Chris Finan
Executive Director
Christopher Finan is NCAC’s executive director. He previously served as president of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFE), the bookseller’s voice in the fight against censorship. He has been an advocate for free expression since 1982. Prior to joining ABFE, he was executive director of Media Coalition, a trade association that defends the First Amendment rights of producers and distributors of media. He is a former chair of NCAC and Media Coalition. He was a trustee of the Freedom to Read Foundation and received its Roll of Honor Award in 2011.
A native of Cleveland, Chris is a graduate of Antioch College. After working as a newspaper reporter, he studied American history at Columbia University where he received his PhD.
He is the author of From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act: A History of the Fight for Free Speech in America (Beacon Press), which won the 2008 Eli Oboler Award of the American Library Association. He also wrote Alfred E. Smith: The Happy Warrior (Hill and Wang) and edited National Security and Free Speech: The Debate Since 9/11 (IDEBATE Press), a reader for high school students. The Hugh M. Hefner Foundation honored the latter with its First Amendment Award. He authored Drunks: The Story of Alcoholism and the Birth of Recovery (Beacon Press). His latest books is How Free Speech Saved Democracy: The Untold History of How the First Amendment Became an Essential Tool for Secur ing Liberty and Social Justice (Steerforth Press 2022).
Chris is married to Pat Willard, author of several food histories, including America Eats! On the Road with the W.P.A.–The First Fries, Box Supper Socials, and Chitlin’ Feasts that Define Real American Food (Bloomsbury). They have two sons and live in Brooklyn.
Josh Corday
Chief Strategy and Development Officer
Josh is originally from Ann Arbor, Michigan and attended school at the University of Utah where he graduated with a degree in Political Science.
Josh’s first job in the non-profit sector was over 15 years ago working for a small social justice organization in upstate New York. He has spent his entire career in the development field working with both small and large nonprofits with a range of services, including the Special Olympics, United Way and NewYork Presbyterian Hospital. Josh’s work has primarily focused on individual and foundation giving in various director roles, most of which had a particular focus on major gifts.
Josh believes that free speech and freedom of expression are foundational principles that must always be protected and actively defended. Joining NCAC has given Josh the opportunity to combine his professional expertise with some of his own personal beliefs.
Christine Emeran
Youth Free Expression Program Director
Christine Emeran joins NCAC with non-profit, international research and academic teaching experience. In previous roles, she served as a research consultant at UNESCO and UNESCO-International Institute for Education Planning in Paris, France, including initiatives on knowledge societies, primary education decentralization policies, youth program on climate change, and lifelong learning. Dr. Emeran is the author of New Generation Political Activism in Ukraine 2000–2014 (Routledge, 2018) and a book chapter titled “The March for Our Lives Movement in the USA: Generational Change and the Personalization of Protest” featured in a global social movement book series, When Students Protest: Secondary and High Schools (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2021). Her journal service includes manuscript refereeing at Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization and Observator
In her academic career, Dr. Emeran has taught sociology at St. John’s University, Manhattan College and political science courses on social movements at SciencesPO in Paris. She holds a PhD in sociology from the New School for Social Research, New York, MA in International Education from New York University and BA/BS in International Business from the American University. Dr. Emeran presents and writes on contemporary youth social movements in Europe and the U.S, she is glad to be contributing her knowledge to support students’ rights to free expression.
Elizabeth Larison
Arts and Culture Advocacy Program Director
Elizabeth Larison is a curator and arts advocate who joins NCAC with over 13 years of working in support of artists, curators, and in the development of programs focused on increasing experimentation and plurality in arts and culture. Prior to joining NCAC, Elizabeth served as Director of Operations at apexart, guiding the development of exhibitions taking place in New York City and in locations around the world, where challenging exhibition content regularly addressed complex, urgent social issues and revised histories. Earlier, Elizabeth ran apexart’s Fellowship program, and also developed educational and cultural programming for Flux Factory, the 3rd Moscow Curatorial Summer School, and the Park Avenue Armory.
Elizabeth has long been drawn to issues of free speech as they relate to both political subjectivity and the arts, and has pursued related themes across her academic career, earning a BA In Human Rights and a MA in Curatorial Studies, both from Bard College.
