Suzanne St. John-Crane

Suzanne St. John-Crane is a community media founder and executive who helped open and lead two Bay Area community television stations, first CMAP in Gilroy, California and later CreaTV San Jose in California, building from the ground up two organizations that gave residents and nonprofits practical access to production and distribution in their communities. Her work spans more than two decades and includes station-building, documentary and local television production, civic storytelling, and leadership in communities shaped by both technological change and deep local information needs.

In 2014 she received the ACM's Dirk Koning-George Stoney Award for Humanistic Communication, recognition that connected her institution-building work to the field's tradition of honoring people who give community media its civic and democratic grounding.

Founding two community media ceners in California's Bay Area - one in the small city of Gilroy, followed by one serving the major urban market of San Jose - reflects an unusual depth of commitment to the field's mission, and the work she built at CreaTV San Jose in particular helped make the Bay Area's community media ecosystem one of the more robust in the country.