Curtis Henderson Jr.

Curtis Henderson Jr. spent 33 years at Boston Neighborhood Network, serving as General Manager for more than two decades and building BNN into one of the most recognized community media centers in the country. Under his leadership BNN grew into a multilingual operation producing more than 1,000 programs annually in languages including Spanish, Haitian Creole, Amharic, Arabic, Chinese, Vietnamese, and more than a dozen others, making it one of the most genuinely diverse public access operations in any American city. He led the expansion of BNN's reach from cable television into community radio, partnering with the City of Boston to launch WBCA 102.9 FM, a low-power FM station that extended BNN's community platform into the radio spectrum.

BNN operates out of the Charles J. Beard II Media Center, a former MBTA power station renovated into a LEED-certified production facility, and under Curtis's stewardship it became what its own description calls a landmark institution built by and for the community. In 2018 he received the ACM's Dirk Koning-George Stoney Award for Humanistic Communication.

Curtis's tenure at BNN is a record of what sustained leadership makes possible: a station that grew more multilingual, more technically capable, and more deeply embedded in its city over three decades.