Cherie Tessier

Cherie Tessier is a longtime producer at Thurston Community Television in Olympia, Washington, who used public access television to speak for herself as a disabled person and to encourage other disabled community members to do the same. Her work brought disability voice and representation into the local access channel at a time when those perspectives were largely absent from both commercial and community media, and she helped build a local production practice that treated disabled producers as full participants in public storytelling. In 2009 she received the ACM's Jewell Ryan-White Award for Cultural Diversity.

That recognition placed her work within the field's understanding that cultural diversity in community media is not only about race and ethnicity but about all the ways people are systematically excluded from mainstream media representation, including disability.

Cherie's work at Thurston Community Television is an example of what public access was designed to make possible: a local producer using a community channel to claim a public voice that no commercial outlet was going to provide.