Tami Kashia Gold is professor emerita of film production and media studies at Hunter College and the Director of the James Aronson Awards for Social Justice Journalism. She is an award-winning filmmaker and has produced SEX WORK It’s Just a Job; Every Mother’s Son; Juggling Gender: Politics, Sex and Identity; Out At Work: Lesbian And Gay Men On The Job; Passionate Politics: The Life and Work of Charlotte Bunch; RFK In The Land of Apartheid; The Last Hunger Strike: Ireland 1981; among others. Tami’s films have screened at the New York Film Festival; Sundance; Tribeca Film Festival; Whitney; Museum of Modern Art; Chicago Institute of Art and on PBS/POV, HBO, America Reframed. She is a recipient of a Rockefeller; Guggenheim; Fulbright; NY/NJ Video Arts Fellowships; AFI Independent Filmmakers Fellowship; New York State Council for the Arts and awards from the Audience Award from Tribeca; Documentary Media Award from GLAAD; Excellence in the Arts Award from the Manhattan Borough President; Cine Golden Eagle Award; HUGO Award; Gold Plaque from the Chicago International Film Festival; Audience Award from The Workers Unite Film Festival; nominated for an Emmy Award.
David Alm joined the committee for the Aronson Awards for Social Justice Journalism in 2009 and served as co-director in 2014 and 2015. He is also a writer whose work has appeared in Mother Jones, GQ, Runner's World, Outside, Men's Journal, and many other publications. In recent years, David has focused on the intersection of athletics and social issues. His 2021 feature for GQ "The Marathon Men Who Can't Go Home" was named one of the best features of the year by Longreads, and his 2023 profile of Rachael Rapinoe was anthologized in The Year's Best Sports Writing. Since 2006, David has taught journalism at Hunter College, where he focuses on magazine and feature writing.
Robin Andersen is professor emerita of media studies at Fordham University, and an award-winning author who has written a dozen single and co-authored books. She analyses film, TV, media coverage of war, the media’s role in environmental awareness and action, and politics and public opinion. She edits the Routledge Focus Book Series on Media and Humanitarian Action, and her latest book is, The Complicit Lens: Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza, co-published by OR Books and the Institute for Palestine Studies. Her latest co-authored book is Censorship, Digital Media, and the Global Crackdown on Freedom of Expression, published in 2024. She works with Project Censored as a Judge and a contributing author. She is a member of the Board of Directors and writes for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), and is an Izzy Award Judge given by the Park Center for Independent Media. She writes for CounterPunch the LA Progressive, The Progressive, Common Dreams, Scheerpost.com, Mondoweiss and other outlets.
Rhoda Aronson is the niece of James Aronson. She believes deeply in a free press and is committed to the legacy of her uncle and to the mission of the Aronson Awards.
Seyma Bayram is a multimedia journalist and assistant professor of journalism at Hunter College. Bayram was a Spencer Fellow at Columbia University and a Reflect America Fellow at National Public Radio. She has covered race, criminal justice, reproductive rights, and other social justice issues. Her work has appeared in NPR, the Akron Beacon Journal, Columbia Journalism Review, The Associated Press, Chalkbeat and other outlets. She has taught reporting and writing at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, her alma mater, and its School of International and Public Affairs.
Emmanuel Felton is a journalist and author whose work focuses on race and racism shapes American politics and policy. He spent nearly five years as a race and ethnicity reporter at the Washington Post, where he contributed to Pulitzer Prize–winning coverage and won a Sidney Award for his reporting on the spread of Stand Your Ground laws. Previously, he was an investigative reporter at BuzzFeed News and a senior staff writer at the Hechinger Report, where his investigation into the federal government's failure to enforce desegregation orders won a James Aronson Award and was a Livingston Award finalist. He is writing The Search for Black Mecca, a book on the aftermath of the Great Migration, for HarperCollins. He holds a master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he was a Toni Stabile Fellow for Investigative Journalism.
