MARK WINSTON GRIFFITH (CREATOR/HOST)
Mark Winston Griffith is a third-generation resident of Crown Heights. Until April 2022, he was the Executive Director of the Brooklyn Movement Center, a Black-led community organizing group based in Central Brooklyn that he co-founded in 2011. While at BMC, Griffith created Brooklyn Deep, a citizen journalism initiative that chronicles neighborhood change in Central Brooklyn.
Over three decades, Mark has led a combination of social justice organizations, cooperatives institutions, community organizing campaigns, and economic justice projects. He teaches a graduate course in community organizing at CUNY’s Murphy Institute. He has served as an adjunct professor of urban reporting at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, and has been a board member of The City news site, City Limits Magazine and Free Speech TV.
Mark is an enthusiastic parent of two teenage boys and has navigated the public, private and charter school systems.
MAX FREEDMan (CREATOR/HOST)
Max Freedman is a journalist and educator raised in Los Angeles and based in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. He currently works as a producer on the Content Development Team at National Public Radio.
In addition to creating School Colors, Max is also one of the creators of Unsettled, a long-running independent podcast about Israel-Palestine and the Jewish diaspora. For Unsettled, he most recently reported and produced "The Birthday Party," an immersive narrative series about Palestinian-Jewish solidarity work in the occupied West Bank. In the early weeks of COVID-19, he produced Making the Call, a weekly show about medical ethics and the pandemic for Endeavor Content.
Before becoming a journalist, Freedman was a facilitator with Theatre of the Oppressed NYC, adjunct faculty at Pratt Institute and a senior educator at the New-York Historical Society, where he created an enrichment program for grades 4-8 using musicals to teach American history.
AVERY R. YOUNG (ORIGINAL MUSIC)
Interdisciplinary artist and educator avery r. young is a 3Arts Awardee and one of four executives for The Floating Museum. His poetry and prose are featured in several anthologies and periodicals including; Berkeley Poetry Review 49, Poetry Magazine and photographer Cecil McDonald Jr’s In The Company of Black. He is the featured vocalist on flautist Nicole Mitchell’s Mandorla Awakening (FPE Records) and is currently touring with her Black Earth Ensemble and his funk/soul band de deacon board. Young’s latest full length recording tubman. (FPE Records) is the soundtrack to his first collection of poems, neckbone: visual verses (Northwestern University Press).
SORAYA SHOCKLEY (EDITOR & PROJECT MANAGER, SEASON 2)
CARLY RUBIN (PRODUCER, SEASON 2)
ILANA LEVINSON (PRODUCER, SEASON 2)
ELYSE BLENNERHASSETT (PRODUCER, SEASON 1)
Elyse Blennerhassett is an audio and multimedia producer, oral historian, and interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn. She collaborates with documentary producers, journalists, artists, nonprofit organizations, and academic institutions to produce podcasts, films, and immersive exhibitions. Focusing on memory, trauma, and justice, she seeks to produce works that investigate alterity and provoke imagination. Her original and collaborative works can be seen/heard in publications including: The BBC Word Service and Sundance Institute, The Marshall Project, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, NPR, and The Invisible Institute. She has taught audio and permaculture throughout Africa and Asia and has contributed to productions that have screened at festivals and exhibitions throughout North America, Europe, and The Caribbean.