Nora Barry

Nora Barry is a pioneering story innovator, strategist and coach. In 1998 she launched The Bit Screen, the first online site for web film. In January of 1999 the site was featured by the New York Times and quickly went international, drawing over a million viewers a week.

The Bit Screen became a lab for experiments in digital narratives and online storytelling, helping give rise to data-based, interactive and pass-along films. Dubbed “La Dame du Web Cinema”, Nora became a guest speaker at film festivals and conferences in the US, Europe Asia. She wrote and published a number of articles about emerging narratives, including the definitive “History of Web Cinema,” which was published in conjunction with the show she curated for Future Cinema, at the ZKM Museum in Germany. That exhibit later traveled to Japan.

Nora went on to create several digital film platforms, including Kurz Film Kanal for Europe Online, and Cinema Lounge for AT&T/Media One. She originated “Streaming Cinema”, the first festival of online film, which traveled to Europe and Asia, as well as to cities in the US.

She pushed story forms to the next level when she originated the first live, online film mix, “Story Streams.” The project brought together three filmmakers in France, Mexico and Canada who each created their own version of the universal myth of “The Hero’s Journey.” The films were uploaded and mixed live by a VJ at a studio in Philadelphia and streamed live over the Internet. Again experimenting with emerging technologies and digital narratives, Nora created the first “Game-Film”, an online video game that generated short films based on how the game was played. The films were created collaboratively, using the Internet2, by teams in Beijing and Seattle; Salt Lake City and Philadelphia; and Rio de Janeiro and Uppsala. Exploring the universality of myth, Nora used the story of the descent to the underworld as the subject of the game and films. Her most recent online narrative platform is The COVID-19 Story Project, a compilation of stories from people around the world during the first few months of lockdown.

Nora has written for and coached executives at: Lenovo, Red Hat, Oracle, The Hallmark Channel, Ellucian, Astra Zeneca, Genentech, Oracle, Pfizer, Sunovion, MDVIP, and J&J, among many others. She has also worked with marketing teams at AT&T, Avaya, Lucent and Verizon. She has written for The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Forbes, Inc. Magazine, Engineering News Record and the Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as for a number of online news outlets, including Culture 11 and Women in Hollywood. She has contributed chapters to several books including, “Pink TV: Sixty Years of Women on Television”. Nora has also written and sold a number of screenplays.

Ms. Barry was graduated from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University with an MS in Communications, where she studied writing and television production. Post-Syracuse she studied directing at the Walnut St. Theater in Philadelphia. She received her BA in Political Science and French from LaSalle University and studied at L’Universite Catholique de L’Ouest, in Angers, France. She is fluent in French and holds dual citizenship with the Republic of Ireland.

Books

"The Strategy of Story: Why Story Works and How You Can Make It Work for You"

The Home Fires Are Burning...My Feet! (2011). EBook and paperback.

Medea Madness: The Image of Working Mothers on TV. (2010). Pink Television: Sixty Years of Women on TV. Kendall Hunt Press.

Webcinema: The Cybernetic Image. (2006). Italy. Introduction.

Descent to the Underworld. A Minima, Journal of New Media (2006). Spain.

Story Forms, Remixing Narrative Media. (2005). Spain.

Talking Pictures: Networked Cinematic Technologies. (2004). Slovakia.

Telling Stories on Screen : A History of Web Cinema. (2003). Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imagery After Film. MIT Press.

Digital Shanachies. (2002). TakeOver: Who's Doing the Art of Tomorrow. Ars Electronica Press. Linz, Austria.