We invited leading storytellers, journalists, writers and filmmakers who are trusted and beloved in their communities to produce stories in various mediums – video, audio, photos and written word. Meet our Resident Storytellers.
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Jean Melesaine
Jean Melesaine is an Indigenous director, filmmaker, and photographer deeply rooted in both the Bay Area and Samoa. Her creative journey began as a formerly incarcerated teen when Silicon Valley De-Bug handed her a camera—an act that transformed her life. Over the next decade, she harnessed the power of film to support families navigating the criminal legal system, helping them tell their stories through a groundbreaking community organizing model called Participatory Defense, developed by Alex Covarrubias. This work has reshaped courtroom dynamics and helped prevent countless unjust sentences.
Guided by relationships, lineage, and the transformative power of storytelling, Jean continues to document the beauty, resilience, and struggles of Black, Indigenous, Samoan, and immigrant communities in the Bay Area and beyond. Jean is a proud aunty and daughter. Her late mother, Sopo Masina Matai’a, migrated from Moamoa, Samoa to San Francisco, and her late father, Moaseni Tito Leasiolagi, came to Oakland from Salani Faleali’li in the Atua District of Samoa. In 2025, Jean graduated from the USC School of Cinematic Arts with a degree in Film and Production and was honored as a Leading Edge Fellow by the Rosenberg Foundation.
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Davey D
Davey D is a hip-hop historian, deejay, talk show host, and journalist whose work has shaped the political and cultural discourse of hip-hop for over three decades. Originally from Bronx, NY, he followed family to the Bay Area in the 1980s, attended UC Berkeley and soon rooted himself in Oakland, CA.
Motivated by the absence and misrepresentation of Black communities and hip-hop in the media, he launched Davey D’s Corner in 1991, one of the first websites dedicated to hip-hop commentary and news. In 1999, he co-founded and continues to host Hard Knock Radio on KPFA—one of the longest-running daily radio shows focused on hip-hop and social justice from a grassroots perspective. With a passion for documentation and storytelling, he has become a beloved community griot known for preserving hip-hop culture as a living, evolving form of Black resistance and innovation.
Throughout his prolific career, Davey D has interviewed hip-hop legends and emerging voices from around the world, including Tupac Shakur, Nipsey Hussle, Too Short, DJ Kool Herc, and E-40. In a moment of historical erasure, his extensive archive of recordings have taken on new significance as a community resource. His encyclopedic knowledge of hip-hop history is featured in the young adult edition of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (2021), co-authored with Jeff Chang.
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Jamilah King
Jamilah King is a proud fourth generation San Franciscan who was born and raised in the Fillmore. An award-winning journalist and poet, Jamilah is an editorial director at Mother Jones and was previously managing editor at BuzzFeed News. Her work has also appeared on NPR, HBO, and Showtime. Recently, she was part of a team that helped shepherd 40 Acres and a Lie to a Pulitzer Prize nomination, and her reporting on former Vice President Kamala Harris was featured prominently in PBS and Frontline’s documentary, The Choice, in the lead up to the 2024 presidential election. In her spare time, she teaches political reporting and feature writing at the Craig Newmark School of Journalism in New York City and unapologetically says “hi” to every dog on the block.
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Leo Maco
Leo is a Peruvian-American filmmaker living in Oakland, CA. His documentary and narrative films shine light on marginalized communities and their stories of joy and resilience. As the child of immigrants, Leo’s storytelling is motivated by gratitude and the desire to honor his ancestors.
His work has screened in film festivals across the country including SXSW, BlackStar, DOC NYC, and SFFILM, as well as in the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian. His latest collaboration, “Through The Storm”, received an Emmy nomination and premiered at the Big Sky Documentary Festival, where it won the Artistic Vision Award. He was recently awarded an Alternative Exposure Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
His work as a Resident Storyteller is an act of resistance to preserve this moment in time and uplift the voices of some of the Bay Area’s most important artists.
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Malkia Devich Cyril
Malkia Devich Cyril is a writer, movement strategist, public speaker, and transformative grief facilitator that has called Oakland home for 30 years. Born to a Black Panther and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn in the 1980s, Malkia’s life has been shaped by the struggle for Black liberation. They proudly embrace their identity as a Panther Cub, carrying the legacy forward through lessons that have inspired and grounded a generation of activists with their principled clarity and compassion. They have been featured in the documentaries Outfoxed (2004), Miss Representation (2011), 13TH (2016), and Free For All: Inside the Public Library (2020).
In 2022, devastated by unrelenting grief from the deaths of their wife, their mother, and many loved ones during an era of mass pandemic loss of life and violence against Black and brown communities, Malkia launched the Radical Loss Project. This Black-led offering is breaking open new space for modern freedom movements to face loss and grief collectively rather than in isolation as an essential part of building collective power. Their forthcoming book, Radical Loss: Black Grief Can Change the World, blends memoir and movement analysis to explore the role of grief inside social movements and its potential for transformation. Their visionary work is an invitation to grieve in community and to wield our collective grief into a force for justice, healing, and connection.
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Pendarvis Harshaw
As a kid growing up in Oakland, Pendarvis took note of what the elders would tell him.
