Founding Editorial Board Member

Sandhya Dirks is a national correspondent at NPR, covering race and identity in America. She created and hosted the podcast American Suburb, about the new great migration of people of color to suburbia. She produced and reported On Our Watch, an investigative podcast uncovering long-secret tapes of police interrogations that reveal how police really police - and protect - themselves. Sandhya is also the mother of a cancer surviving toddler, and believes all stories are stories about power.

Founding Editorial Board Member

Dr. Chenjerai Kumanyika is a scholar, audio producer and advocate who works in NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Alongside his scholarship and teaching, disciplinary service on the intersections of social justice and media, Kumanyika specializes in using narrative non-fiction audio journalism to critique the ideology of American historical myths about issues such as race, the Civil War, and policing. He has written in scholarly venues such as Popular Music & Society, Popular Communication, The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture, as well as public venues such as The Intercept, Transom, NPR Codeswitch, All Things Considered, Invisibilia, and VICE. Kumanyika is also the co-creator, co-executive producer and co-host of Uncivil, Gimlet Media’s podcast on the Civil War and he is the collaborator for Scene on Radio’s influential Season 2 “Seeing White,” and Season 4 on the history of American democracy.

Kumanyika’s work has been recognized with several prestigious honors including the George Foster Peabody Award (2018) for Uncivil and The Media Literate Media Award (NAMLE) for Scene on Radio (2021). In 2021, he received the Union of Democratic Communications’ Dallas Smythe Award for his career accomplishments and advocacy.

Founding Editorial Board Member and Art Director

Ariana Martinez is a multimedia artist, radio maker, and educator. They have created original audio features for BBC Radio 4's Short Cuts and BBC Radio 3’s Between the Essays. As a professional sound designer and audio engineer, Ariana has worked on Immaterial for Magnificent Noise and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Prism: Tales of Your City for Pineapple Street Studios, and Say You're Sorry for Bucket of Eels and Audible Originals, among others. Ariana is a dedicated media arts educator and has taught for UnionDocs, the Salt Institute for Documentary Study, the Association for Independents in Radio (AIR Media), the City University of New York, New York University, and others.

In their personal creative practice, Ariana investigates processes of sensory perception and the simultaneously social and spatial process of navigation. Across all of their creative mediums, Ariana works to hone their own capacities for observation, attention, and non-linear and non-prescriptive storytelling. Ariana's audio and video work has appeared at HearSay Festival (Ireland), Open City Documentary Festival (UK), LUCIA Festival (Italy), BANGOUJA Festival (Lithuania), OORZAKEN Festival (Netherlands), and the Third Coast International Audio Festival (US).

Founding Editorial Board Member

Sayre Quevedo is an artist and journalist. He works across mediums to tell stories about intimacy, identity, and human relationships. Quevedo began as a reporter with Youth Radio in Oakland, California at the age of 15. Since then his work has been featured on NPR, Marketplace, BBC Short Cuts, Love Me on the CBC, McSweeney's and Radio Atlas.

In 2018 his piece 'Espera' received the Third Coast/RHDF Directors' Choice Award and his other piece 'The Quevedos' was nominated for a Best Audio Documentary award by the International Documentary Association (IDA). The following year he won the 2019 Third Coast/RHDF Gold Award for Best Documentary for 'The Return' . It was also nominated for a Best Audio Documentary award by the IDA, his second nomination two years in a row. In 2023 Quevedo was nominated twice for Best Stand-Alone Audio Documentary by the IDA and won for his piece, 'Documenting a Death by Euthenasia.' Quevedo was the Fall 2019 Podcaster-In-Residence for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, an Associate Producer for The Daily at The New York Times and NPR's Latino USA, and a Producer for VICE News. He is currently a teaching artist at Columbia University and an adjunct faculty member at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

Founding Editor

Kalli Anderson is a Brooklyn-based audio and film documentary maker, writer and educator. She is a Tow Professor and the Director of Audio Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at The City University of New York. She started her career in radio at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in Montreal and, since 2008, has worked as an independent radio documentary producer, story editor, and podcast development consultant. Her work has been featured on a number of radio shows and podcasts including, most recently, Short Cuts (Falling Tree/BBC Radio 4) and The Doc Project (CBC).

She also works as a feature writer and documentary filmmaker and loves collaborating on audio and multimedia projects that combine documentary, art, community engagement, and journalism. Her documentary short films have won audience and jury prizes at film festivals internationally.

For audio documentary, Kalli has won a Canadian RTDNA Award, a silver Canadian Digital Publishing Award, and has been named a finalist at the Third Coast/RHDF Competition, The Hearsay International Audio Arts Festival, and the Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ) Awards.

Associate Editor and Social Media Producer

Kimberly Izar is an engagement and audio journalist based in Brooklyn, New York. She enjoys reporting stories that delve into the systemic inequities that shape politics, art, and culture. Previously, she was a longform podcasting fellow for NPR's Rough Translation series about love marriages in India. Her work has been featured in NPR, Gothamist, WNYC, Prism, The Indypendent, among others. Prior to her journalism work, she was a nonprofit fundraiser for nearly a decade raising funds for groups building economic and political power for the working class and communities of color. She is a graduate of the Masters of Engagement Journalism program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.