AUDIO FELLOWSHIP

EARS IN THE FIELD

Ears in the Field is a 4-month paid production fellowship hosted by Food Culture Collective in the Spring and Summer of 2023.

Comprising a cohort of 4 emerging audio producers and creatives, Fellows will develop original audio pieces to be featured in the first season of the Radical Nourishment podcast, produced by Food Culture Collective in partnership with the HEAL Food Alliance. Selected fellows will have the opportunity to contribute to a dynamic new podcast experiment, collaborate with a creative community, hone their storytelling and narrative strategy skills, and connect with seasoned audio and food media professionals.

Learn more

  • This is a production-oriented fellowship for people already working in audio and/or who have a developed creative voice as editors, producers, artists, writers, etc. Over the course of the fellowship, fellows will craft two, ~12 minute original audio pieces to be featured in the new Radical Nourishment podcast. A juicy, intimate, narrative-driven podcast meets audio collage, the podcast will celebrate food cultures of deep nourishment and collective care that exist all around us.

  • Radical Nourishment features the stories of food workers, culture-bearers, organizers, creatives, and more working to reclaim and reimagine our relationship to food, land, and community, Fellows aim to immerse listeners in stories that witness food as a teacher and its power to shape the narratives that nourish our culture.

  • This season’s podcast will focus on the core theme: ​​“Stories of self-determination & sovereignty in relationship to food, land and nourishment, found in moments big and small.”

Meet the Audio Fellows

SPRING/SUMMER 2023

  • Donelle Wedderburn (she/her) is an audio producer with a special love for sound and product design. She has contributed to producing and developing a range of broadcasts and podcasts for ABC News, 10% Happier, Blind Landing, and NPR. In her free time, she loves to write poetry, watch movies, and obsess about architecture and industrial design.

  • Shephali (she/her) is a traditional ecologist, farmer, educator, and artist-activist. Her work is focused on building models and thought leadership around ecological stewardship, restoration, education, and justice that centers equity, dignity, and interconnection. As a farmer, she is learning not only how to grow food to feed stomachs and soil, but also how to nourish social and racial justice movements so intimately tied with the Earth. As an educator, she strives to engender the study of the original 3 R's - regeneration, reverence, and re-membering. As a climate activist, she continues to feed the mycelial networks for post-paradigm futures and engage in council and earth activism work with organizations like Global Peace Initiative of Women, Earth Holder Community, Community Alliance for Global Justice, Just Food NYC, etc. As a human being, she strives to walk everything back to and center Love.

    Through a lens of “land as pedagogy” she has designed and facilitated several flagship educational and creative programs to train beginner farmers, K-12 youth, and climate activists in developing pathways of access to underserved communities, and laying the foundations for a more-than-human future powered by ancestral wisdom and interspecies collaboration. In the spaces between, you can find her staring at stars, obsessing over trees, practicing yoga and qi gong, listening to rivers, learning Afro-Cuban percussion, and falling into the ocean over and over again.

  • Nino McQuown (they/them) is an artist, writer, performer, and podcaster. They write and make art about dirt, apocalypse, death, and bodies. They are the co-host and creator of the podcast Queers at the End of the World, where queer and trans artists, scientists, activists, and scholars (re)imagine apocalypses and utopias, old and new. Find their poems, comics, and essays published with Edge Effects, Catapult, Electric Literature, The Kenyon Review Online, Hotel Amerika, Barrelhouse, Cimarron Review, and Rabbit Catastrophe Press. They have a doctorate of philosophy in English, an MFA in poetry, and in all that schooling they never stopped working for farms. They also spent five years learning to build and design urban gardens, so it’s no wonder that they wrote their dissertation about dirt. They live in Baltimore, Maryland where they teach classes on urban gardening, write poems and essays, and make puppet shows.

  • Alejandra Salazar (she/her) is an audio producer, editor, and writer from San Antonio TX, based in Brooklyn. She's currently a story editor for the TED Audio Collective. Previously, she was an editor at Futuro Media and PRX's Latino USA and a reporter/producer for WNYC, New York City’s NPR member station. As a writer and audio-maker, Alejandra is interested in exploring histories and cultures through narrative storytelling. She has produced work across a range of subjects and formats, including unscripted profiles of POC creatives, stories on local cultural institutions and community-led events, and reported audio features and deep dives. She got her start in radio hosting a weekly music show at her college station at Stanford University.