Craig A. Masback
Oxford Academia
Craig has spent over 40 years working in and around sports as a professional track and field athlete, TV sports commentator who covered five Olympic Games for NBC, founder of an innovative sports marketing/sports media venture, lawyer, CEO of USA Track & Field, and senior executive at Nike. He has taught classes at Yale Law School and Stanford on sports law and sport and society. Craig has a special connection to Oxford, where he studied at Trinity College for two years as a Keasbey Scholar and ran his first sub-four-minute mile on the Iffley Road track, where Sir Roger Bannister ran history’s first sub-four.
Michal Krenz
Oxford Academia
While at Oxford, Michał focused on combining his architectural training with that of a writer and wrote his master's and doctoral theses on the relationship between architecture, film, and literature. During that time, he lived on a river boat; writers need adventures to write about, after all. In his architectural master's thesis, he focused on the conservation of Hu-Tong areas in Beijing, China, as well as on the relationship between urban structures and systems of government. After university, to develop as a writer, he underwent pilot training while working as ground crew and firefighter at an airfield. This experience provided the material for a collection of short stories, published in 2009 under the title “Entropie”. He then continued writing about space and society for journals and newspapers and worked as a broadcast journalist producing his own weekly cultural TV show. Michał now works as screenplay consultant and assistant director on feature films and had his acting debut on the silver screen in 2021, playing a doomed intellectual. Some say he only did it to let himself be killed on-screen. Michał is fluent in English, Polish, and German, and gets by reading novels in French and Spanish, occasionally trying to revive his rusty Latin by reading some of the lighter classics. This fall, Michał will be returning to the film set to work on a WW2 spy film to be shot in the Polish mountains, and a family drama to be shot in Croatia.