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, strategist, and communications expert, Malkia has worked with organizations such as the Applied Research Center, We Interrupt This Message, and the Community Organizing Team, and has partnered closely with Consumer’s Union, Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the Media and Democracy Coalition, Public Knowledge, the Media Access Project, and Free Press. Malkia has led dozens of community campaigns; is the author of numerous essays and articles on media, marginalization, and movement-building; and motivates the building of popular movements through the delivery of training, public speeches, and strategic consultation.

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. Malkia has appeared on or 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, Media Action Grassroots Network Coordinator

Amalia Deloney is a Guatemala-born activist, cultural worker and former Senior Fellow with the Main Street Project. In the Minneapolis area, where she is based, 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.

Mervyn Marcano, PR Strategist

An accomplished communicator and organizer, Mervyn Marcano has worked on a variety of local and national campaigns.

Before joining the Center for Media Justice, Mervyn was the communications director at ColorOfChange.org, the 400,000-member Black online advocacy group founded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. He provided leadership in building the organization’s profile with high-level media outlets, while strengthening relationships with the net/Blackroots. Mervyn steered difficult media cycles spurred by the organization’s work to free the Jena 6, pushed black media to talk about online black activism and leadership, and provided a new frame for national media who wanted to talk about superdelegates and the black vote. Mervyn also led the organization’s PR in the primary election cycle, providing a consistent talking point on race-baiting, voter disenfranchisement, and black political engagement.

Previously, Mervyn trained community organizations and advocates on the basics of PR as a communications strategist at the Spin Project. He helped dozens of groups around the country refine their goals, reach out to major press outlets about unpopular causes, and define their work more clearly. Before that, Mervyn served as communications director at the League of Young Voters, a progressive young voter group. The League was one of several groups credited with helping to take back Congress in 2006, thanks to the overwhelming turnout of the youth vote.

Before joining the League, Mervyn was the communications director for the Right to Vote Campaign, a national collaboration of eight major civil rights organizations dedicated to ending felony disenfranchisement. His work there helped to overturn discriminatory laws and policies, enabling thousands of people to vote again.

Mervyn began his career in communications while organizing with community groups in New York City, and after a short stint in private PR.

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.

Chris Lymbertos, Associate Director

Born and raised in Iran by Syrian and Armenian parents, Chris came to the Bay Area in 1976 to attend college, with plans to return to the Middle East to teach. As a result of the changes in social and political conditions due to the revolution in Iran and the subsequent war, she remained in the U.S., developed a transcontinental and nomadic identity, and dedicated herself to building social and political awareness of racial, ethnic, class, and gender identities in the U.S.

For the last 20 years she has dedicated herself to grassroots efforts and social justice organizations focused on shifting power dynamics away from entities based on exploitation and oppression to those based on equity and self-determination. Some of these organizations include Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice, Generation Five, San Francisco Women Against Rape, Women of Color Resource Center, and WILD for Human Rights, among others.

Chris hopes that her work contributes to equity, peace, and justice in all of our homelands and an opportunity for rightful and safe return for all exiles and refugees.

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.

Prentis Hemphill, Development Strategist

Prentis (or P) Hemphill was born and raised just outside Dallas, Texas, to a black working-class family led by a single mother. P credits her early politicizing to a wisely critical, intensely loving and vocal mother who always taught P to question. After studying African history and theatre at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, P made his way to Bay Area determined to find ways to converge his political and historical analysis with his growing interest in media production, accessibility, and performance.

P has contributed to the work of several organizations committed to community and social justice, particularly working around issues of affordable housing. And for the last four years P has worked in different capacities with the Freedom Archives, an archive of progressive audio and video, producing progressive educational media, growing and developing a youth media training program, and participating in the overall growth of the organization.

P has continued in her trajectory of performance by performing with the all-black performance troupe Nappy Grooves. This coalition of queer performance artists has led P to perform throughout the Bay Area and around the country. P has led performance workshops and lectured on the performance of black masculinities and queerness at University of Texas at Austin, Mills College, and as an artist-in-residence at Massachusetts Institute for Technology.

P has also written on the subject of prison abolition for the Critical Resistance publication the Abolitionist, has been featured in Left Turn magazine discussing the state of the black queer left, and has worked with the Committee for the Defense of the San Francisco 8.

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.