Malkia Cyril is the Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Media Justice (CMJ). As an award-winning organizer and communications leader, Malkia has more than 15 years experience conceiving and managing grassroots communications and media organizing initiatives. Since founding CMJ in 2002, Malkia has led the organization to help organizations like People Organized to Win Employment Rights, Media Literacy Project find communications strategies and policy solutions to support their campaigns for social justice change.
Malkia’s organizational goals are to build the strategic communications capacity of the progressive movement to forward a social justice agenda, to empower traditionally disenfranchised communities, and to hold corporate media accountable for biased content and policy. Her work is premised on the core principal that communications is fundamentally a human right, and should not be for sale.
Malkia is the recipient of the Media Leader award from the Alliance for Community Media, the Emerging Leader award from the Media That Matters Film Festival, and other awards from the Media Justice Fund, Rock the Vote, and others. She has made appearances in Democracy Now, Hard Knock Radio, Breakdown FM, Free Speech TV, the documentary Outfoxed, the documentary Broadcast Blues. She has has written for and been published in the SF Weekly, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the New York Times, the Village Voice, and others.
For fun, Malkia spends an inordinate amount of time writing fiction and poetry when she should be sleeping.
To learn more about Malkia Cyril or The Center for Media Justice please visit the following website: centerformediajustice.org/about/cmj-mission-statement/