Staff

Malkia Cyril, Executive Director

Malkia A. Cyril is the Executive Director and founder of the Center for Media Justice. With more than 15 years’ experience as a community organizer, policy advocate, and communications strategist, Malkia has led local and national campaigns for racial and economic justice and is the author of numerous essays and articles on media, marginalization, and movement-building.

Malkia is the recipient of the Media Leader award from the Alliance for Community Media, the Emerging Leader award from the Media That Matters Film Festival, and other awards from the Media Justice Fund, Rock the Vote, and others; with appearances in Democracy Now, Hard Knock Radio, Breakdown FM, Free Speech TV, the documentary Outfoxed, the documentary Broadcast Blues, the SF Weekly, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the New York Times, the Village Voice, and others.

Amalia Deloney, Grassroots Policy Director

Amalia Deloney is a Guatemala-born activist, cultural worker and former Senior Fellow with the Main Street Project. In the Minneapolis area, where she was based until recently, Amalia is a board member of the Headwaters Foundation for Justice, and a longtime member of the Social Change Fund Grants Committee of the Headwaters Foundation. Nationally, Amalia is a board member of the Indigenous Women’s Network, Progressive Majority’s Racial Justice Advisory, and the Media Democracy Coalition. Additionally, she serves as a field representative for the American Indian Treaty Council and has participated in UN meetings such as the Working Group on Indigenous Populations and the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. For the past two years, she has been on the steering committee for the Midwest Social Forum, and was a member of the Indigenous Advisory Committee for the 2006 US Social Forum.

Amalia has over 15 years of experience in community and cultural organizing and community education. Her specific focus includes human rights and anti-racism education, cultural rights, the production of knowledge, and movement building. She was a 2004 recipient of the Mansfield Upper Midwest International Human Rights Fellowship, a 2007 Salzburg Seminar fellow during their Immigration and Inclusion: Rethinking National Identity program, and is a recipient of a Gaea Sea Change fellowship in 2009. Additionally, Amalia is a recipient of the 2005 Minnesota Hispanic Chamber of Commerce’s 25 On the Rise Award, given to 25 Latinos under the age of 40, as well as the 2007 recipient of Macalester College’s Young Alumni Award, given to graduates who have demonstrated outstanding and achievement and community involvement after graduation.

Amalia earned her B.A. in Urban Studies and History from Macalester College and her Juris Doctorate with a focus on Social Justice from Hamline University School of Law. Her areas of specialization include community organizing and education, cultural rights, non-partisan political participation, and media justice.

Karlos Gauna Schmieder, Communications Strategist

Karlos Gauna Schmieder is a talented organizer and strategist from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Before joining the Center for Media Justice, Karlos worked for nearly a decade as a community and communications organizer with SouthWest Organizing Project (SWOP). As cochair of communications for the 2007 U.S. Social Forum, he coordinated media strategy for this groundbreaking event. He is also a former steering committee member of Grassroots Global Justice, resource ally with Right to the City Alliance and editor of Voces Unidas.

Karlos is currently a member of Progressive Communicators Network’s Leadership Council and co chair of communications working group of the 2010 U.S. Social Forum.

He has trained hundreds of community leaders and organizers in strategic communications. His recent work includes coordinating a community communications strategy to support the defeat of Proposition 6; in November 2008, Prop 6 became the first piece of so-called “tough on crime” hate legislation aimed at young people of color to be defeated in the state of California.

Karlos has appeared on affiliates of ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, and ClearChannel News, as well as on CounterSpin, NPR, and the Laura Flanders Show, and in the Dallas Morning News, the Albuquerque Journal, the Albuquerque Tribune, the East Bay Express, the Grassroots Fundraising Journal, Wiretap, Youth Today, YES magazine, and more.

His media strategy work has lead to grassroots voices and spokespeople appearing on CNN, MSNBC, NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, BBC, CBC, PBS, and Telesur, and in USA Today, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New Orleans Times Picayune, the Oakland Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, and most major and progressive news outlets from all over the world.

Contact Karlos on Twitter: @anotherpundit.

Betty Yu, Media Action Grassroots Network Coordinator

Betty Yu is a longtime community organizer, media activist, and filmmaker. Prior to joining CMJ, Betty was the Director of Community Outreach & Media Services at Manhattan Neighborhood Network (MNN), New York City’s community access TV organization. She was one of the lead organizers in the Save Public Access TV campaign in New York, organizing individuals and organizations to oppose any legislation that threatened community access TV. Betty has additionally worked as a lead organizer for the Chinese Staff and Workers’ Association. She has been recognized as a semi-finalist for the 2000 National Brick “Do Something” Award, the recipient of the 1999 Union Square Award for grassroots activism, and the 2007 fellow of the National Rockwood Fellowship in Media, Communications and Information Policy.

In addition to her experience as an organizer and alliance builder, Betty has presented at dozens of local and national conferences on issues ranging from economic and racial justice organizing to media policy, grassroots media activism, and media making 101. She has also appeared on several news outlets including ABC, FOX, CW, WB, NY1, and been featured in such publications as the New York Daily News, the Financial Times, Stress Magazine, Brooklyn Bridge, and City Limits. She co-wrote the Media Justice Fund’s “Scenario Study on the Future of Community Access Television” and is a regular contributor to the Community Media Review.

Oshen Turman, Program Associate

Oshen Turman is a 29-year-old East Oakland native. She is a writer, artist, activist, and student of healthy living. She has been involved in social justice work for the past nine years, beginning in her senior year of high school, when she spoke on panels aimed at teachers, students, and administrators about issues such as homophobia in the Oakland public school system. Through this work, she assisted in the development of a resource guide aimed for queer-identified youth and their allies. For six years, Oshen worked with Young Women United for Oakland on issues including reproductive justice, health and wellness education, political development, grassroots organizing, and organizational development. She has been working with the Center for Media Justice for over a year now, where she has been able to expand her knowledge of media justice.

Lisa Jervis, Finance and Operations Director

Lisa Jervis became an activist for independent political media by accident when she cofounded Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture because she was angry about some things and knew that no one else would publish her essays about it. While growing Bitch from a tiny 300-copy zine into a national quarterly nonprofit magazine with a circulation approaching 50,000, she learned some things about how the media landscape affects social justice movements.

In addition to her many writings for Bitch, her work has appeared in Ms., the San Francisco Chronicle, Utne, Mother Jones, the Women’s Review of Books, the late and much-lamented Hues, Salon, the late and also-lamented Punk Planet, the late and lamented-by-the-few-people- who’ve-heard-of-it LiP: Informed Revolt, Body Outlaws (Seal Press), and Tipping the Sacred Cow (AK Press). She is the co-editor of Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) and the author of Cook Food: A Manualfesto for Easy, Local, Healthy Eating (PM Press).

She was born in Boston and partially raised in Los Angeles; her family moved to New York City when she eight, making her a New Yorker by chronology and temperament. The transplant to Oakland, however, has worked out remarkably well.

Chantel Cain, Executive Associate

A proud Bay Area native, Chantel is a quiet observer to some and a sarcastic bastard to many more. Raised in Richmond and transplanted to Oakland, she became aware of the inequities between people of color and Euro Americans at a young age. Today, as a founding member of Oakland Copwatch, she is making sure the Oakland Police Department is painfully aware that the streets are watching. When not empowering the community one camera shot at a time, Chantel can be found reading up on history not found in U.S. textbooks, criticizing American commercials, and rediscovering riot grrrl.