Red Burns

Goldie "Red" Burns (née Gennis; April 9, 1925 – August 23, 2013) was the co-founder and chair of the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) in the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She was known as the "Godmother of Silicon Alley", New York's technology district.

Goldie Gennis was born in 1925 in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, the youngest of the three children of two Russian immigrants. Her hair color inspired her nickname Red. When she graduated from high school early at the age of 16, her parents considered her too young to go to college, so she went to Montreal for an internship at the National Film Board of Canada where she trained as a documentary filmmaker.

She married Alex Myers, an editor at the film board, with whom she had a son Michael and a daughter Barbara. Her husband died suddenly in 1953 when she was 28, leaving her with her children who were six and three at the time of his passing.

Burns then took work with a television distribution company and seven years after the death of her first husband, married one of her co-workers, Lloyd Burns. He had a teenaged daughter from a previous marriage, and together the couple had another daughter Catherine Lloyd Burns. The family moved from Toronto to New York City in the late 1960s. Lloyd Burns died in 1970.

Around the time of her second husband's death, Burns began her interest in social uses of technology, including the possibility that everybody could make documentaries. This interest was sparked when she attended a demonstration of the Sony portapak camera, the first portable video camera, in 1970.

Inspired, she met with David Oppenheim, a former dean of the Tisch School of the Arts, who referred her to George C. Stoney and the film school at New York University. The two co-taught a video production course, which focused on the use of video in a community-based context. As part of the course, students taught residents in the Washington Heights district of Manhattan how to use video to pressure city hall into giving them a new traffic light. With Stoney, Burns co-founded an informal program, the Alternate Media Center at Tisch School of the Arts's in 1971.

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