Daniel Bernardi

Daniel Leonard Bernardi (born 1964)is the CEO of NarrativeTrack, Inc, the Director of the Veteran Documentary Corps, and a Professor of Cinema at San Francisco State University. He is the former Interim Dean of the College of Liberal and Creative Arts, Chair of the Cinema Department, and Director of the Documentary Film Institute. Bernardi earned a Bachelor of Arts in Radio-TV (1984) and a Masters of Arts in Media Arts (1988) from the University of Arizona. He went on to earn a PhD in Film and Television Studies from UCLA (1994). He completed a University of California postdoctoral research fellowship in 1997.
His main academic interests are: media studies, cultural studies, narrative theory, and rumors as narrative IEDS. His work in media, which is perhaps most known, emphasizes whiteness as a historical formation of meanings. Borrowing from Michael Omi and Howard Winant's theory of racial formation, he argues that whiteness is a historically powerful set of meanings that serves to either implicitly or explicitly dominate the shifting and reforming meaning of race in U.S. media.

Bernardi has taught film, television and new media at UCLA (1999 and 2000), UC Riverside (1997–1998), the University of Arizona (maho), and SFSU (2011–Present). He was awarded a Ford Foundation Dissertation Followship (1994), a UC President's Post-Doctoral Fellowship (1995–1997), and a Fulbright Fellowship (2009). He declined the Fulbright Fellowship. From 1998 to 2000, he worked for the Sci-Fi Channel as a consultant, writer and producer/host of the web feature Future Now (since deleted).

Bernardi is also an officer in the United States Navy Reserves. He has served at sea on the USS Coronado, the USS John C. Stennis (CVN-74), the USS Blue Ridge (LCC-19), and the USS Cleveland (LPD-7), as well as at shore in Italy, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Vietnam and at the Pentagon with the Chief of Navy Information. From May 2009 to February 2010 he was recalled to Active Duty in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. In Iraq, Bernardi served with US Special Forces as the Public Affairs Officer for Special Operations Task Force-Central, where he trained Iraqi Special Operations Forces (ISOF) and Emergency Response Brigade (ERB) Soldiers on combat camera and media operations. He also managed US media embeds, including CNN, NBC and AP, and US Army and US Navy journalists and photographers. In 2011 he returned to Active Duty for nine months and served as the Mission Public Affairs Officer for Pacific Partnership 2011, an annual humanitarian assistance initiative sponsored by the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Bernardi managed a team of military (U.S., Australian and New Zealand) and NGO (Project Hope) photographers, videographers and writers assigned to document and report on the mission.

In an effort to bridge his academic, military and entertainment industry experiences, in 2013 Bernardi launched NarrativeTrack Inc. (NT). NT is a strategic communication start-up company that tracks, analyzes and counters suspicious stories circulating in the media sphere that may threaten a client's brands and strategic communication plans. Bernardi serves as President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO). The company currently serves clients in the government, corporate and political sectors of the economy. As part of its services, Bernardi developed and is the founding editor of RumorsWiki, a non-profit affiliate of NT and San Francisco State University that houses scholarly entries on a range of historically significant rumors.

In 2012, Bernardi launched the Veteran Documentary Corps (VDC) project. Founded by grants and donations, VDC produces and exhibits short documentaries on the struggles and successes of veterans from across the world. To-date, VDC has produced and distributed twelve short documentaries on veterans dealing with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), the fall-out of the former "don't ask, don't tell" policy, and a range of other topics. The films are made by professional filmmakers. Bernardi acts as Executive Producer. He has also directed two of the films, one on Tim Koches (Vietnam War) and one on Michael Blackwell (Iraq War). Blackwell was a Combat Camera photographer that served with Bernardi in the U.S. Iraq War.