Our Mentors

Our Mentors

Ana Lissardy

Ana Lissardy is a Uruguayan author, poet, journalist, and editor. She holds a degree in Literature and a master’s degree in Cinema. She has collaborated with media outlets across Europe and Latin America, including The Guardian, The New York Times, El País, la Repubblica, Gatopardo, El Tiempo, among many others. Ana works as an independent editor of narrative and journalism, and also serves as an editor and copy editor for the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) in the United States.

As an author, she has published novels, narrative journalism (chronicles and profiles), and poetry collections in Spain, Uruguay, and other Latin American countries. Her work has received several awards and distinctions.

Brentin Mock

Brentin Mock is a reporter, writer, and editor who specializes in stories about democracy, race, place, environment, and culture. His work can be found in Bloomberg News, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, Grist, The American Prospect and Le Monde. He’s also made appearances on MSNBC (currently MS NOW), CBS News, PBS and Democracy Now. In 2021, he co-authored the book anthology Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019, edited by Dr. Keisha N. Blain and Ibram X. Kendi. The book became a New York Times Bestseller, a finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal, and was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post. His expertise includes urban policy, environmental justice, climate politics, housing, finance, criminal justice, voting rights, election administration, and race. He currently works as an editorial consultant for his company The Mock-Up, LLC.

Cindy Carcamo

Cindy Carcamo is a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. She is a California-based journalist who most recently worked as a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times’ Food section. She previously covered immigration as a Metro reporter for the Times and served as Arizona bureau chief and national correspondent in the Southwest. A Los Angeles native, she has reported from Argentina, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico. From 2003-2012, she was a staff writer at the Orange County Register, where she covered immigration, the environment, politics, and law enforcement issues. She also has written for Reuters, The Guardian, and El País. In 2023, Carcamo was honored as one of the ten most influential journalists in California by the Latino Journalists of California-CCNMA.

Dagmar Thiel

Dagmar Thiel is an Ecuadorian-German journalist. She is the founder and director of training at the Media Resilience Network, a Vita Activa initiative that provides emergency emotional assistance and guidance for journalists in marginalized and underserved areas of the United States. Previously, she was director of the Fundamedios’ U.S. office, where she promoted freedom of expression in the region and created support systems for journalists in exile. She is co-author of the UNESCO report “Displaced Voices: An X-Ray of Latin American Journalists in Exile.” In addition, Dagmar is an Altavoz Lab mentor and works with Plumas Invitadas, a community journalism initiative of Conecta Arizona.

Jaeh Lee

Jaeh Lee is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and a 2021-2022 Knight-Wallace Reporting Fellow. She has written for California Sunday, The Economist’s 1843 Magazine, Columbia Journalism Review, Topic Stories, Vice News, and Mother Jones, among other publications. She is a recipient of the American Mosaic Journalism Prize for excellence in longform, narrative reporting on underrepresented groups in America.

José Luis Castillo

José Luis Castillo, born in Lima, Peru, is the founder of La Esquina TX. He has nearly 30 years of experience as a journalist, editor, and translator, and more than a decade in consumer protection and investigative reporting. He has worked with outlets including Agencia Internacional de Noticias EFE, Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Noticias Telemundo Digital, Telemundo Houston, Univision Houston, Univision’s Aquí y Ahora, The New York Times Syndicate, La República (Peru), La Vanguardia (Spain), among others. He has been recognized with multiple regional Emmy Awards and other journalism prizes for his investigative work in television and print media.

Jude Joffe-Block

Jude Joffe-Block is a journalist, currently based in Northern California after years in Phoenix, Arizona. She has worked for NPR, The Associated Press and public radio stations in the West. She is the co-author with Terry Greene Sterling of Driving While Brown: Sheriff Joe Arpaio versus the Latino Resistance

Lottie Joiner

Lottie Joiner is an award-winning multimedia journalist whose work explores the conditions and lived experiences of those in underserved and marginalized communities. She has written extensively about the Civil Rights Movement, with pieces in The Washington Post, USA Today, The Daily Beast, The Guardian and Time. During her tenure as editor-in-chief of The Crisis, the magazine won several national awards. Lottie also hosted and produced the weekly Facebook Live show Crisis Conversations, which focused on how the pandemic impacted minority communities and the 2020 racial reckoning. Lottie is a former board member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors and the Fund for Investigative Journalism. She is a current board member for Free Speech TV and Journalism and Women Symposium. In 2025, Lottie was named a 2025-2026 Rosalynn Carter Fellow for Mental Health Journalism.

Mago Torres

Mago Torres is a trainer and an investigative and data journalist. She has worked on award-winning long-form investigations and developed programs that support collaborations, data-driven stories, and investigative journalism in the US and internationally. She has worked for The Examination, Open News, the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism, the Data-Driven Reporting Project at Northwestern University, and with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists  on the investigations like FinCEN Files, Luanda Leaks and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Panama Papers. She also co-lead the investigation “El país de las dos mil fosas,” and was a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University.

