Eduardo Carreon
Eduardo Carreon is a graduate student at California State University, Los Angeles, with focus on researching systems of oppression and their effects on identity development and mental health among disempowered communities.
Carreon is interested in researching the psychological outcomes of racial discrimination and its effects on identity development and resilience among minority groups (e.g., Latinx, and Native Americans/Indigenous). In addition, he is determined to explore the coping mechanisms that members of different cultural groups use to overcome social inequalities such as poverty and police brutality to achieve a better life. Currently, Carreon is investigating how political activism and a positive sense of self could enhance or diminish resilience among undocumented Latinx individuals. As a future academic and therapist, he is committed to developing culturally sensitive and inclusive therapy, pedagogy, and conducting empirical research. He hopes the results of his academic work improve mental health theories and practices regarding underprivileged groups – LGBTQ. Lastly, Eduardo looks forward to offering a safe space and guidance to students of underrepresented communities to conduct cross-cultural research that could have positive outcomes in their communities.
Chris Hedges
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
He was a member of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for The New York Times coverage of global terrorism, and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. Hedges, who holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, is the author of the bestsellers American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist for his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He writes an online column for the website ScheerPost. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and the University of Toronto.
Mark Lloyd
Mark Lloyd is a communication lawyer and a journalist. From 2009-2012 he served as an associate general counsel at the Federal Communications Commission, advising the Commission on how to promote diverse participation in the communications field with a focus on research into critical information needs and broadband adoption by low-income populations. He now teaches at McGill University.
He taught at AHSC and the Max Bell School of Public Policy from 2018 to 2020. From 2012 to 2022, Lloyd was a Clinical Professor at the University of Southern California-Annenberg School of communication, where he also managed and taught doctoral candidates in the Washington, DC summer program COMPASS (Consortium of Media Policy Scholars). His academic career also includes two years as a visiting scholar at MIT, and three years as an affiliate professor teaching graduate students communication policy at the Georgetown University Public Policy Institute.
Mobolaji Olambiwonnu
Mobolaji Olambiwonnu is a filmmaker, speaker, and educator whose superpower is using cinema as a tool to share diverse cultural and political experiences, critique the superficial conditions that divide us, and accentuate the merits of shedding our prejudices.
His Academy qualifying documentary, Ferguson Rises, executive produced by Academy and Emmy Award winner TJ Martin, acclaimed producer Gigi Pritzker, Grammy Award winners RZA and Aloe Blacc, and acclaimed actor David Oyelowo, is honored with the coveted Tribeca Film Festival Audience Award (2021) and the Pan African Film Festival Audience Award (2022) among others, and is the only documentary to represent PBS/Independent Lens’ 2021 fall slate at the Television Critics Association (TCA). Variety, Salon, Screen Daily and Ebony have featured articles on the film, to name a few.
A Pasadena native, son of a Nigerian Muslim father and Jamaican Christian mother, Mobolaji spent his early childhood in his father’s native Nigeria and at the age of 9, he returned to Southern California.
Lisa Cleri Reale
Lisa Cleri Reale is principal of Lisa Cleri Reale & Associates. She provides consulting to multiple sectors including corporations, government and academia, but has built a 40+ year specialty in the non-profit and philanthropic fields. Cleri Reale considers herself a generalist, advisor and implementation strategist. Her client work involves a variety of services from strategic grant making, fund development, executive and board coaching and development, marketing, communications, events, organizational capacity to strategic planning.
Cleri Reale spent 11 years with The Times Mirror Corporation and the Los Angeles Times directing their community affairs efforts. She served in a number of capacities, including Vice President of The Times Mirror Foundation and Director of Community Affairs for the Los Angeles Times. As head of community affairs at The Times, she launched several initiatives, including the Times in Education Partners in Education program, 1-800-877-READ, a literacy referral hotline and the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.
During her 20 plus years of consulting, she has served as an advisor to a diverse group of nonprofit and philanthropic leaders assisting them on a range of programs and operations from grant making policies and community engagement, to internal staffing, operational structures, and interface across other sectors of the philanthropic community.
Janet Yang
Janet Yang is an Emmy and Golden Globe-winning Hollywood producer, President of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, a keynote speaker, and a trailblazer and advocate for the AAPI community. She came to prominence through her collaboration with Steven Spielberg on Empire of the Sun, followed by partnerships with Oliver Stone and Lisa Henson. Her extensive Film and TV credits include The Joy Luck Club, The People vs. Larry Flynt, Shanghai Calling and High Crimes.
She currently leads Janet Yang Productions, which is developing projects with diverse themes. Her most recent credit is the Academy Award-nominated animated feature, Over the Moon.
Committed to fostering global understanding, Yang is a co-founder of Gold House, the non-profit collective of influential Asian cultural leaders; an advisory board member of Asia Society Southern California where she also chairs its highly regarded US-Asia Entertainment Summit and AWE (Asian Women Empowered) Initiative; and a long-standing member of the Committee of 100, an organization of the most prominent Chinese-Americans.