Goldie "Red" Burns (née Gennis; April 9, 1925 – August 23, 2013) was a chair of the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) in the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.
[1] When she graduated from high school early at the age of 16, her parents considered her too young to go to college, so she went to Montreal for an internship at the National Film Board of Canada where she trained as a documentary filmmaker.
As part of the course, students taught residents in the Washington Heights district of Manhattan how to use video to pressure city hall into giving them a new traffic light.
[1][3][4] Among her projects at this research center for new technologies were a two-way cable system and interactive television through which senior citizens in Reading, Pennsylvania, could communicate with each other and get information about social services.
[2][3] She also used telecommunications systems to provide services to increase the independence of developmentally disabled individuals in Vermont[4] and pioneered an early teletext trial.
[6][7] Burns emphasized the importance of housing such projects within an art school context, stating that "People who come from other disciplines, not just computer scientists, can now create their own forms of communication.