Macey Morales
Director of Communications
Macey Morales brings nearly two decades of media relations experience to the NCAC. She has worked to elevate the visibility of free speech issues and the harms of censorship by generating substantial national and international media coverage. Morales has reached billions of advocates and mainstream consumers through her work with high-level news outlets like the Associated Press, NPR, New York Times, USA Today, and Good Morning America.
Before joining NCAC, Morales worked closely with librarians and other educators to advocate for the freedom to read as Deputy Director of the American Library Association’s Marketing and Communications Office. Morales has worked within the newsroom of Chicago’s WFLD FOX 32 as an assistant assignment editor and is a former press secretary to Civil Rights Leader Reverend Jesse Jackson, Sr., founder and president of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition.
Morales holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is an advocate for the arts, equity, diversity, inclusion, and free expression.
Svetlana Mintcheva
Program Consultant
Svetlana Mintcheva joined NCAC after years of academic teaching and research on post World War II art and literature. Having spent a large part of her academic career analyzing provocative art and its socio-political contexts, she is happy to be on the front lines protecting the coexistence of a diversity of voices in the cultural sphere. Dr. Mintcheva has written on emerging trends in censorship, organized public discussions and mobilized support for individual artists. She is the co-editor of Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression (The New Press, 2006) and of Curating Under Pressure: International Perspectives on Negotiating Conflict and Upholding Integrity (Routledge, 2020).
An academic as well as an activist, Dr. Mintcheva has taught literature and critical theory at the University of Sofia, Bulgaria and at Duke University, NC from which she received her Ph.D. in critical theory in 1999, as well as at New York University. Her current research focuses on the challenges to the concept of free speech posed by social media, social justice movements and political polarization.
Gordon Danning
Program Associate, Youth Free Expression Program
Gordon Danning has a background in both law and K-12 education. He obtained a JD from the University of California, Berkeley but decided not to practice law and instead taught Social Studies for many years at a public high school in Oakland, California. He has also worked for more than 25 years on an occasional basis doing research and writing for criminal defense attorneys who represent indigent defendants in Los Angeles County.
He relocated to New York in 2012 to pursue doctoral work in Political Science, and immediately before coming to NCAC he served as the History Research Fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, where he was tasked with researching the connection, if any, between “hate speech” and political violence. He has published several academic and law review articles on issues relating to free speech, including Did Radio RTLM Really Contribute Meaningfully to the Rwandan Genocide? Using Qualitative Information to Improve Causal Inference From Measures of Media Availability; “It Ain’t So Much the Things We Don’t Know That Get Us in Trouble. It’s the Things We Know that Ain’t So”: The Dubious Intellectual Foundations of the Claim that “Hate Speech” Causes Political Violence; Is the Cure Worse Than the Disease? Censorship of Hate Speech May Well Increase Violence; and Freedom of Speech in Public Schools: Using Communications Analysis To Eliminate The Role of Educational Ideology.
Gianmarco Antosca
Youth Free Expression Program Coordinator
Gianmarco Antosca has always been dedicated to supporting and amplifying the voices of young people. In middle school, Gianmarco wrote a report on SNCC and ever since he’s been fascinated by young people who have spoken truth to power. As he’s gotten older, Gianmarco has been particularly interested in how the younger generations can move past utopian ideas of political unity and instead focus on emphasizing and working through their differences to build a better and more democratic future.
Before coming to NCAC, Gianmarco worked as an administrator at the University of Chicago, where he supported non-credit continuing education students and masters students. He’s worked with nonprofits in Washington, DC and Chicago focusing on human rights, art, and political engagement. Outside of his professional career, Gianmarco has been a bartender, a substitute teacher, and a photographer, among other things.
Gianmarco received an MA in Humanities from the University of Chicago where he studied and wrote about mass media, ideology, and history. His thesis used depression memes to engage with precarity and online communities. Before moving to Chicago, Gianmarco attended the University of Maryland and received BAs in Government and Politics and Film Studies.
He currently lives in Brooklyn with his dog, Harvey.