Speakers
Ana Gonzalez
Producer, Mosaic, The Public’s Radio
Ana is a storyteller with focus on shooting and editing together stories that elicit compassion. Her B.A. from Brown University in Jazz Studies underscores her pieces with rhythm, style, and an ability to play and improvise. Her work in media education seeks to represent the underrepresented.
Ariel Mejia
Ariel Mejia also goes by Ari and is a Chicago-based freelance audio producer and artist. She identifies as a time traveler, and has found audio functions as a multi-tool in her travels. Find her and her work at www.arielmejia.com.
Session: Soundscapes and Podcasting - 10:30am ET
When it comes to sound FX and music in podcasts, where do you start? Ariel Mejia and Mara Lazer share how to build immersive sound environments from scratch.
Mara Lazer
Mara Lazer is a musician, educator and audio producer in New Orleans, LA. They bring their Pisces sensibilities of deep emotional arcs and wild possibilities to every project. If you want to scheme on daydreams say so, www.maralazer.com.
Session: Soundscapes and Podcasting - 10:30am ET
Sarah Ventre is an audio journalist based in Phoenix and is one of the hosts of Unfinished: Short Creek, a podcast from Stitcher/Witness Docs and Critical Frequency about a fundamentalist Mormon community on the Utah-Arizona border. It was named the #3 best podcast of 2020 by The New Yorker, one of the best podcasts of 2020 by The Atlantic, and made the Bello Collective’s year-end list as well. As part of her reporting for Unfinished, Sarah embedded in Short Creek and lived in former FLDS prophet Rulon Jeffs’ house.
Sarah has produced for NPR, PBS, the Center for Science and the Imagination, the Jewish Women’s Archive, and other outlets. She’s one of the founders of Girls Rock! Phoenix, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering girls, trans, and gender nonconforming youth through music, is a Regional Producer for The Moth, and is a journalism fellow with the Recovering Truth project from the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict. Unfinished: Short Creek won a Wilbur Award for Best Radio/Podcast Series and was nominated for two Ambie Awards. Sarah has also won an Edward R. Murrow Award and was a finalist for two Religion News Association Awards for her reporting in Short Creek.
Lina Altaan Al Hariri
Lina Altaan Al Hariri is a freshman at Rhode Island College. Lina says, “I met my friend Clare through Brown Refugee Youth Tutoring and Enrichment where I was a student at the beginning then I became a junior counselor for two summers. I got to work with Clare in an audio piece called This is the Story. The audio piece was about my experience living in three different countries as a Syrian refugee. Through BRYTE, I also met one of my friends, Pranati, who is now a senior at Brown med school. I got to work with Pranati on one of her cool projects. The project was about resettlement in Rhode Island and included perspectives from two Syrian women. We interviewed Syrian refugee women about their experiences with the U.S. health care system and their feelings about resettlement.”
Tony Mendez
Poder 1110 WPMZ
Valerie Tutson
Valerie Tutson graduated from Brown University with a self-designed major, Storytelling As a Communications Art, and a Masters in Theatre. Since 1991 she has traveled the country and world teaching, gathering and sharing stories and songs. She is a founding member and Executive Director of the Rhode Island Black Storytellers, and Festival Director of FUNDA FEST: An Annual Celebration of Black Storytelling. Valerie has been featured at numerous festivals, including the National Association of Black Storytellers Festival, the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesboro, TN, the Zanendaba Storytelling Festival in South Africa. She has received numerous awards for her work.
Maria Garcia
Maria Garcia is the Managing Editor at WBUR, where she oversees the Arts and Culture, Investigations, Environmental and Education teams.
Before that, Maria reported on politics and public policy along the U.S. - Mexico border for more than a decade.
For most of 2020, she has stepped away from the daily editorial duties to produce Anything for Selena, a podcast from WBUR and Futuro Studios that examines the legacy of Selena Quintanilla.
Maria is also a queer, first-generation Mexican-American who listens to Selena when she needs some motivation.
Workshop: Constructing Anything For Selena - 2pm ET
Liza Yeager
Liza Yeager is an audio producer who currently works at NPR’s Planet Money and has made longform stories for Invisibilia, WNYC’s Nancy, and 99 Percent Invisible. In 2014, she co-founded the student audio-storytelling collective Now Here This.
DJ Franchise
Franchise has DJ'd in Rhode Island since 1999. He's the Head of the Rhode Island music-focused, Franchise Report and the Host of 360 in the Morning on WBRU360 on 101.1FM.
Panel: The Music Scene and Music Discovery in Rhode Island - 3:30pm ET
It’s easier than ever to create music, but it’s not as clear how artists can go mainstream. We’ll explore how new networks find and promote local music in RI.
Gisel Bello
Gisel Bello is a New York City native, Afro-Dominicana, and a proud first-generation graduate. She is currently a fourth-year medical student at the Warren Alpert School of Medicine and serves as the Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion Fellow there. In her spare time, she writes to process the achy moments in life and empowers underrepresented medical students to tell their own stories through her podcast You Are Med.
