Homelands producer and board president Ruxandra Guidi is one of ten people receiving grants from the Open Society Foundations for projects that promote racial equality. She will use the award to produce a narrative podcast, Happy Forgetting, that tells untold stories about racial justice victories in the United States.
“As we navigate the many challenges, both new and unfamiliar, to advance racial justice, we are proud to support the remarkable individuals pushing for real and lasting change that is representative of the inclusive multiracial democracy we aspire to become,” said Andrew Maisel, a senior program officer at Open Society-U.S.
Ruxandra Guidi has been telling stories for more than two decades. Her work has appeared on the BBC World Service, NPR, Orion, Guernica, High Country News, The New York Times, The Guardian, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Atlantic, among others. She covered Central and South America as a freelance foreign correspondent based in Bolivia (2007‐2009) and in Ecuador (2014‐2016).
Guidi is the president of the board of Homelands Productions, a journalism nonprofit cooperative founded in 1989, and is co‐founder of Fonografia Collective. She also serves on the board of El Tímpano, a local reporting lab amplifying the voices of Oakland’s Latino and Mayan immigrants. In 2018, she was awarded the Susan Tifft Fellowship for women in documentary and journalism by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. She is currently a narrative editor for various podcasts and is working on her first novel. She’s a native of Caracas, Venezuela, and is currently based in Tucson, Arizona.