Judging Panel

Active Lifestyle Vehicle Jurors

Nina Russin

Russin

Nina Russin has been writing about and photographing automobiles for twenty years, including ten years as a weekly columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. Her work has appeared in numerous enthusiast magazines, including AutoWeek, Automobile Quarterly, Collectible Automobile, Corvette Quarterly, Cycle World, European Car, Car Craft and more. Her car reviews have also appeared on Active.com and Competitor.com: two web sites geared towards active lifestyles.

She has done editorial photography for Jaguar, General Motors, Toyota,  Porsche and other manufacturers. An alumnus of Triton College’s automotive technology program, she received her ASE certification as an automotive technician in 1988. She also holds a master’s degree in fine arts from Indiana University.

Russin is also an avid distance runner, having completed ten marathons, including a Boston qualifier. She was a torch bearer for the 2002 Olympic torch relay, and continues to train about sixty miles per week.

Jim Woodman

Woodman

Jim Woodman is a visionary entrepreneur who brings over 25 years experience as event organizer, magazine publisher and founder/senior executive at The Active Network. As chief executive officer of Miami-based ActiveUSA.com, Woodman handled all aspects of managing the business, raising venture capital and hiring personnel. By late 1999, Woodman negotiated a 50% merger with Racegate.com and the two companies became The Active Network (active.com). As senior vice president of the merged entity, Woodman led every major acquisition that forms the foundation of The Active Network’s product offerings. Today the Active Network employs over 2,500 and is projected to reach over $300M in annual revenue for 2011. Woodman’s love of automobiles and sports got him reviewing vehicles for his magazine, Florida Sports, and other publications from 1992 to 1999. After a few years in San Diego, Woodman, along with Nina Russin and Bob Babbitt of Competitor Publishing, created the Active Lifestyle Vehicle program and Jim’s been contributing reviews and judging annual ALV winners for the past five years.

Jill Ciminillo

Ciminillo

Formerly the online editor for the Chicago sun-Times and the print auto editor for Pioneer Press Newspapers, Ciminillo tells it like it is from the fun to the functional. Jill currently writes weekly car reviews for The North Star National syndicate, manages an automotive blog for ChicagoNow called “Drive, She Said,” and has ocassional guest appearances on WGN radio. She also freelances for a fuel economy-focused web site called MPGomatic.com.

Jol Dantzig

Dantzig

A native of Evanston, Illinois, Jolyon (Jol) Dantzig studied photography and film at the Art Institute of Chicago.

While in his early twenties, Dantzig became a touring musician, supplementing his income buying and selling used guitars and running his band equipment rental company.

In 1970, Dantzig opened Northern Prairie Music, one of the first shops selling “vintage” instruments to professional musicians and collectors. In 1973 Dantzig was co-founder of the first “boutique” elecric guitar company, Hamer Guitars.

1993 saw the formation of the Dantzig Design Group, a design company that specializes in the music and motorsports industries.

Dantzig has written for numerous music and automotive publications including Amplitudes and AutoStar. His workshop blog can be found at guitardesigner.com

Dantzig’s hobby is collecting, working on and racing vintage sports cars and is active in HSR, SVRA, NASA and PCA racing. His recorded work includes performing with R&B legend Wilson Pickett and Handy Award winning producer Jon Tiven.

Dantzig currently resides in Connecticut.

Brian Douglas

Douglas

Brian Douglas has driven everything with wheels during his career in the automotive technical, marketing and journalism professions. He has reported on the automotive industry for 28 years, serving as editor for Gentry and Ranch & Coast magazines, automotive talk show host at KSFO, guest correspondent at KGO radio and automotive reviewer for the Minneapolis/St. Paul Times Tribune. Douglas is also the automotive features writer for Pajamas Media.

Douglas founded the Western Automotive Journalists organization, serving as its first president. Douglas lives an active lifestyle in Tiburon, with his wife, Kathleen, where mountain biking, kayaking and skiing are part of his leisure activities. His work can be found at www.autoeditor.com.

Larry Edsall

Edsall

Larry Edsall wanted to be a major league baseball umpire when he grew up. Instead of calling balls and strikes, he found a home in the press box.

He was a sportswriter and sports editor for daily newspapers in Michigan before being recruited by Leon Mandel to AutoWeek magazine, where he was motorsports editor and, for most of his dozen years on the masthead, managing editor.

