Meet the Class of 2022
Alejandra Salazar
Alejandra Salazar is a producer and associate editor at the award-winning public radio show and podcast Latino USA. Before her time at Latino USA, Alejandra was a reporter/producer for WNYC, New York City’s NPR member station, where she covered local and daily news for the flagship shows Morning Edition and All Things Considered. In the past, she has written articles for the San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, The Dallas Morning News, and Refinery29.
Alejandra primarily covers arts and culture, especially as it intersects with politics, social justice, and history. She got her start in radio through her college station at Stanford University. Before pivoting into journalism, she was a Univision Media Fellow at the National Hispanic Media Coalition in L.A.
Alejandra is originally from San Antonio, Texas and is currently based in Brooklyn.
Jimmy Ramirez
Jimmy Ramirez was raised in Northern California by his mother. He spent his childhood in hair salons and community college classes. Jimmy studied at Georgetown University and earned a degree in Government, Film & Peace Studies. While in Washington DC, he worked in the Obama White House and made appearances on MSNBC and TED. He spent six years at Google leading video campaigns for companies in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Jimmy entered the world of audio storytelling after participating in the National Public Radio Story Lab Fellowship. In this program, they incubated their series Viva La Mota, a podcast on the history of marijuana and how it was weaponized throughout the War on Drugs.
Jimmy is based in the Bay Area.
Lucy Kang
Lucy Kang is a second-generation Chinese American radio journalist and artist. They are a producer, editor, and instructor at the KPFA Storytelling Project, which supports the creation of impactful long-form narrative radio journalism. They used to produce the KPFA program UpFront with Brian Edwards-Tiekert and Cat Brooks.
They have won multiple awards for their radio journalism. Most recently, their story exploring the Indigenous history of the Black Rock Desert won a Public Media Journalists Association First Prize for Enterprise Reporting. Black Rock Desert is the ancestral territory of the Northern Paiute people, but once a year it also becomes the site of the Burning Man festival. Their reporting on homelessness in Oakland, CA has also been recognized by the NorCal Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.
They graduated from the Transom Story Workshop and are based in occupied Ohlone land in the East Bay, CA.
Mayowa Aina
Mayowa Aina is a member of the Special Projects team at NPR member station KNKX, based in Tacoma, WA where she pitches and produces stories to highlight the creative potential of audio journalism.
Prior to returning to her hometown of Tacoma, Mayowa spent two years in Anchorage, Alaska covering local and statewide education issues and produced Alaska Public Media's flagship nightly news magazine Alaska News Nightly. In 2018, she was also a Kroc Fellow at NPR. Mayowa began working in audio production by volunteering with a community storytelling/oral history project and she graduated from the University of Washington.
In her free time, Mayowa enjoys live music, taking road trips, and watching fridge organization videos on TikTok.
Miguel Contreras
Miguel Contreras is a journalist, writer, and producer based in Los Angeles. He is currently the lead producer and editor of the new Spotify original podcast Abolition X, an interview show that explores how the ideas behind prison abolition intersect with culture.
He was the producer on the highly-acclaimed second season of There Goes The Neighborhood, a collaboration between KCRW and WNYC about gentrification and displacement in neighborhoods in and around L.A. There Goes the Neighborhood was named one of The Atlantic’s top 10 podcasts of 2017 and was chosen as UCLA’s Common Experience for first-year students in 2019. Miguel has worked as a digital producer at KPCC and Marketplace.
He has also done award-winning reporting on wage theft and abuse in L.A.’s restaurant industry and on the misappropriation of public funds at L.A.’s housing authority.
Oluwakemi Aladesuyi
Oluwakemi Aladesuyi is an editor and reporter based in Brooklyn. Her reporting has taken her from Berlin as an Arthur F. Burns fellow to the American Deep South to unearth histories of travel during the Jim Crow era.
