Digital Media at the Crossroads

Dan Fill, Co-founder and President, Dark Slope. Dan Fill is the Co-founder and President of Dark Slope, an entertainment company that operates a 75,000 square foot virtual production facility. Under his leadership, Dark Slope has been heralded as a Realscreen Trailblazer for their impact on the scripted and unscripted industries through the use of LED volume production, and recognized in the Deloitte Technology Fast 500™.

Recent projects include Heated Rivalry, Hate The Player as well as shots for Eli Roth's Ice Cream Man, Gen V, The Boys and Netflix's BET; Dark Slope's location based games team has created activations at Disneyland Shanghai, Dave & Busters and Vertigo Games; and the animation team has produced hundreds of hours of motion capture animation content for Nickelodeon, NBC Peacock and TVOntario.

Prior to Dark Slope Dan was the Head of Multiplatform for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation where he was named the country’s top Digital Innovator for his role in commissioning Australia’s leading streaming service ABC iView, a service that now accounts for over 900 million streams a year.

Lisa Henderson is professor and recent past dean (2019-25) of the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University. From 1994-2019 she was Professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she also served as Chair from 2009-13. From 2005-09, she was director of CISA, the Five College Center for Crossroads in the Study of the Americas. She is a radio producer by early training, co-founder of the International Communication Association's LGBTQ Studies Interest Group, and 2011 recipient of the Roy F. Aarons Award for outstanding contribution to GLBT education and research from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. Her book Love and Money: Queers, Class, and Cultural Production (NYU, 2013) was a 2014 finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. New work considers artist/scholar collaboration and multi-modal research practice--how scholars use images, sound, music, code, and performance to create knowledge on campus and off. With colleagues from five continents, she currently co-leads a project to develop guidelines for the academic support of multi-modal scholarship.

Moyra Rodger, Founder and CEO, Magnify Digital. Moyra Rodger is a media innovator and founder of Magnify Digital, a strategy agency and software company redefining how content connects with audiences. An award-winning producer turned tech entrepreneur, she equips creators, producers, and platforms with the tools to build and sustain engaged communities.

Rodger launched ScreenMiner™— an audience intelligence platform that turns engagement data into practical insights—after years of working directly with media organizations struggling to understand and scale their audiences. Her company now delivers digital strategy services, training, and software used by creators, media companies, and funders alike.