Mónica Ortiz Uribe

Mónica Ortiz Uribe is an independent reporter born and raised in El Paso who writes about the U.S.-Mexico border and the American Southwest. Her work has appeared on National Public Radio and published in the El Paso Times. In 2020, she co-hosted “Forgotten: The Women of Juárez,” a podcast about the disappearance and murder of women in El Paso’s Mexican sister city that was named a top 10 podcast of 2020 by The Atlantic.

Perla Trevizo

Perla Trevizo is a reporter for the ProPublicaTexas Tribune investigative unit. Trevizo is a Mexican-American reporter born in Ciudad Juárez and raised across the border in El Paso, Texas, where she began her journalism career. Trevizo spent more than a decade covering immigration and border issues in Tennessee and Arizona before joining the Houston Chronicle as an environmental reporter. She was part of the team that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist last year. Recognitions for her work also include Texas’ top award for investigative reporting two years in a row and an Edward R. Murrow award.

Ricardo Sandoval-Palos

Ricardo Sandoval-Palos is an award-winning investigative journalist and editor whose career has spanned four decades.  In May, Ricardo was named Public Editor – ombudsman – for PBS, the nation’s leading public media outlet. Prior to joining PBS, Ricardo consulted with non-profit investigative news outlets such as InsideClimate News and 100Reporters, and was a supervising editor for Morning Edition, the flagship news show for National Public Radio.

Ricardo also served as an international editor with Center for Public Integrity in Washington, DC, and assistant metro editor for the Sacramento Bee in California. Between 1997 and 2006, he was a correspondent in Latin America for the Dallas Morning News and the San Jose Mercury News. 

Roberto “Bear” Guerra

Roberto “Bear” Guerra is a photographer whose work contemplates our connections to each other and the natural world, while addressing contemporary social, cultural and environmental issues. He is the visuals editor at High Country News, a five-decade-old, non-profit publication that specializes in thoughtful, nuanced coverage of the western United States. Bear has led efforts to approach the magazine’s visual storytelling more holistically and expansively, earning recognitions from the American Society of Media Editors, American Illustration-American Photography, Indigenous Journalists Association, and other organizations. He prioritizes collaboration with artists from diverse backgrounds and experiences, and mentors emerging talent. As one of the organizers of HCN’s first labor union, he has contributed to efforts towards a more equitable and sustainable workplace.

Ruxandra Guidi

Ruxandra Guidi has been telling stories for more than two decades. After earning a Master’s degree in journalism from U.C. Berkeley in 2002, she has worked as a documentary audio producer, a features writer, and an editor for both English and Spanish publications throughout the U.S. and Latin America. Fonografia Collective, co-founded in 2005 with her partner Bear Guerra, has consulted with various news and community organizations on placemaking, trainings and public engagement in an effort to make empathetic and culturally-sensitive documentary storytelling more accessible.

Sylvia A. Harvey

Sylvia A. Harvey, widely known as SAH, is an award-winning journalist, author, and speaker whose work sits at the intersection of race, class, policy, and incarceration. Her acclaimed book, The Shadow System: Mass Incarceration and the American Family, was a finalist for the Media for a Just Society Awards. SAH’s reporting appears in The Nation, Elle, Vox, Politico, and more, and is cited by lawmakers and taught in university classrooms. She is the founder of Just Love, an emerging nonprofit that will provide justice-involved young adults with storytelling skills for the digital age and financial literacy.

Tina Vasquez

Tina Vasquez is a movement journalist with more than 15 years of experience reporting on immigration, reproductive injustice, food, labor, and Latino culture. Currently, she is the features editor at the nonprofit newsroom Prism and serves on the board of Press On, a Southern journalism collective that strengthens and expands the practice of journalism in service of liberation. Tina was born and raised in Southeast Los Angeles and currently calls North Carolina home.

Valeria Fernández

Valeria Fernández is an immigrant from Uruguay and the founder and executive director of Altavoz Lab. Under her leadership, Altavoz has grown from a pilot project into a nationally recognized initiative that uplifts trusted messengers, advances accountability journalism, and helps build a more equitable news ecosystem.

An award-winning journalist, filmmaker, and producer, Valeria began her career at a small Spanish-language newspaper in Phoenix, Arizona, where she learned to report with and for immigrant communities. Her work has since appeared in outlets such as The Guardian, Pacific Standard, Latino USA, and PRX’s The World. She is the recipient of the American Mosaic Journalism Prize for her reporting on underrepresented communities and was named a 2025 Fellow of the Society of Professional Journalists.

Valeria previously served as managing editor of palabra, a publication of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, where she championed fair pay and editorial support for freelancers. Through Altavoz Lab, she continues to mentor and empower the next generation of community-rooted journalists.

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