Laura Flanders is an award-winning independent media creator and entrepreneur. A contributing writer to The Nation magazine and a media fellow at The Democracy Collaborative, Flanders is also the author of six books, including The New York Times best-seller, BUSHWOMEN: Tales of a Cynical Species (Verso, 2004) and BLUE GRIT: True Democrats Take Back Politics from the Politicians (Penguin Press, 2007) as well as Real Majority/Media Minority, The High Cost of Sidelining Women in Reporting (Common Courage, 1996). The Laura Flanders Show aired on Air America Radio from 2004-2008 prior to which Flanders was the founding host of Your Call on public radio in San Francisco and founding co-host of the long-running media watch program, CounterSpin (1990-1998). In 2019, she was awarded an Izzy Award for excellence in independent media as well as the Pat Mitchell Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women's Media Center for advancing women’s and girls’ visibility and power in media. In 2020, she received a Lannan Cultural Freedom Fellowship in recognition of her work in independent journalism and as an advocate for public media. Currently she interviews forward-thinking people about the key questions of our time on Laura Flanders & Friends a solutions-focused television and radio program airing on close to 300 PBS stations and YouTube, on PRX, the public radio exchange.
Erica González Martínez works to strengthen the advocacy, leadership, and activation of the Puerto Rican diaspora. Her prior roles include serving as Executive Editor of El Diario/La Prensa, and as Senior Advisor to New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark Viverito. Erica conceptualized “Sept.11 – the Latino experience,” a ground-breaking, bilingual, multiplatform series at El Diario that reported on the impact of this devastating event on Latino workers, immigration policy, the New York City mayoral race, and gentrification. Prior to this position, she wrote hundreds of hard-hitting editorials that helped build momentum for landmark changes, including reforms to the vestiges of the Rockefeller drug laws and the introduction of a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in New York State. While at the New York City Council, Erica led the development and implementation of the Council’s first-ever digital inclusion and innovation plan and brought diverse ethnic and community media to the front of city government outreach and prioritized ad buying. Erica currently serves on the boards of City Limits and the New Economy Project, and the Women’s Media Center, where she edits reports and essays by Latina writers and journalists, and also co-hosts WMC Talks. The great granddaughter of a Marine Tiger, Erica has degrees in political science and journalism from Syracuse and Columbia University.
Yoruba Richen is an award-winning documentary filmmaker whose work has been featured on multiple outlets, including Netflix, MSNBC, FX/Hulu, HBO, and PBS. Her most recent film The Rebellious Life of Mrs Rosa Parks premiered at Tribeca Film Festival and won a Peabody Award. It is currently streaming on Peacock. Other recent work includes the Emmy-nominated films American Reckoning (Frontline), How It Feels to Be Free (American Masters), The Sit In: Harry Belafonte Hosts the Tonight Show (Peacock), and Green Book: Guide to Freedom (Smithsonian Channel). She directed an episode of the award-winning series Black and Missing for HBO and High on the Hog for Netflix. Her film, The Killing of Breonna Taylor won an NAACP Image Award and is streaming on HULU. Her previous films, The New Black and Promised Land won multiple festival awards before airing on PBS’s Independent Lens and P.O.V. Yoruba is a past Guggenheim and Fulbright fellow and she won the Creative Promise Award at Tribeca All Access. She was a Sundance Producers Fellow and Women’s Fellow and is a recipient of the Chicken & Egg Breakthrough Filmmaker’s Award. Yoruba is the founding director of the Documentary Program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. She founded Promise Land Films, which focuses on producing nuanced, compelling documentary films that illuminate issues of race, space, and power.
John Tarleton is Editor and co-founder of The Indypendent, a free, progressive newspaper and website published in New York City. He previously served as Associate Editor of Clarion, the newspaper of the Professional Staff Congress, the union that represents 30,000 faculty and staff at the City University of New York. Tarleton has been awarded Best Feature Story three times by the New York Community Media Alliance and won numerous local and national awards for labor coverage during his time at Clarion. Under his direction, The Indypendent was the first publication to feature little-known candidates Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani on their cover long before they became household names. He has also trained and mentored hundreds of young journalists over the past quarter century and is the co-host of The Indypendent News Hour which airs on WBAI-99.5 Tuesdays 5-6 pm.
Alex S. Vitale is Professor of Sociology and Coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, He has spent the last 30 years writing about policing and consults community-based movements, human and civil rights organizations, and governments internationally. Prof. Vitale is the author of City of Disorder: How the Quality-of-Life Campaign Transformed New York Politics and The End of Policing. His academic writings on policing have appeared in Policing and Society, The American Journal of Sociology, Social Research, Criminology and Public Policy, Police Practice and Research, Mobilization, and Contemporary Sociology. He is also a frequent essayist, whose writings have been published in The NY Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, Vice News, Fortune, and USA Today. He has also appeared on CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, NPR, PBS, Democracy Now, and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.