Bettina Fabos (Ph.D., University of Iowa) is the Director of the Fortepan US cooperative photo history portal and its prototype, Fortepan IA. Both projects display curated family snapshots and historical photographs from the 19th and 20^th-century. They are built in partnership with the Hungarian Fortepan. The Fortepan project is part of the global Open Portal Archive Network (OPAN), which Fabos co-founded.

Fabos is also Professor Emeritus of Visual Communication and Interactive Digital Studies at the University of Northern Iowa. Her work revolves around digital culture, digital visualization, digital photo archiving, and the communication of historical narrative and public memory. As a scholar and award-winning producer of digital culture, Fabos created and directed the exhaustive interactive timeline on Hungarian history (Proud and Torn: A Visual Memoir of Hungarian History) that uniquely combines photomontage, public history, and graphic memoir to tell the story of modern Hungary. She has also created multiple interactive, video and video art projects.

In other work, Fabos has written extensively about the role of the U.S. media in democracy and Internet commercialization, and is co-author of the leading introduction to mass communication textbook, Media and Culture (Bedford/St. Martin’s), which is used in mass communication survey classes across the U.S. Deeply committed to the Creative Commons and the public web, she co-authored Media & Power, an Open Educational Resource textbook focusing on media literacy. Finally, Fabos has co-authored two other textbooks, Media Essentials (2019) and Media in Society (2013).