biography

Stefan Wray began a doctoral program in Media Ecology at New York University in September, 1997. He completed an M.A. program in Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin in May, 1997, where he wrote a thesis titled “The Drug War and Information Warfare in Mexico.”  He received a B.A. in Journalism in 1995 from San Francisco State University and an A.S. in Energy Technology in 1985 from the Community College of Allegheny County.

While an M.A. student at the University of Texas, Wray was awarded funds, from the Shell Foundation, the Tinker Foundation, and the University of Texas, for thesis research based at the Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City. He also was rewarded with departmental scholarships from the Ada Frances Miller Endowed Graduate Fund and the Readers Digest Foundation. The Institute for Alternative Journalism funded his participation in the first Media and Democracy Congress in San Francisco. The Institute for Latin American Studies and Global Exchange funded participation in a Human Rights Delegation to Chiapas, Mexico. Wray was a contributing editor and writer for (sub)TEX, a graduate student produced newspaper. His writing about “Information Warfare” was incorporated into a Rockefeller Foundation funded CD-ROM project at U.T. about the Zapatistas called The Revolution Will Be Digitized. He joined the Union for Democratic Communication.

At San Francisco State University, he was an award winning editor and reporter for the student newspaper, the Golden Gater. Prior to this, his writing appeared in The Web, a local San Francisco political newsletter, and in the Street Sheet, a publication of the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness. His work also was published in Discourse and Exodus. While a student, he created several self-published pamphlets. After completing his bachelors degree, he was a news intern at Pacifica's KPFA radio in Berkeley.

His exposure to computer technology began twenty years ago in the days of key punch cards. In high school in the 1970s, he studied computer programming languages like FORTRAN. In the early 1980s he used one of the first Commodore personal computers to connect to local bulletin board systems. Since 1990 he has been a Macintosh user of a variety of word processing, desktop publishing, Internet and Web site software. The focus of his doctoral work will be new communication and information technologies.

Wray was raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he graduated from high school in 1978. He since has lived in the United States in Arizona, California, Indiana, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas, Vermont, Washington, DC, and West Virginia. But he also has extensive foreign experience. Since first traveling to Mexico to study Spanish in 1983, he has made six separate visits there, including twice in 1996. He went to Europe in 1986 to see relatives in Croatia. In 1987 he traveled through western Canada. In Nicaragua in 1988 he built houses with a group of North American volunteers. For almost two years, starting in 1989, he traveled and worked in Europe, mostly in Italy, Germany, and The Netherlands.

Over the last 10 years, he has worked, for pay, as part of education or training, or on a voluntary basis, as an assistant editor, assistant organizer, community networker, contributing editor, data base manager, fact checker, independent researcher, information manager, international volunteer, micropower radio consultant, news editor, radio news intern, reporter, promotional writer, publicist, and teaching assistant.