Mayra Ocampo has been promoted and will join the executive staff of the Directors Guild of America as assistant executive director in the Guild’s Los Angeles headquarters.
“Since joining the DGA, Mayra has helped to grow our organizing and expand our services to address the unique needs of our members working in non-dramatic categories including reality television,” said Jay D. Roth, DGA national executive director. “As assistant executive director, she will now build upon those efforts and take on additional duties as part of the DGA’s senior management team. We look forward to putting her deep experience and specialized skills to use in the service of our members who work across an array of categories.”
Ocampo joined the DGA in 2014 as a field representative, and was promoted to special assignments executive in 2015 where she expanded her work in non-dramatic categories including reality, and assisted in the administration and enforcement of the Guild’s Freelance Live and Tape Television Agreement–in addition to serving as the liaison to the Guild’s Women’s Steering and Asian American committees. She will continue to report to Lisa Layer, associate Western executive director.
Ocampo has more than two decades of labor union and membership organization experience. Prior to joining the DGA, Ocampo was the director of government affairs at the Nevada Local of the Service Employees International Union. She has also worked in various national and regional organizing roles for the AFL-CIO, United American Nurses, and the Hotel Employees & Restaurant Employees International Union.
Jules Feiffer, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Cartoonist and Writer, Dies At 95
Jules Feiffer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and writer whose prolific output ranged from a long-running comic strip to plays, screenplays and children's books, died Friday. He was 95 and, true to his seemingly tireless form, published his last book just four months ago.
Feiffer's wife, writer JZ Holden, said Tuesday that he died of congestive heart failure at their home in Richfield Springs, New York, and was surrounded by friends, the couple's two cats and his recent artwork.
Holden said her husband had been ill for a couple of years, "but he was sharp and strong up until the very end. And funny."
Artistically limber, Feiffer hopscotched among numerous forms of expression, chronicling the curiosity of childhood, urban angst and other societal currents. To each he brought a sharp wit and acute observations of the personal and political relations that defined his readers' lives.
As Feiffer explained to the Chicago Tribune in 2002, his work dealt with "communication and the breakdown thereof, between men and women, parents and children, a government and its citizens, and the individual not dealing so well with authority."
Feiffer won the United States' most prominent awards in journalism and filmmaking, taking home a 1986 Pulitzer Prize for his cartoons and "Munro," an animated short film he wrote, won a 1961 Academy Award. The Library of Congress held a retrospective of his work in 1996.
"My goal is to make people think, to make them feel and, along the way, to make them smile if not laugh," Feiffer told the South Florida Sun Sentinel in 1998. "Humor seems to me one of the best ways of espousing ideas. It gets people to listen with their guard down."
Feiffer was born on Jan. 26, 1929, in the Bronx. From... Read More