She has developed, produced and edited podcasts for Gimlet Media, Macmillan Podcasts, T Brand Studio, Audible Originals, ABC’s 20/20 among others. Currently, she produces Behind the Money for the Financial Times. It’s a narrative podcast about financial and corporate news. Her work has won a Wincott Award for excellence in economic, financial, and business journalism.
Oluwakemi has also taught courses at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. When she is not conducting interviews or editing scripts you can find her centering clay on her potter's wheel.
Sasha Khokha
Sasha Khokha has spent 18 years as a public radio reporter, correspondent, and host. She currently hosts the weekend magazine for KQED's statewide broadcast of The California Report, featuring documentaries and long-form stories about the Golden State.
Sasha’s reporting in rural California helped expose the hidden price immigrant women janitors and farmworkers sometimes pay to keep their jobs: sexual assault at work. She was a key member of the reporting team for the Frontline film and Reveal documentary Rape on the Night Shift. Sasha's work has been recognized with a Third Coast award, national Murrow, Society of Professional Journalists , and PRNDI awards, and two national Emmy nominations. She got her start at Raven Radio in Sitka, Alaska, wearing waterproof overalls.
She's a mom of two spunky kids, a proud alum of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and a member of the South Asian Journalists Association.
Meet the Co-Teachers of 2022
Annie Avilés
Annie Avilés is an editor, audio producer, and writer, and works as executive editor at VICE Audio. She started her journalism career in Bolivia as a fixer and translator, then spent several years covering South America for NPR before shifting to editing, consulting, and producing longform work. Her stories have been published by Harper’s, Pop Up Magazine, Radio Ambulante, and other outlets, and she’s also served as chair and lead audio instructor at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies. Shows she’s recently edited at VICE include the Murrow award-winning series Painkiller, The Crisis / Contra Natura, and A Show About Animals.
Antonia Cereijido
Antonia Cereijido is the Executive Producer of LAist Studios and the host of the LAist podcast Norco '80. She was a senior producer on Anything for Selena and a producer for six years on NPR’s Latino USA and hosted her own segment The Breakdown. She has hosted podcasts for Mic and Slate. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Code Switch, and NPR’s All Things Considered.
Audrey Quinn
Audrey Quinn is a podcast editor and reporter and an NYU adjunct professor. She’s edited podcasts for LAist Studios, Futuro Media, Frontline, TransLash Media, Complex Media, Longreads, and Runner’s World. She’s reported and produced for Planet Money, Gimlet, Radiolab, 99 Percent Invisible, BuzzFeed, Slate, and Marketplace. Audrey’s narrative podcast Aftereffect from WNYC Studios won two awards and was a Scripps Howard and Third Coast finalist. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner, child, and way too many plant babies.
Emanuele Berry
Emanuele Berry is the Executive Editor of This American Life. She came to This American Life from Gimlet Media. There she worked on several shows including The Nod, Undone and StartUp. Previously, Emanuele worked as a public radio reporter in Michigan and Missouri. She is also the recipient of a 2015 Fulbright award to Macau, China.
Lynn Levy
Lynn Levy is an editor at Gimlet Media. She has edited everything from short interviews to deep-dive serialized podcasts. She’s currently an editor on Resistance, a show about people refusing to accept things as they are. Before becoming an editor, Lynn hosted the podcast The Habitat and produced stories for Radiolab.
Marlon Bishop
Marlon Bishop is a Peabody-award winning journalist and producer who currently serves as the VP for Podcasts for Futuro Studios, where he has been a key part of the creation of hit shows like LOUD: The History of Reggaeton, Anything for Selena, Norco 80, Suave, and La Brega. Marlon has an audio and radio career spanning 14 years and includes stints at WNYC and MTV, cover stories for major music magazines like The FADER, several years leading the public radio show Latino USA, and creating audio stories for shows like This American Life, Planet Money, and All Things Considered, filed from around the world. He is a child of Queens, NYC.