He’d literally write down their words. He has notebooks full of their witticisms and wisdom, charting their ways of moving through the world. Imagine living to be 80, 90 or cracking triple digits, and how many stories someone that age has to offer?
That fascination with the aging process showed up in one of Harshaw’s signature projects, OG Told Me. First a photo essay and then a memoir-style book, the project showcased not only his love of elders, but also his ability to tell stories in a variety of ways. Pendarvis is a graduate of Howard University’s School of Communications and UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. He currently works at KQED where he writes about arts, culture, prison, politics and all things impacting his Northern Californian community.
He can be reached @ogpenn on all platforms.
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Tina Bartolome
Tina Bartolome is a writer and educator, the daughter of working-class immigrants from the Philippines and Switzerland. She was born and raised in San Francisco, where she attended public schools, survived divorce, the ‘89 earthquake and eviction. Between unlearning the 500-year lie of Columbus, coming out, writing on walls, and fighting racist propositions, she joined the movement and never looked back. She is driven to tell stories of a San Francisco that no longer exists, honoring those to whom the city truly belongs: Ramaytush Ohlone land stewards, migrant day laborers, public school teachers, MUNI bus drivers, queer teenagers, evicted mothers, disloyal temp workers, and movement elders—in their full humanity, complete with desires and contradictions.
Her writing appears in Black Power Afterlives: The Enduring Significance of the Black Panther Party and Still Here: An Anthology of Queer and Trans People Raised in San Francisco. For over 25 years, Tina has trained thousands of community organizers across the country and created vibrant spaces where young women, queer, and trans people of color can share their stories.
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Weyland Southon
Weyland Southon is a first generation Samoan-Chinese San Franciscan and has been a proud resident of Oakland for 30-plus years. He has worn many hats: producer, journalist, curator, master of ceremonies, mentor, event planner, home chef, wedding officiant, and talk show host. Weyland inherited a knack for good storytelling from family ciphers and gossipping aunties. He honed his journalistic chops at Berkeley’s free speech institution KPFA FM and is widely remembered for his audacious public radio programming. A passion for food, farms, art, cultural equity, and hiphop is ever-present in his activism and media work. He currently spends most of his time focused on girl-dad duties, and juggles side-hustles as a podcast editor, voiceover artist, cannabis consultant, craft bartender, and vinyl DJ. When everyone is asleep he writes audio drama and wonders what if.
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David Telles
David Telles is a Xicano/Native American (Yoeme, Ajachemen) filmmaker from Oakland, California. His work is rooted in storytelling as a form of medicine. Committed to telling nuanced and authentic stories, David believes in making art that challenge audiences to see the world through a different lens. He is repped by Ari Lubet at 3 Arts Entertainment.
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Carolina Quintanilla
Carolina Quintanilla is an arts administrator, curator and educator based in Oakland, CA. A graduate of SFSU’s Ethnic Studies MA program, she has applied racial and social justice frameworks to supporting artists and curators as SOMArts’ Gallery Director. Her latest curatorial project, A Soft Place to Land centers joy as a relational and embodied practice worthy of archiving and passing on. A believer in the power of the arts and storytelling for collective liberation, Quintanilla’s curatorial practice weaves together personal narratives with social commentary.
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Ani Rivera
Ani Rivera, is a Chicana from Tijuana/ San Diego and has called the San Francisco Bay Area home for over 27 years. Growing up in the borderlands informed her identity, cultural practice, agency and positioning in the world. Rivera felt the call to be in service of arts & culture when she experienced the monumental sculpture, Toy An-Horse, 1997. Encountering this 33-foot sculpture – placed at the dividing line between the United States and Mexico border – during Rivera’s daily commute informed her vision of the role culture plays in creating spaces of belonging and cultural power.
Since 2012, Ani has served as Executive Director of Galería de la Raza. Her work explores intersections of community development and art in a social practice with the goal to create equitable and sustainable communities. Rivera is the Vice President of the City and County of San Francisco’s Commission of the Department on The Status of Women. Rivera’s board member roles include, Co-Chair of The GLBT Historical Society Museum & Archives, recognized internationally in the field of LGBTQ public history. On the national front, member of National Association of Latino Arts & Culture, a 35-year U.S. based organization that supports the national Latine art & culture sector through funding, leadership training and advocacy.
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Bloodstone
[Coming soon]
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Nicole Lee
Nicole Lee is the fouding Executive Director of Urban Peace Movement and a fourth-generation Oakland resident of Chinese American heritage who has spent the past 30 years leading critical social justice work through coalition-building and youth organizing campaigns in Oakland and Alameda County. She became an activist in the fight against mass incarceration in the early 2000’s when they were in their early 20’s when young people across California were mobilizing to stop Prop 21 and end the criminalization of youth of color. Lee has dedicated her life to issues such as racial justice, youth justice system transformation, and workers rights. She is a fourth-generation Oakland resident of Chinese American descent who works at the intersection of culture, youth leadership development, community building, healing, and racial justice. She founded a music festival at Lake Merritt called Town Up Tuesday, drawing thousands, which celebrated the unique and vibrant hip-hop culture of Oakland and the Bay Area. In 2018 she was named on Ebony Magazine’s Power 100 List as a Community Cruisaider, and in 2022 she received the Leading Edge Fellowship.
