Emiliano Villa is a multidisciplinary artist and mediamaker born and raised in Oakland, CA. Through his work with YR Media and KQED, he has nearly a decade of public media experience and has covered the intersection of identity and arts for radio, TV, and digital. As Youth Media Specialist at KQED, he produces Youth Takeover, publishing youth-made content sourced from Bay Area high school classrooms across KQED's many programs. Emiliano also leads their Youth Advisory Board, which connects students to KQED producers for mentorship and production support. He is also a founding producer of their upcoming Youtube series The Field Trip Game, KQED's first ever youth-produced program. Outside of mediamaking, Emiliano enjoys dancing to pop music, thrifting unique vintage goods, and spending as much time as possible in nature.

Noel California is a creator from East Oakland. He works in multimedia and focuses most of his energy on creating media that sheds awareness for people in various communities. He uses multimedia as a medium to produce quality storytelling. He is a 5x multinational award-winning artist, most notably winning 2 Edward R. Murrow's & being honored with the title "Journalist of the Year" by the Society Of Professional Journalists in 2022. If he isn't working in multimedia, he shifts his dedication to being an active member in the community that is Oakland, advocating for a better culture for Oakland.

Juliana Yamada is a Japanese American independent photojournalist in San Francisco. Her work can frequently be found in the San Francisco Chronicle, KQED, CalMatters, and the San Francisco Standard. She loves that photojournalism allows us to meet new people, share their stories, and make an impact on their communities. Juliana is drawn to making work about culture, identity, and politics, and is especially interested in exploring the Japanese American experience.

Media Professional with experience from in sports, journalism, commercial film and tv, and nonprofits.

Social Media Coordinator for the San Francisco 49ers

Bosko Kante is a music producer, inventor, and mechanical engineer who has written and performed talkbox on Grammy Winning Albums by Dua Lipa and Kanye West including the #11 streaming song of all time “Levitating”. When he was forced to lip sync his talkbox part instead of performing live on the American Music Awards with Kanye West, he decided to reinvent the talkbox and make it mobile. He co-founded music tech company ElectroSpit Inc., invented the Guthman Award winning ElectroSpit ESX-1 talkbox used by David Guetta and Stevie Wonder, produced and performed on songs with E40, Drake, Bruno Mars, and Big Boi, and gives back by helping musicians create their own music tech businesses that leverage AI and AR technology at the nonprofit Black music incubator “HiiiWAV” he founded in Oakland, California.

Andy Warner creates nonfiction comics. He is the author of This Land is My Land, Spring Rain, the NY Times Best Selling Brief Histories of Everyday Objects, and the YA history series Andy Warner’s Oddball Histories: Pests and Pets. His books have been translated into Russian, Chinese, Korean, French and Spanish. He was a contributing editor at The Nib from 2016 until it ceased publication in 2023, and teaches cartooning at the California College of the Arts, Stanford University and The Animation Workshop in Denmark. His work has been published widely, including by Slate, American Public Media, Popular Science, KQED, IDEO.org, The Center for Constitutional Rights, UNHCR, UNRWA, UNICEF, Google X and Buzzfeed.

Cierra is the East Bay Division editor for the Embarcadero Media Foundation, a nonprofit news organization with seven publications spanning the Peninsula and Tri-Valley regions. She has a BA in journalism and media studies from California State University, Monterey Bay and an MS in communications from Syracuse University. Over the last decade, Cierra has worked in print, digital media, television and radio. Cierra is also a racial justice advocate and a founding member of Tri-Valley for Black Lives, a community based organization that aims to foster a safe and anti-racist environment through education and empowerment within the Tri-Valley region of the Bay Area.

Sharif Youssef is a writer, editor, producer, designer, engineer, and artist working primarily in the media of sound and words (often at the same time!) Their work has appeared on This American Life, 99% Invisible (where they were a staffer for 4.5 years,) Vox, NBC, and New York Magazine (among others.) Shows, series, and episodes they’ve worked on routinely rank in the top ten of the iTunes Chart, have won awards (including a Pulitzer,) and garnered praise from critics at The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Vulture, and (occasionally) their father. They are from Wheeling, West Virginia by way of Alexandria, Egypt and now call Oakland, California home.

Azucena is a bilingual journalist from East Oakland. She’s the arts & community reporter for The Oaklandside, curating the city’s rich artistic landscape and cultural heritage. She is a longtime reporter on Oakland arts, culture, and community. She is also the host of Culture Makers. In this quarterly live event, she is in conversation with other creatives in Oakland. She started her career at the alt-weekly East Bay Express. As an independent journalist, her work has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, KQED, Eater, Curbed, and other publications.

Youth Advisor, The kNOw Youth Media

Tower of Youth, Access Sacramento