Martina Castro
Martina Castro is an Uruguayan-American audio journalist, editor, producer, educator, podcast host, and the founder and CEO of Adonde Media, a multilingual podcast production company based in Los Angeles, CA. She co-founded and produced Radio Ambulante, the first spanish-language podcast distributed by NPR and over the past fifteen years, has produced and edited award-winning audio content in both the U.S. and Latin America. Martina launched Adonde Media at Start-Up Chile’s S Factory program, a pre-seed accelerator for female founders in Santiago, Chile. Since then, she has led multilingual and multinational production teams as Executive Producer on all of Adonde’s projects, and hosts Duolingo Spanish, The Vivo Songbook, and the upcoming Canción Exploder podcasts.
Phyllis Fletcher
Phyllis Fletcher is a senior editor for audio at The New York Times. She is a decorated editor, mentor, teacher, and coach with 19 years of distinguished service in journalism. Her podcast portfolio includes documentary, investigations, history, comedy, and advice. Phyllis’s work has been recognized with two Gracie Awards, two Salutes to Excellence from the National Association of Black Journalists and a Sigma Delta Chi medal. She has been named a Friend of Scholastic Journalism by the Journalism Education Association, and her peers in radio named her their inaugural Editor of the Year. Her research on the unique ethical challenges faced by journalists from marginalized groups is published in the Handbook of Global Media Ethics from Springer International.
Sophia Paliza-Carre
Sophia Paliza-Carre is a French-Peruvian producer and editor who grew up in the Midwest. She began working in audio at her college's storytelling project and then jumped headfirst into the world of public radio. She's written, reported and produced for outlets like WNYC, The Moth, and Latino USA. Most recently, she worked at Futuro Studios on the shows Loud: The History of Reggaeton, Anything for Selena, and Norco 80. She's now a Senior Producer & Editor at LAist Studios.
Meet the Class of 2021
Afi Yellow-Duke
Afi Yellow-Duke is an associate producer on the WNYC Studios podcast Death, Sex & Money. She previously worked at StoryCorps, where she produced two episodes of the Peabody Award-nominated Stonewall OutLoud podcast series. Afi has also contributed to projects for Panoply Media, Audible Originals, and BRIC. She was an AIR New Voices Scholar in 2016, a 3-time AIR New Voices Scholarship Captain, and is one of the five co-creators of the POC in Audio Directory. Originally from Brooklyn, New York, Afi has a B.A. in Sociology/Anthropology and Dance from Middlebury College.
Corinne Gilliard
Corinne has been a content producer for 12 years. She began her professional life in television, then discovered a love of audio four years ago. Starting her career interning on the final seasons of The Oprah Winfrey Show, Corinne spent eight years producing non-fiction content for OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network. In 2017, she became the Director of Development at Crooked Media, producing and launching the popular weekly podcasts, Keep It and Hysteria. Corinne returned to independent producing in 2019, launching The Tamron Hall Show for Disney/ABC, The Oprah Conversation for Apple TV+, and freelancing on audio projects with Blue Wire Podcasts and OBB Media. Corinne is ecstatic to join the inaugural class of Neon Hum's Editors' Bootcamp to deepen her understanding of narrative and longform storytelling.
Davey Kim
Davey Kim is an editor, producer, and sound designer based in Oakland, California. He’s currently the senior editor at Snap Judgment studios. Most recently, he was the creator and senior producer for Adult ISH, an interview and storytelling show by YR Media (fka Youth Radio) and PRX’s Radiotopia. Prior to that, he was a producer and sound designer at Snap Judgment. Davey has also contributed to NPR, WNYC, KPCC, KCRW, The World, Marketplace, The Dinner Party Download, and Self Evident, and his stories and scores have been recognized as exceptional by The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, CNN, ColorLines, AV Club, and more.
Davey has also taught audio storytelling courses at Writing Pad in San Francisco and Oakland School for the Arts. Outside of audio, his side hustles/hobbies include bike polo, point and shoot film, and mastering his sous vide.
