmer.org) is an Associate Teaching Professor of Core Literature who is also affiliated with Environment and Sustainability Studies. Her current project, “Melville’s Leaks: Science, Materialism, and the Reconstitution of Persons,” is under advance contract with Northwestern University Press. A related edited collection, Ahab Unbound: Melville and the Materialist Turn was published by the University of Minnesota in 2022. Her next book project, “Reading the Weather in the Nineteenth Century,” is a scientific, cultural, and literary history of the “American Storm Controversy” and related attempts to model climate change. Farmer’s research has been supported by the American Philosophical Society, the Bakken Museum of Electricity, the Chemical Heritage Foundation, the New Bedford Whaling Museum, the Science History Institute, and the Smithsonian Institution. As a teacher and scholar her focus is on the nineteenth-century in America and the ways that it helped shape the present moment. Her current teaching interests include the history of slavery in our community here in Winston-Salem and the ways that rhetoric about the environment in the nineteenth century contributed to our current climate crisis. Projects produced by her classes can be viewed at hiddentown.org and environmentaldestruction.org. Farmer hopes to build on work that she did in the Studio for Instructional Technology Lab (SITES) at UNC, helping other faculty members develop assignments that teach students to create podcasts, digital essays, and even short documentaries—ideally as public-facing projects that engage ethically with community partners. Her two-page CV can be viewed here. 

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Brianna Healey

Managing Director

is the Associate Director of Academic Technology, a division of Information Systems. Her role is to promote digital literacy on campus and to teach storytelling through digital tools and technology. She has been crafting digital stories through various mediums like short films, music videos, podcasts, website design, and documentary films for over 25 years. More importantly she has been teaching students the value of digital literacy through storytelling for 14 years. She trained non-film and video students to produce a documentary film called Utopian Dreams, stories of the Susquehanna River, at Bucknell University. The film was aired on WVIA, a PBS member television station. She was also part of a five-student team that produced the documentary film, Coming Home: The C.A.R.E. Program, which examines the re-entry process through a program designed to help ex-offenders after they are released from prison. The film was used to promote the new program to the federal court system. Brianna has also been the chair of Tech X for 5 years. Tech X is an annual technology conference sponsored by Information Systems that celebrates and showcases the important work faculty are developing with technology. Brianna’s digital portfolio can be viewed on Vimeo. Her two-page CV can be viewed here.

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Sidney Beeman

Manager of Advanced Learning Projects

is the Manager of Advanced Learning Projects, a division of Information Systems. In this role, she supports faculty and students in the effective use of digital media to enhance teaching, learning, and research. With a background in documentary filmmaking and nearly a decade of experience in video storytelling, Sidney brings a creative lens to academic technology initiatives. She collaborates closely with faculty across disciplines to develop innovative digital storytelling projects, interactive media, and pedagogical resources that support transformative learning experiences. Her work has been recognized at regional and national film festivals, including multiple official selections and an Audience Award for both documentary and animation.