Jesikah Maria Ross

jesikah maria ross has spent her career building participatory documentary and civic storytelling projects rooted in place and community voice, working at the intersection of public media, community engagement, and collaborative journalism. As Senior Community Engagement Strategist at Capital Public Radio, Sacramento's NPR affiliate, she developed models for community-engaged journalism that drew on oral history, digital storytelling, and participatory documentary practice, bringing residents into the process of shaping the stories told about their own communities. Her documentary work includes Saving the Sierra, a multi-platform project that aired on more than 200 NPR stations, and community engagement campaigns for PBS projects co-created with communities in the United States and Mexico. She has led participatory media training initiatives in Ethiopia, South Sudan, Uganda, South Africa, and Ireland in collaboration with UNICEF, WarChild, and the European Union funded Community Media Network. In 2017, the ACM recognized her with the Dirk Koning-George Stoney Award for Humanistic Communication.

Her approach, building media with communities rather than about them, represents one of the field's most developed answers to the question of what it means to give communities genuine agency over their own stories.

jesikah's work sits at the edge where community media practice meets journalism, documentary art, and civic engagement, and her career has helped define what that edge can produce.