He was recruited again, this time to the desert Southwest to establish editorial content for automotive websites and continues to oversee iZoom.com and to consult for classiccars.com. He also writes a weekly feature for The Detroit News, contributes to AutoWeek and Automotive News as well as other publications and websites, does editorial consulting, and is the author of 11 books, the latest are Masters of Car Design, Miata 20 Years, and Camaro: A Legend Reborn.

He has been quoted in The New York Times, Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald, Arizona Republic and Phoenix Business Journal and appeared as an automotive expert on CNN, the History and Travel channels, and appears frequently on NBC affiliate Channel 12 in Phoenix.

Chuck Giametta

Giametta

Chuck Giametta has written about new and vintage automobiles for more than 20 years. He’s currently Managing Editor of Iguida.com, a Web site he helped launch after serving for many years as Executive Auto Editor of Consumer Guide books and magazines. He’s created hundreds of new-car reviews for print and the Internet. He’s written and edited numerous books and Internet articles on such topics as muscle cars and sports cars and has produced hardcover histories of Ferrari, Jaguar and other classic marques. Chuck is a contributor to Collectible Automobile magazine and has created articles on automotive topics for general-interest publications.

He brings to his automotive writing a foundation forged as a reporter on daily newspapers in Chicago , Washington , D.C., and Norfolk , Virginia . His beats included politics, courts, education, business, and government. Chuck and his wife Carol have two adult daughters and live in Colorado Springs , Col.

Denise McCluggage   

McCluggage

Like the man surprised to learn he had been speaking prose all his life, Denise McCluggage is surprised to find she has been a pioneer. Nonetheless when women sportswriters were rare she was on the staff of the New York Herald Tribune covering primarily skiing and motor racing. She was known for doing what she wrote about whether it was skiing, racing or jumping out of airplanes (always with a parachute.)
 
After leaving the Herald Tribune she was at one time or another a member of the following racing and rallying teams in the U.S. and abroad: North American Racing Team (NART), Bill Harrah’s Racing Team, Rover Motor Co, British Motor Corp., Ford of England, Ford America , General Motors, L’Equipe Renault, Team Volvo, Camoradi and Briggs Cunningham’s team. Competition cars have included Ferrari, Porsche, Maserati, Jaguar, MG, Volvo, Mini-Cooper, Rover, Triumph, Lotus, Fiat, Ford, Renault, OSCA, Elva, Alfa-Romeo, DeTomaso and Corvair.
 
Her co-competitors at one time or another included: Juan Manuel Fangio, Stirling Moss, Phil Hill, Fireball Roberts, Joe Weatherly and Curtis Turner.
 
Chief successes: 1st Gran Turismo, Sebring 1961 (Ferrari): Copa de Damas, Grand Prix of Venezuela (Porsche) 1st in class Monte Carlo Rallye (Ford); the Coupe des Dames Trans-Canada Rallye (Corvair); the Coupe des Dames American International Rally (Triumph). And a number of class and overall victories at Nassau, Bridghampton, Daytona Beach, Elkhart Lake, Lime Rock, Watkins Glen and the Nurburgring.
 
She was involved at the inception of Competition Press (now AutoWeek, aka A/W) for which she is a columnist.  She has reacently launched her own web site in which she reviews new cars and includes new articles as well as one gleaned from more than half a century writing about cars. Her internet column, McBlog, appears as well as in The Detroit Bureau.com. She also offers her vintact racing photographs for sale.

She writes car reviews for web magazines including Road and Travel.  She is an honorary judge at the Pebble Beach Concours d’ Elegance and Amelia Island .
 
BOOKS: The Centered Skier (Tempest Books), Are You a Woman Driver? (Dunlap) By Brooks Too Broad for Leaping (Fulcorte Press). With Tom Burnside American Racing: Road Racing in the ’50s and ’60s (Konemann.)
 
AWARDS: Ken W. Purdy Award for Excellence in Automotive Journalism. Dean Bachelor Life Time Achievement Award. Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Media Association.  Spirit of Ford Award. Lifetime Achievement Award, Road & Travel Magazine. She was the first journalist to be inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame, Dearborn , MI. and was inducted in 2006 into the SCCA Hall of Fame. She was recently made a member of the RRDC, the Road Racing Drivers Club.

Sue Mead 

Mead

Sue Mead began her automotive career as a freelance evaluator for Four Wheeler Magazine in 1988, on the first team that included women test drivers.  Today, she travels the globe test-driving cars and trucks, and working as a photojournalist/feature writer for dozens of publications.  Mead specializes in four-wheel drive, and has been an auto editor and four-wheel drive editor for CNN/fn. Over the last 20 years, she has accumulated enough off-road miles to have circumnavigated the world in the dirt.
 
