Homelands Productions Board of Directors

Christine Ahn
Christine Ahn is a policy analyst who writes and speaks on human rights, poverty, hunger, trade, globalization, militarism, and North Korea. She is former program director at the Women of Color Resource Center and serves on the board of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy and the Korea Policy Institute. Ahn edited Shafted: Free Trade and America's Working Poor (Food First Books) and co-authored Trustee Fees: Use and Abuse (Georgetown University). She was inducted into the OMB Watch Public Interest Hall of Fame, recognized as Rising Peace Maker by the Agape Foundation, awarded a Ford Foundation New Voices Fellowship with the Institute for Food and Development Policy, and a Wallace and Alexander Gerbode Fellowship.

María Blanco
María Blanco is Executive Director of the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity at the University of California, Berkeley Law School. Blanco is also the co-chair of the California Coalition for Civil Rights. As both a litigator and an advocate, she has been a long-time leader for immigrant rights, women's rights, and racial justice. Blanco has received numerous awards, including the California Lawyer of the Year Award, League of Women Voters Women Who Could be President Award, American Jewish Congress Mensches in the Trenches Award, San Francisco La Raza Lawyers' Association Unity Award, MALDEF's Legal Services Award, and an NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Award.

Priscilla Pierce Goldstein
Priscilla Pierce Goldstein has served as chair of Twin Cities Public Television, and as a member of the board of directors of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). She has also served as board chair of the International Peace Academy, an independent international institution that uses policy research and mediation to promote the prevention and settlement of armed conflicts around the world. She is currently an advisor to Charity Skills, a London-based NGO providing support and training for non-profit organizations and boards.

Dori J. Maynard
Dori Maynard is President of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education in Oakland, California. Prior to being named president, she directed the institute's History Project, devoted to preserving and protecting the contributions of courageous journalists of color who broke into the mainstream media against the backdrop of the turbulent 1960s and 1970s. Maynard also heads the Fault Lines project, which helps journalists more accurately cover their communities.

Jonathan Miller
Jonathan Miller is Executive Director of Homelands Productions and Executive Producer of the WORKING project. He was Executive Producer of the Homelands series Worlds of Difference and Editorial Director of Think Global, the 2005 Public Radio Collaboration on globalization, involving more than 300 public radio stations and 30 national shows. He has worked as a freelance reporter for radio, TV, and magazines from Asia, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and Africa. He has also served as a consulting writer and editor for several international development organizations. He is an Affiliated Scholar at the Polson Institute for Global Development at Cornell University.

Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan is a professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also the director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism. Pollan is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and author of The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World, A Place of My Own, Second Nature: A Gardener's Education, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, and In Defense of Food.

Raúl Ramírez
Raúl Ramírez is News and Public Affairs Director of KQED Public Radio. He has worked as reporter for The Miami Herald and The Washington Post, and as a reporter and editor for the Oakland Tribune and the San Francisco Examiner. He is former president of the board of the Center for Investigative Reporting and has won numerous awards for local, national, and international reporting. He has taught at San Francisco State University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Poynter Institute in Media Studies. He also has led investigative reporting and civic journalism training workshops at the European Journalism Center in The Netherlands and in Ukraine. Ramírez was a principal writer for the UNITY national conference analysis of US media coverage of ethnic and racial minorities, and frequently lectures on topics related to diversity and news media.

Orville Schell
Orville Schell is the Arthur Ross Director of the Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society. The former Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, he is the author of fourteen books, nine of them about China. He has written for magazines and periodicals from The Atlantic Monthly, TIME, and the New Yorker to Foreign Affairs, Wired, and The New York Times. He has also served as a television commentator, correspondent, and consultant. Schell serves on the boards of Human Rights Watch and the Social Science Research Council, and on the jury of the Sundance Documentary Fund. He is also a member of the Pacific Council, the Council on Foreign Relations, and is a regular participant in the World Economic Forum at Davos.

Sandy Tolan, Vice President
Homelands co-founder and Senior Producer Sandy Tolan has produced dozens of public radio documentaries from more than 30 countries. His programs have won numerous awards, including three from the Overseas Press Club, the DuPont-Columbia Silver Baton, three Robert F. Kennedy awards for reporting on the disadvantaged, a Harry Chapin World Hunger Year award, and a United Nations Gold Medal award. His second book, The Lemon Tree: A Palestinian, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was rated the top nonfiction book of 2006 by Booklist. He is associate professor of journalism at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.

Cecilia Vaisman, President
Homelands co-founder and Senior Producer Cecilia Vaisman has traveled throughout the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean to report for National Public Radio and other public media outlets. Her work has focused on the environment, human rights, race and ethnicity, women's issues and the AIDS epidemic. A former staff producer for NPR, she teaches Latin American Cinema at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Alan Weisman, Secretary/Treasurer
Senior Producer Alan Weisman is the author of five books, including The World Without Us, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and named best nonfiction book of 2007 by TIME magazine. His articles have appeared in Harper's, Discover, the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, and Condé Nast Traveler. Weisman has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Colombia and a fellow in nonfiction at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Along with many radio awards shared with his Homelands colleagues, he has received a Four Corners Award for Best Nonfiction Book, a Los Angeles Press Club Award for Best Feature, a Best of the West Award in Journalism, and the Social Inventions Award from the London-based Global Ideas Bank for his book Gaviotas. He is the Laureate Associate Professor in Journalism and Latin American Studies at the University of Arizona.

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