About Boyle Heights Toxic Tour
Jasmin Lopez is an independent audio producer, reporter and sound artist working throughout the western United States and México. Born in Los Angeles and raised part-time in Northwest México, her childhood was affected by issues experienced on both sides of the U.S./ México border. This instilled in her a strong passion for pro-active social change, immigrant rights and youth empowerment.
In 2007, Jasmin founded Project Luz, an organization that empowers youth to share their stories within their communities utilizing audio and photojournalism techniques. The following year, she moved to México where she worked as a teacher in Oaxaca and also worked with several disadvantaged communities in the region. She collaborated with journalists and researched for published documentary projects, including coverage of communities and families affected by the H1N1 influenza and those affected by the disappearance of the Colorado River. Most recently, her collaborative audio work surrounding the Colorado River was exhibited at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, LookBetween Festival of the Photograph in Charlottesville and Exposure Gallery in San Francisco
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Photojournalist
Lianne Milton pursues cultural and humanitarian stories, with the goal of focusing on the effects of politics on people and their environments in places such as, Indonesia, Cambodia, Cuba, Puerto Rico, rural Mexico, Guatemala as well as the U.S. In January 2009, she transitioned into freelancing after a layoff from her newspaper job, a result of challenging economic times in the newspaper industry. Since then she photographs for publications such as the New York Times, the Guardian of London and Weekend Magazine, Los Angeles Times, NPR Digital and San Francisco Chronicle. Her work has also been featured in Foto8, PDN's Photo of the Day blog for series-in-progress on cockfighters, Slideluck Potshow DC IV and V, NPR's The Picture Show for Five Years Later on post-tsunami recovery in Banda Aceh, among others. She lives in the far western edge of San Francisco, where the city meets the ocean.
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A Los Angeles native,
Suzy Salazar is a graduate of San Francisco State University. While pursuing a double major in Raza Studies and Journalism, she worked at the Center for Integration and Improvement of Journalism, a nonprofit university-based group raising awareness of diversity in today’s society. As an undergraduate, she became involved with community-based programs that brought her into direct, day-to-day contact with the city’s Latino neighborhood, the Mission district.
For the last two years, she worked as the photo/multimedia editor for the Spanish/English bilingual newspaper, El Tecolote. These roles allowed her to develop and teach a visual journalism class at Burton High School in San Francisco's Bayview district. She also coordinated the photography for an educational fotonovela project on the 2010 U.S. Census.
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Zackary Canepari (b.1979, USA) is a freelance photographer specializing in editorial and documentary photography. His career began in 2003 shooting portraiture for American culture magazines such as XLR8R, RIDES and the SF Guardian. Before that he studied photography in Paris at the SPEOS Photographic Institute and later entered the Masters Program at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. He has been a still photographer for two documentary films, "My Blood, My Compromise," about the struggle for independence in Kosovo, and "REBORN," about rebuilding the New Orleans school system after Hurricane Katrina. His clients have included the New York Times, The Guardian, Newsweek, TIME Magazine and The Chicago Tribune. He is currently based in Los Angeles.
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Lucia Torres holds a Masters in Public Administration from CSUN and B.A. in Chicano Studies from UCLA. With more than 10 years of experience in community-building nonprofits, she is currently the Program Director for Proyecto Pastoral's IMPACTO Youth Leadership Program in Boyle Heights.
