Lisa Armstrong
Lisa Armstrong (she, her) is an award-winning journalist with credits in The New Yorker, The Intercept, The Daily Beast, Rolling Stone, The Texas Tribune and other outlets. She reported from Haiti from 2010 to 2014, through grants from The Pulitzer Center and NYU and has been featured on NPR and the BBC, discussing rape in the camps in Haiti and HIV/AIDS in the aftermath of the earthquake.
She is currently reporting on incarceration and has written about the spread of COVID19 in correctional facilities and people who were sentenced to life without parole as minors. She also produced a documentary for CBS News about how subpar mental health care provided by for-profit companies led to in an increase in suicides in state prisons, and directed a documentary about a young man who was incarcerated in an adult prison when he was 16. The film, “Little Boy Lost,” was featured in the Social Impact track at SXSW.
Armstrong is a professor at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and also taught at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY for 12 years. She has done workshops on reporting on trauma, covering natural disasters, diversity in journalism and other topics at American universities and high schools, as well as in Zimbabwe and Haiti. She has also taught journalism to incarcerated women in California.
Anita Varma
Anita Varma (she, her) leads the Solidarity Journalism Initiative at UT Austin, where she is also an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Media.
Tina Vasquez
Tina Vasquez (she, her) is a movement journalist with more than a decade of experience reporting on immigration, reproductive injustice, and Latinx culture. Currently, she is editor-at-large at the non-profit newsroom Prism. She lives in North Carolina.
Rumba Yambú
Rumba Yambú (they/them/elle) is the Executive Director and Co-founder of Intransitive, a Transgender migrant led organization. They are an Afro-Salvadoran Trans migrant, neurodivergent queer living as an uninvited guest in Osage and Caddo land, currently known as Arkansas. They are a member of the National Latinx Alliance Against Sexual Assault and have a background in sexual and domestic violence advocacy, mental health first responder, digital and distributed organizing and handling immigration cases. On weekends you can find Rumba catching Pokemon, cooking food of their home land, singing along to a variety of genres and dreaming of the day where living at the intersections of multiple identities is celebrated as a blessing.