Onida Coward-Mayers

Onida Coward-Mayers became the founding director of Brooklyn Community Access Television at age 25 in 1989, leading the design, construction, launch, and daily management of what grew into a 10,000 square foot multimedia production facility housed at BRIC, the Brooklyn arts and culture organization. Born in Panama and raised in Brooklyn, she took the helm at a moment when Black and brown Brooklyn was beginning to use public access channels to put its music, culture, politics, and stories on television, and BCAT became the platform for that expression. She later also directed Manhattan's Cable Access Center, extending her community media leadership across the boroughs.

After leaving BCAT she moved into civic engagement work, serving as agency head for New York City's Voter Assistance Commission and later as a government affairs strategist, carrying forward the same conviction about public participation that had shaped her access work. In 2002 she received the ACM's Jewell Ryan-White Award for Cultural Diversity, recognition that reflected both her station leadership and what BCAT represented for communities that had rarely seen themselves centered in any media.

Onida's work at BCAT demonstrated at an urban scale what community access television was built to do: hand a platform to the people a city is made of, and step back while they use it.