She has been a participating journalist on three Camel Trophy adventures in Borneo , Mongolia and Central America, and an attending journalist on the Camel Trophy ’98, in Tierra del Fuego , Argentina. She also attended Land Rover’s G4 Challenge, in Australia  in 2003, and drove with the Longitude team, also sponsored by Land Rover, from Singapore to Bangkok , in 2004.
 
Mead has participated in three record-setting adventure drives: the Arctic Circle Challenge ’95, the Tip to Tip Challenge ’96, and the TransAmerica Challenge ’97 and been a co-driver for Rod Hall in the 1996 Baja 1000(1st -place finish). She was a co-driver for Darren Skilton for the 1999 Baja 1000 (1st- place finish) and the Paris-Dakar-Cairo 2000.

Mead was also a co-driver in the Baja 2000, on the internationally-ranked Mitsubishi team (1st-place finish), and on the Scaroni Motorsports team in 2001. She competed as a co-driver in the Nevada 1000, and is featured in the off-road documentary, “Into the Dust,” as a member of the Toyota Motorsports Team. Mead also competed behind the wheel on two Wide Open Baja/Centrix Teams in the 2002 and 2003 Baja 1000. Mead competed in the 2011 Dakar Rally as the first female “driver of record” from North and South America: she won her class.
 
Mead has written three books: Monster Trucks and Tractors; Off Road Racing, Legends and Adventures; and Rock Crawling published by Chelsea House. Her work has appeared in Four Wheeler, Four Wheel & Off Road, 4WD and Sport Utility, Off Road, Motor Trend, Truck Trend, AutoWeek, Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, Men’s Journal, Parade, New York Times, Road and Track Buyers Guide, European Car, as well as magazines and newspapers around the globe. She is a correspondent for Motor Trend Radio. She has received two awards from the International Automotive Press Association, and is an inductee of the Off Road Motorsports Hall of Fame in Reno , Nevada .

Jim Prueter

Prueter

Jim Prueter is a Sr. Vice President at AAA (American Automobile Association) an organization with over 50 million members in North America. 

He is also an automotive and travel journalist where his new product auto reviews, automotive and travel articles regularly appear in AAA publications throughout the U.S. and Canada and is a contributor for “AAA Top Picks,” an annual award for the best new vehicles.

He has regular automotive segments and appears on KTVK TV 3 in Phoenix and KGUN TV 9 in Tucson.

Jim and his wife Claudia live in Phoenix, AZ.

Linda Sharp

Sharp

Linda Sharp has spent a lifetime eating, sleeping and breathing automobiles. At the time she received her SCCA competition license she was the youngest female and one of the youngest members to do so. She would go on to compete in SCCA National Championship, the SCCA Playboy Challenge Series and the Pro SCCA Trans-Am Series.

Other competitive endeavors included being an early competitor in IMSA’s Kelley American Challenge Series, as well as the BF Goodrich Radial Challenge Series and a few forays into the world of NASCAR late model stock events.
 
Sharp taught at the Road Atlanta Driver Training Center for eighteen years, as well as the Skip Barber Racing School. She instructed in defensive driving and anti-terrorist driving skills as well.  For six years she trained sales consultants at the Saturn facility in Springhill, TN.

From 1990-2006, Sharp produced an automotive column for the Atlanta Journal Constitution that was syndicated on both the New York Times and Cox Wire services.
She has also contributed to Car & Driver, Better Homes & Gardens, Essence, Corvette Fever and Cars.com. 

On multiple occasions, Sharp has been a judge for Amelia Island’s prestigious Concour’s de Elegance. She and her husband, Bob, live in Mount Airy, North Carolina.
 
Tamara Warren

Warren

Motor City native Tamara Warren is a New York based editor and writer. Her articles have appeared in over 75 publications covering cars, music, the arts, and social issues. She has most recently written for  The New York Times, Forbes, Life and Times, Delta Sky, AutoWeek, Automobile and the Detroit Free Press. She is a founding editor of the online lifestyle car magazine Gotryke.com. Tamara is a member of the Author’s Guild and the International Motor Press Association. Tamara holds a BA in social relations from James Madison College at Michigan State University and is pursuing an MFA in creative writing at The New School. 

 Larry Webster

Webster