people

grit matthias – president & founder

I am currently teaching German at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. My great passion and talent is to bring people of different cultural backgrounds together to enjoy each other’s company and to learn from one another.

I was born in Jena, Germany, which at the time was still part of East Germany. Growing up in Jena, I experienced life in an almost hermetically sealed country where contact with other nations and cultures was almost impossible. Fortunately, my situation changed before I became a teenager through German Reunification. Then, when I was 16, I spent my first year abroad, and ever since, I have surrounded myself with friends from across the world.

During my time at university, I realized that I needed to find a way to make a living using my passion. I therefore studied German as a Foreign Language, seeking to work in foreign countries.

Ever since I started teaching at Cornell, I have connected my students every semester to English learners in Germany via video chat. Seeing my students connect to others across the globe gave me the inspiration to expand the idea to a much larger scale while creating an opportunity for the students to contribute creative works to the free and open Internet.

alex cardenas – secretary

While at Cornell University, I was fortunate enough to be exposed to a broad set of ideas and issues that, more often than not, related back to personal experiences that I had had while growing up in the vibrant immigrant community of Los Angeles. My studies fortified my desire to increase the legal services provided to this community. I strongly believe that legal services and notions of social justice can only do so much when there is no or little communication across different cultural groups. Having extensive experience with different multicultural networks, I believe there to be a need to have more constant and in-depth communication across different and diverse backgrounds. By providing mediums such as CultureSofa, which allow for further communication through the open Internet, I believe we are working towards those much-needed services that we do not yet know how to provide.

andreea mascan – treasurer

I am currently a PhD student at Cornell University and I’m interested in exploring with Culture Sofa ways in which our everyday understanding of culture(s) can move beyond the paradigm of cultural relativism. In the past eight years I have moved twice across so-called cultural boundaries from Romania to Germany and from Germany to the US. When I say moved, I don’t just mean  packing, shipping belongings, traveling. I moved, that is I repositioned myself in a new social, cultural context and in repositioning myself I changed, I developed. I have become who I am on the move. For generations of Romanians two decades earlier, this would have been an impossibility.Yet for me moving was the formative experience of my adult life. This moving involved a lot of crossing of geo-political borders and cultural boundaries. What I have learned in crossing is that borders/ boundaries are build on a paradox: they are both imaginary and real, they are red lines drawn on a map and invisible lines that one at times cannot cross.

truong dang – web consultant

My name is Truong and I was born and raised in The Netherlands. My parents are Vietnamese refugees who fled the country in the aftermath of the Vietnam war and our little family has been living in The Netherlands (aka Holland) for about thirty years now. The Dutch community has really embraced us into their midst back in the 80ies and I think that’s why I feel quite at home here. At the moment I’m running my own little web business and I’m board member of a cultural festival. I’m helping CultureSofa out whenever I have some spare time left.

I really believe that dialogue is the key to combat prejudice and ignorance and that’s why I feel quite connected with the CultureSofa message. Samantha Hosea deserves some credits for she is responsible for linking me to CultureSofa. The web is changing our ways of communicating and connecting with each other enormously. I’m looking forward where it will take us in the near future.