StreetFilms » Meet the team
Meet the team
StreetFilms is a project of the New York City Street Renaissance (NYCSR), a collection of non-profits geared towards re-imagining the city’s public spaces and making our streets safer for pedestrians, bicycles and non-vehicular modes of transportation. The goal of the NYCSR is to engage the Department of Transportation and the city’s elected officials in a dialogue about how to best improve the quality of life for all New Yorkers.
The NYCSR includes The Open Planning Project, Transportation Alternatives and Project for Public Spaces, and maintains Streetsblog, and the StreetFilms video weblog.
The NYCSR and the StreetFilms project have grown quickly in the past year. The short-form videos that have marked the StreetFilms campaign thus far have raised awareness on topics as varied as physically separated bike lanes and neighborhood re-design led by residents.
Our continued work in video is aimed at achieving a measure of equality in terms of the way space is allocated to the people using New York City’s streets. In the coming months, look for videos on congestion pricing, bus rapid transit and increased leading pedestrian intervals for the elderly and disabled.
Mark Gorton, Founder & Executive Director
Mark’s bicycling adventures around New York City have been extensive and all but deadly in recent years. His inspiration for beginning the StreetFilms project came out of his belief that people believe what they can see, and that video is a great form of evangelizing an important cause. Before founding The Open Planning Project (TOPP), Mark worked as an electrical engineer for Martin Marietta (now part of Lockheed Martin), a fixed-income trader at Credit Suisse First Boston, and launched the Lime Group (of which software company LimeWire is a part). Mark holds a Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering from Yale University, a Master’s in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and an MBA from Harvard University.
Clarence became emeshed in the bicycle and pedestrian scene after riding the Transportation Alternatives (T.A.) Century in 1994 and becoming enlightened to how almost every place in NYC is attainable by bike. After serving three years as chair of the Brooklyn T.A. Committee, he yielded to his true passion and started bikeTV, a cable program dedicated to showcasing bicycle phenomenoa and bike advocacy in the NYC area and beyond. It was fate he met Mark Gorton and joined the TOPP team in 2004 after producing a short film for T.A. about Car-Free Central Park. Clarence has dozens of StreetFilms to his credit, some showing communities struggles against traffic, others documenting best practices in other cities, nearly all of them shot and edited entirely by him. He shoots all video by foot, bike or using mass transit and has never owned a driver’s license.
Nicholas Whitaker
Filmmaker
Nicholas Whitaker is a Videographer and Editor for NYSCR. He’s also a full time graduate student at the Media Culture and 
Communications department of NYU. Having studied film productions and media studies at The New School as an undergraduate, he became passionate about media literacy as well as the potential for positive social change though media. He’s happy to no longer be working for the “man” in corporate news or commercial production, and hopes to one day lead a full scale rebellion against big media and the forces of hegemonic oppression. In the meantime, he settles for not watching cable, handing in his term papers on time, and educating the masses on transportation issues in the city. You can read his rants on media at www.alifelessmediated.blogspot.com
Filmmaker
Elizabeth Press joined Streetfilms in October after four years as a producer for the independent TV/Radio program, Democracy Now! She received her MFA in Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a focus in community media. Her videos have screened in festivals all over the world, including a grassroots organized tour with her most recent documentary, Still We Ride.