Jaileen Vargas-Garcia
Jaileen says: “I am a nonbinary, Latinx, and queer, so you could imagine how invested I am in social activism. I am 16 years old and attend Classical High School. I joined Providence Student Union in March 2021, and have been attending an art program about social justice and art. Personally, I wouldn't call myself an artist, but I enjoy the curating of art and media. I like finding connections between older classical art and more modern art, and seeing how humans have progressed culturally through art. I am very excited about what PSU has in store for me, and how art can further influence society.
Ash Sanders
Ashley is a journalist and podcast producer who covers both religion and the environment (and sometimes, when she's feeling multi-tasky, religion and the environment). Her writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, The Believer, Narratively, NPR's The Salt, and Buzzfeed, as well as the climate anthology, All We Can Save. As a proud Utahn and recovering ex-Mormon, Ash has used her insider knowledge to delve into everything from the strange world of Mormon survivalist food to LDS dance propaganda films. She divides her time between Salt Lake City and Brooklyn, which is a fancy way of saying she got stuck in Utah during COVID. She's currently getting a masters in creative writing at NYU and working on a book about religion, climate change, and the end of the world.
Precious Lopez
After working in corporate America for most of her adult life, Precious Lopez returned to school to pursue a Masters of Arts in International Higher Education & Intercultural Relations with a focus in Multicultural Arts Education & Community Development.
Precious has been with the Providence Student Union since 2019. There, she has found her calling in creating partnerships with Rhode Island communities that engage young people in basic life skills, social and emotional understanding, and multicultural arts education. Precious says, “Continuing to create safe and supportive spaces for youth, staff, and connecting with the community is where I thrive. I am eager, humbled, and excited to step into the role of PSU Co-Executive Director.”
Mia Raquel
M.R. (she/ they) is usually an Oakland-based audio-storyteller, audio producer & storytelling consultant; however, due to the pandemic they are currently located on the east coast. M.R. is bilingual (Spanish/ English) since birth & is a storyteller in various mediums, with experience working for nonprofits such as StoryCorps (NPR) & Omnidawn Publishing, along with lots of culinary arts experience working with chefs such as Russ Moore of Camino, in restaurants around the Bay Area. originally from Massachusetts, M.R. graduated with a B.A. from Oberlin College with a degree in Comparative American Studies & Creative Writing in 2017.
Chioke I’Anson
Chioke I'Anson is a podcaster, a voice of underwriting for NPR, a professor at VCU, and the director of the VPM + ICA Community Media Center. He's been on several shows including Love + Radio, Everything is Alive, and Wait Wait Don't Tell Me.
Workshop: So you want to start a podcast? - 2pm ET
The road from podcast idea to podcast pitch can be long, but it doesn't have to be. Join us for some tips on how to refine your pitch and make your show the best version of itself
Workshop: Finding your voice - 3:30pm ET
It's easy to imitate. It's much harder to do your own thing. But podcasts are about individual voices, so let's do some things to develop yours.
Anita Rao
Anita Rao is an award-winning public radio journalist and the host and creator of "Embodied," a podcast and radio show about sex, relationships and health from North Carolina Public Radio WUNC. She's also the managing editor of WUNC's on-demand content and editor of the critically-acclaimed podcast "The Double Shift." She has traveled the country recording interviews for the Peabody Award-winning StoryCorps production department, founded and launched a podcast about millennial feminism in the South, and served as the managing editor and regular host of "The State of Things," North Carolina Public Radio's flagship daily, live talk show.
Session: Having Uncomfortable Conversations - 2 pm ET
Steve Ahlquist
Steve Ahlquist is the co-founder and lead reporter for UpriseRI. He has covered human rights, social justice, progressive politics and environmental news for nearly a decade.
Torey Malatia
Torey Malatia has nearly two decades of public radio experience, most recently as CEO of WBEZ/Chicago Public Media. Malatia’s accomplished public radio career includes the co-founding of This American Life, a ground-breaking program that changed the sound of public radio. He was also instrumental in the development of Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me, one of the most popular programs distributed by NPR.
Jason Moon
Jason Moon is a Senior Reporter/Producer with New Hampshire Public Radio's DOCUMENT team, a longform, narrative news reporting project. He's also the host and reporter behind Bear Brook, a podcast about genetic genealogy, amateur web-sleuths, and an unsolved murder. Bear Brook has been downloaded more than 15 million times and was named one of the best podcasts of 2018 by The New Yorker magazine.
Nicole Rabe
Nicole Rabe is a high school student and part of the Providence Student Union’s Art and Activism team. She is currently working to publicize the PSU “Student Bill of Rights.”
Nicole absolutely loves listening to music and playing soccer. She is currently working on her first clothing collection to be debuted in June.
Chris Bannon
Chief Content Officer - Midroll Media
Chris Bannon has been Chief Content Officer for Stitcher since 2015. There, he has led content development for popular new Stitcher and Earwolf podcasts including Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, Office Ladies, The Dream, Heaven’s Gate, Chris Gethard’s Beautiful Stories from Anonymous People, and LeVar Burton Reads. A thirty-year veteran of public radio and podcasting, before Stitcher Chris served as VP of Content Development and Production and, Program Director for WNYC, the country’s largest public radio station. There, he led the podcast teams that created Freakonomics Radio, Here’s The Thing with Alec Baldwin, and Anna Sale’s Death, Sex & Money. He is the recipient of three Peabody Awards.