Jennifer Lai
Jennifer Lai is an audio producer, storyteller, poet, visual artist, and first-generation Chinese American. Her professional experience includes time at American Public Media, Panoply, and Slate, where she’s produced narrative, interview, scripted, and kids’ shows. She’s worke don shows as diverse as Family Ghosts, Smash Boom Best, and Happier in Hollywood.
Currently, she produces the daily poetry show The Slowdown, which is hosted by former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith and received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 2020. She also works on the food and kids verticals for APM. For the last three years, Jennifer has been a part of a storytelling initiative called Everyday Chinatown. Seniors and community members explore collective memory about everyday objects by telling stories about them in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin. These days, she lives in Brooklyn with her partner and their cat, Moon.
Jimmy Gutierrez
Jimmy got his start in radio at his local NPR station in Milwaukee over a decade ago. He went on to learn at Transom’s story workshop, then worked at New Hampshire Public Radio, and was recognized as an Artist in Residence at Ragdale.
Currently, he’s directing audience at Outlier Media in Detroit, which includes overseeing the local Documenters program. Last year he was filling information gaps in low-wealth neighborhoods in Milwaukee, based on the Outlier model, which ended up with him being recognized as a 2020 John S. Knight Community Impact Fellow at Stanford University. He also hosts a podcast highlighting Wisconsin change-makers. Before making radio he was a firefighter in Milwaukee. You can catch him on a court playing ball or near water when the sun is shining.
Oliver-Ash Kleine
Oliver-Ash Kleine is an audio storyteller focused on show development and shaping sound-rich stories. They developed and currently produce the trans news and culture show TransLash Podcast with Imara Jones and recently launched Cancel Me, Daddy, a podcast taking a critical look at the public temper tantrums around cancel culture. They’re also working on a serialized show set to be released later this year. Additionally, Oliver-Ash is an advocate for better trans coverage in the media and was instrumental in the creation of the Trans Journalists Association in 2020.
Previously, Oliver-Ash developed and worked as a founding producer on The Mother Jones Podcast, produced the season of Brave, Not Perfect with Reshma Saujani nominated for a Webby award, and edited WAMU’s award-winning “What’s with Washington?” project. Oliver-Ash was also an AIR New Voices Scholar in 2019.
Stephanie Serrano
Stephanie Serrano is an award-winning multimedia bilingual journalist and non-fiction podcast editor based in Northern Nevada. Her reporting is powered by character-driven stories and is rooted in sound-rich audio.
She’s won three Regional Edward R. Murrow Awards for best sports reporting, one was awarded a national title in 2018. Most recently her 2021 Edward R. Murrow Award followed the story of two collegiate Black athletes and their experiences facing racism in predominantly white college towns. Stephanie was awarded a 2020 Edward R. Murrow award for continuing coverage on anti-Semitic incidents on a college campus.
She is a 2021 graduate of Neon Hum Media’s inaugural Editor’s Bootcamp and a former 2019 Radio Television Digital Association N.S. Bienstock fellow. As an alumna of NPR’s Next Generation Radio Project, she now serves as a mentor. On top of storytelling, she is a passionate digital illustrator and oil painter.
Zakiya Gibbons
Zakiya Gibbons is a Brooklyn-based audio producer, host, and editor. She's been a producer at Gimlet, WNYC, Audible, and Latino USA, to name a few. Zakiya is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University where she co-teaches a course called "Telling True Stories in Sound." In 2018, she was selected by the Association of Independents in Radio to be a New Voices Scholar, a competitive scholarship awarded to those who "represent the zing, talent, and drive to connect public media to all of America." She was also selected to participate in the prestigious Third Coast Radio Residency at the Ragdale Foundation where she worked on her experimental audio fiction passion project (which she describes as a "POC Broad City meets Adult Swim humor and surrealism"). Zakiya is also a co-founder of the POC in Audio Directory, a resource created to fight the lack of racial diversity in the audio industry. In 2019, Zakiya and her collaborators were recognized by Bitch Media as among the top 50 "most impactful creators, artists, and activists in pop culture" for their work in advocating for racial equity in audio.
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