Fonografia Collective is a collaboration between Ruxandra Guidi and Bear Guerra. Fonografia believes in empathetic and culturally-sensitive documentary storytelling about everyday people around the world. Fonografia finds and crafts compelling stories about human rights, politics, the environment, and social issues and shares them with the general public using radio, photography, the printed word, multimedia, public installations and events. Since 2005, Fonografia has been working together to advance a vision of a more inclusive and diverse approach to nonfiction storytelling, focusing on communities and issues across the U.S. and Latin America that are often underrepresented or misunderstood by the mainstream media.
Ruxandra Guidi has been telling nonfiction stories for almost two decades. Her reporting for public radio, magazines, and various multimedia and multidisciplinary outlets has taken her throughout the United States, the Caribbean, South and Central America, as well as Mexico and the U.S.-Mexico border region. After earning a Master’s degree in journalism from U.C. Berkeley in 2002, she assisted independent producers The Kitchen Sisters; then worked as a reporter, editor, and producer for NPR's Latino USA, the BBC daily news program, The World, the CPB-funded Fronteras Desk in San Diego-Tijuana, and KPCC Public Radio's Immigration and Emerging Communities beat in Los Angeles. She's also worked extensively throughout South America, having been a freelance foreign correspondent based in Bolivia (2007-2009) and in Ecuador (2014-2016). Currently, she is the president of the board of Homelands Productions, a journalism nonprofit cooperative founded in 1989. She is a contributing editor for the 48 year-old nonprofit magazine High Country News, and she also consults regularly as a writer, editor, translator and teacher for a variety of clients in the U.S. and Latin America. In 2018, she was awarded the Susan Tifft Fellowship for women in documentary and journalism by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.
Bear Guerra is a photographer whose work explores the human impact of globalization, development, and social and environmental justice issues in communities typically underrepresented in the media. In addition to editorial assignments, he is consistently working on long-term projects, and collaborates with media, non-profit, and arts organizations, as well as other insititutions. His photo essays and images have been published and exhibited widely, both in the United States and abroad. He was a Ted Scripps Fellow in Environmental Journalism for the 2013-2014 academic year at the University of Colorado - Boulder; a 2014 Mongabay Special Reporting Initiative Fellow; as well as a 2014 International Reporting Project Health and Development Reporting Fellow. In 2012, he was chosen as a Blue Earth Alliance project photographer for his ongoing project "La Carretera: Life Along Peru's Interoceanic Highway". Other recognitions have included being selected for publication in American Photography (2005, 2015, 2016) and Latin American Fotografía (2014, 2016, 2017); an honorable mention in the 2012 Photocrati Fund competition for the same project. Bear has also been a finalist for a National Magazine Award in Photojournalism (2010)
For more information on Fonografia Collective, click here.
This event is free and open to the public.
Choi Auditorium, Occidental College
1600 Campus Rd.
Los Angeles, CA 90041
The Oxy Arts Speaker Series is made possible by the Arts and Urban Experience Initiative, which is generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
