Vanessa Maria Graber

Vanessa Maria is an award-winning bilingual journalist, educator and community organizer. She has led several impactful journalism collaboratives in New Jersey and Philadelphia and organized with Free Press Action to pass the New Jersey CIvic Information Bill, which led to the creation of the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium. Her journey in media justice started as part of the movement to expand community radio. As the community radio director at the Prometheus Radio Project, she worked to pass the Local Community Radio Act, and helped build dozens of Low Power FM radio stations across the United States. She co-founded PhillyCAM’s community-radio station, WPPM-LP FM, where she served as the station manager before joining Free Press. She is a co-owner and reporter at the worker-owned Philadelphia Hall Monitor, an independent hyper-local news cooperative focusing on civic journalism.

Vanessa Maria has taught journalism courses at Stockton University, Temple University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has conducted media research in Austria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cuba and the U.S. Virgin Islands. She is a leading expert in community media, community engagement and Latiné media.