Big Vision Media

Margaret Saizan is a social entrepreneur and currently the owner and founder of Big Vision Media, a company focused on transformational media, most recognized for her award winning online publication, Beyond Katrina: The Voice of Hurricane Disaster and Recovery, www.hurricane-katrina.org. In addition to her business background, she has extensive training in the field of personal development. She received her training as an ontological coach through Newfield Network, www.newfieldnetwork.com. Towards this end, she has innovated and remains engaged in a number of projects with both a local and global focus to impact large scale change. Beyond Katrina: The Voice of Hurricane Disaster and Recovery, www.hurricane-katrina.org, is one of the most visible of these projects, winning the Society for New Communications Research Award in 2006. (www.sncr.org) This new media publication has reached over a million people in over three hundred countries worldwide since its inception. It has been syndicated to such publications as: Reuters, The Chicago Sun Times, The Houston Chronicle and other traditional news sources. Through this endeavor she was invited by the U.S. State Department to coordinate a foreign media tour of New Orleans in conjunction with the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. She also assisted with a number of other Katrina recovery projects with such notable institutions as The Appleseed Foundations’ First Anniversary Katrina Report, The Katrina Deceased Project sponsored by The Earth Institute at Columbia University, and other initiatives. She has been interviewed as an expert resource on Gulf Coast recovery issues and the use of new communications strategies in disaster management and recovery by CNN, The Discovery Channel, John Hopkins University, the University of Munich and others. Beyond Katrina is currently in relaunch as Gulf Coast Rising, an online portal featuring news and information about innovations happening on the Gulf Coast. Currently, Margaret managers, represents and collaborates with New Orleans based photographer Matthew White on various coastal projects, such as "The End of the Great River", a landscape photo-documentary of the vanishing communities and historic landmarks of the lower Mississippi River Delta. She is also producing "Purgatory", a dark comedy about an ill-fated love affair set in New Orleans in 2005, the year of Hurricane Katrina. This original play by Christy McBrayer is set to open in New Orleans during the summer of 2010. Margaret is also collaborating with Los Angeles based photographer Helen K. Garber and jazz musician John Beasley to bring Urban Noir, a photography exhibit set to music to the Big Easy in 2010. As an avid patron of the Arts Margaret is also the exhibitions coordinator for PhotoNOLA, an annual celebration of photography in New Orleans, coordinated by the New Orleans Photo Alliance in partnership with museums, galleries and alternative venues citywide. (www.photonola.org). She has sponsored and/or co-produced exhibits for several Louisiana artists, such as: A Labyrinth Journey, by Theresa Herrera, a 3-D interactive art installation and traveling exhibit that included a 36’ canvas labyrinth as a walk-able painting. She is the co-founder of the Baton Rouge Labyrinth Project (www.batonrouge labyrinthproject.org), an effort to work with public agencies and organizations to build labyrinths as tools for community engagement and change. This has been hugely successful in East Baton Rouge Parish. Margaret and her collaborators succeeded at getting The Baton Rouge Recreation & Park Commission to appropriate the funds to commission a labyrinth installation at City Park. Margaret believes that the issues inherent to Gulf Coast rebuilding are microcosms for many of the complex challenges that confront the planet as a whole. She brings a think global, act local perspective to her life and work.

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