Our Board

Our board is composed of 11 individuals, which are nominated and elected by our Voting Members. Board elections are held annually, and board members serve staggered 2-year terms.  

 

Media and Democracy Coalition Board of Directors 2011-2012

 

Parul Desai, Chair (Bio)
Communications Policy Counsel, Consumers Union

Cheryl Leanza, Vice Chair (Bio)
Managing Director, United Church of Christ, Office of Communication, Inc.

Jessica Gonzalez, Secretary (Bio)
Vice President, Policy & Legal Affairs, National Hispanic Media Coalition

Carol Pierson, Treasurer (Bio)
Individual (Past President and CEO of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters and long time leader in community radio)

Deanne Cuellar, Deputy Treasurer (Bio)
Former Executive Director, Media Justice League 

Dee Davis (Bio)
Founder and President, Center for Rural Strategies

amalia deloney (Bio)
Grassroots Policy Director, Center for Media Justice 

Cecilia Garcia (Bio)
Executive Director, Benton Foundation

Traci Morris (Bio)
Director of Operations, Native Public Media

Casey Rae-Hunter (Bio)
Deputy Director, Future of Music Coalition

Tracy Rosenberg (Bio)
Managing Director, Media Alliance

 

Board Member Biographies 

 

Parul Desai, Chair

Communications Policy Counsel, Consumers Union

 

Prior to joining Consumers Union, Parul served as Vice President for Media Access Project, a non-profit, public interest law firm and advocacy organization working in communications policy.  While at MAP, Parul promoted and developed legal strategies and policies to improve and maintain First Amendment access to electronic media.

 

Prior to joining MAP, Parul served as in-house counsel to Microstrategy, Inc., McLean, VA. From 2001-2004, she was as associate in the Telecommunication, Media, and Technology and Litigation Groups of the law firm Crowell & Moring LLP. 

 

Parul is a magna cum laude graduate of New York Law School, where she participated in that institution’s Media Center program. Her undergraduate degree is from Rutgers University.  She is currently serving as a member of the Executive Committee of the Federal Communications Bar Association. 

 

Cheryl Leanza, Vice Chair

Managing Director, United Church of Christ, Office of Communication, Inc.

Cheryl A. Leanza is the President of her consulting firm, A Learned Hand, LLC, www.alearnedhand.com. In this capacity she serves as policy advisor to the United Church of Christ’s historic media advocacy arm and as the Co-Chair of the Leadership Conference of Civil Rights Media & Telecommunications Task Force. Her other clients have included National Federation of Community Broadcasters, Future of Music Coalition, Public Knowledge, and Native Public Media, among others. Ms. Leanza recently helped lead the victorious effort to pass the Local Community Radio Act, and has been a leader in public interest advocacy for 15 years, including advocacy for diversity in media ownership, protection for children in media, and other policies furthering First Amendment principles, including network neutrality. She has represented non-profits before the Federal Communications Commission and in the U.S. Appellate courts, and has been widely quoted in the trade and mainstream press on these issues. Ms. Leanza is a cum laude graduate of the University of Michigan Law School and the Ford School of Public Policy.

 

Jessica Gonzalez, Secretary

Vice President, Policy & Legal Affairs, National Hispanic Media Coalition


Jessica executes NHMC’s national priorities before the federal agencies and in Congress. She leads NHMC's legal and policy work and has developed its legal internship program. In her role as Vice President of Policy and Legal Affairs, Jessica has testified before the Federal Communications Commission, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, and in Congress, and has been interviewed on television and radio. Before joining NHMC, Jessica was a staff attorney and clinical teaching fellow at Georgetown Law’s renowned Institute for Public Representation (IPR),. At IPR Jessica also represented other consumer, civil rights and public interest organizations before the Federal Communications Commission, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration and in the Courts of Appeal. While in law school, Jessica clerked at the Media Access Project in Washington, DC, and prior to law school she was a public high school teacher in Los Angeles, California. Jessica is a LLM degree candidate at Georgetown Law. She earned her JD at Southwestern Law School, where she worked on the Journal of Law and Trade in the Americas and the Journal of International Media and Entertainment Law, and her BA in Communication Studies and Spanish from Loyola Marymount University. 

 

Carol Pierson, Treasurer

Individual (Past President and CEO of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters and long time leader in community radio)

Carol Pierson retired as President and CEO of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters (NFCB) in 2010 after 11 years in the position. She represented community radio at the national and regional level with Congress, the FCC, funders, and networks. She has worked very closely with many of NFCB’s 250 members, including a large number of rural and minority stations as well as independent producers and other broadcast organizations, via direct consultations. Carol has been involved with Native American stations through Native Public Media, Latino-controlled stations helping to organize the Latino Public Radio Consortium, and with new NCE (non-commercial educational) stations via her role as convener of the Radio for People Coalition. Before NFCB, Carol worked for 10 years as Program Director and Director of Special Project with San Francisco public radio station KQED; 8 years as Assistant Radio Manager at WGBH in Boston; and 3 years at WYSO community radio station in Yellow Springs Ohio at Antioch College.  She is currently the President of the La Peña Cultural Center Board of Directors and sings soprano with the La Peña Community Chorus in Berkeley, California.

 

Deanne Cuellar, Deputy Treasurer 

Former Executive Director, Media Justice League

DeAnne Cuellar, co-founder of the Media Justice League (formerly the Texas Media Empowerment Project (MEP)), is an independent media maker, musiciansʼ union organizer (Local 782), and lifelong social justice activist. Based in San Antonio, Deanne is a national leader with MAG-NET, the Media Action Grassroots Network. Her media justice vision includes monitoring representations of marginalized communities; educating around the interconnections of race, gender, class, and sexuality; and sustaining a community media environment that supports women, people of color, low-income people and other underserved constituencies to access and create music, media and technology.

 

Dee Davis 

Founder and President, Center for Rural Strategies

Dee Davis is the founder and president of the Center for Rural Strategies. Dee has helped design and lead national public information campaigns on topics as diverse as commercial television programming and federal banking policy. The Center for Rural Strategies leads the steering committee of the National Rural Assembly and publishes the Daily Yonder, an online newspaper focused on rural life and work. 

 

Dee began his media career in 1973 as a trainee at Appalshop, an arts and cultural center devoted to exploring Appalachian life and social issues in Whitesburg, Kentucky. As Appalshop's executive producer, the organization created more than 50 public TV documentaries, established a media training program for Appalachian youth, and launched initiatives that use media as a strategic tool in organization and development. 

Dee is a member of the Rural Advisory Committee of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, the boards of directors of Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, Fund for Innovative Television, the Media and Democracy Coalition, and Feral Arts of Brisbane, Australia. He is also a member of the Institute for Rural Journalism’s national advisory board as well as the advisory board for the Rural Policy Research Institute. 

Dee lives in Whitesburg, Kentucky.

 

amalia deloney

Grassroots Policy Director, Center for Media Justice

amalia coordinates the media policy initiatives of the Center for Media Justice and the Media Action Grassroots Network (MAG-Net).  She has over 15 years of experience in community and cultural organizing, with a specific interest in human rights, cultural rights and traditional knowledge.  At CMJ, amalia uses her extensive experience for field-building, community-building, and policy advocacy.

 

Born in Guatemala, she worked for many years at the Main Street Project–a MAG-Net anchor–in her hometown of Minneapolis.  While there, she co-directed a nationally recognized four-state rural Latino capacity-buliding initiative called The Raíces Project.  Amalia is also a board member of the Indigenous Women’s Network, Main Street Project.

 

amalia earned her B.A. in Urban Studies and History from Macalester College and her J.D. with a focus on Social Justice from Hamline University School of Law – as a result, she has huge student loans, which she likes to complain about. 

 

Cecilia Garcia 

Executive Director, Benton Foundation

Cecilia Garcia first joined the Benton Foundation in 1997. She most recently served as executive director of Connect for Kids. Her broad range of experience includes work as a press secretary for a Member of the U.S House of Representatives. As communications director for a national Latino nonprofit organization, she worked to create greater avenues of access for the Latino community into the political process through leadership development programs, legislative conferences, a seven-site electronic town meeting and the creation of the organization's web site. Cecilia coordinated state outreach activities, developed teacher training models for classroom use, and worked on the CD-ROM version of "Chicano: History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement," a four-part PBS documentary produced by the National Latino Communication Center. She began her extensive career in communications producing and directing public and community affairs programming at WTVS, Detroit's public television station. Cecilia earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Wayne State University in 1988. Garcia’s other affiliations include:  Foundation Center Advisory Committee, and Council on Foundations Film & Video Festival Task Force.

 

Traci Morris

Director of Operations, Native Public Media


Dr. Traci L. Morris (Chickasaw Nation) is the Director of Operations for Native Public Media, Inc. Native Public Media is a service and advocacy organization that works to strengthen and expand Native American media capacity.  Dr. Morris is the principal and founder of Homahota Consulting, through which she provided organizations policy analysis and research focusing on Internet use, digital inclusion, network neutrality, and development of broadband networks in Indian Country.  The first quantitative and qualitative study commissioned by Native Public Media “New Media, Technology and Internet Use in Indian County,” was co-authored by Morris and Sascha Meinrath, Director of the Open Technology Initiative at the New America Foundation, and has become a seminal resource for key decision-makers, including being extensively cited by the Federal Communications Commission in the National Broadband Plan.

 

As a member of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma, Morris maintains a strong working relationship with her Tribal community and her passion for policy emerged from these strong ties and her own tribal roots. Dr. Morris has PhD in American Indian Studies and Comparative Culture and Literary Studies from the University of Arizona.  She has over ten years of university teaching experience at the University of Arizona, Arizona State University, and East Central Oklahoma University and has inspired a decade of scholars to factor in the Native perspective in their work. Her book, Native American Voices: A Reader, continues to be a primary teaching tool in colleges throughout the country.  Morris is also a blogger for Native Public Media, NAMAC, NABI Foundation, and Homahota Consulting.

 

Casey Rae-Hunter

Deputy Director, Future of Music Coalition

Casey Rae-Hunter is a musician, recording engineer, music journalist and public policy wonk. He regularly speaks on issues such as new business models for artists, telecommunications policy and intellectual property at conferences, universities and in the media. He routinely works alongside leaders in the music, arts and performance sectors to bolster understanding of and engagement in key policy and technology issues, and has written dozens of articles on the impact of technology on the creative community. Casey is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, and also serves on the Board of Directors of the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture. He currently records and publishes under the moniker The Contrarian and is the Grand Poobah of Lux Eterna Records.

 

Tracy Rosenberg

Managing Director, Media Alliance

Tracy Rosenberg left an earlier career sending trade show exhibits around the country and the world to pursue a passion for alternative media and information access for all. She's been with Media Alliance off and on since 1997, interrupted by stints at Pacifica Radio's KPFA and with the Center for Research Libraries in Chicago, where she was up happily to her ears in archival printed materials. Tracy took over as the Managing Director at Media Alliance in May of 2007.