Core Team
Mitzi Miller, Host
Mitzi Miller, Host, has been 70 Million’s narrator since season 1. She is a celebrated journalist, best-selling author, and veteran editor. After almost fifteen years in print media, in March 2015 she made a successful leap to television and film when she became Head of Development at Rainforest Entertainment. Before that, she served as the editor-in-chief of two of the country’s premier African-American magazines, EBONY and JET. She is the third individual and the only woman in history to have held both positions.
Juleyka Lantigua, Creator & Executive Producer
In 2017, Juleyka (she/her) founded the production company LWC Studios after 18+ years in media (including NPR, The Atlantic, and Random House). LWC’s mission is to support and amplify the work of creators of color in digital audio and film.
Jen Chien, Executive Editor
Jen (she/her) is an audio editor and producer. Prior to LWC Studios., she was Senior Radio Editor at Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting and Managing Editor for Crosscurrents and KALW News. Awards recognitions include Third Coast, Peabody, Gracies, ONA/OJA, and SPJ Sigma Delta Chi.
Paulina Velasco, Editor
Paulina (she/her) is a multilingual audio producer based in Los Angeles, California. She’s had experience across several podcasts and public radio programs and has filed stories for KCRW, Marketplace, and The Guardian, among others. She reports on immigration and immigrant communities with a commitment to nuanced and accurate representation of people’s experiences.
Jimmy Gutierrez, Managing Editor
Jimmy (he/him) is an audio editor and producer based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Previously, he was the Director of Audience for Outlier Media in Detroit where he also coordinated the Detroit Documenters program. His past life includes reporting and producing at New Hampshire Public Radio, where he contributed to multiple award-winning reporting projects. He was also a firefighter for the City of Milwaukee. Follow Jimmy on Twitter.
Cedric Wilson, Lead Producer & Sound Designer
Cedric (he/him) is a composer, musician, sound engineer and sound designer. He is LWC’s Lead Producer, responsible for the overall sound quality of original and client podcasts. He began his career in music, then moved to podcasts after discovering the intricacies of sound within them. Previously, he worked on The Nod from Gimlet Media where you can hear his work in engineering, scoring, and sound design. In 2020, he sound designed and composed an original score for Driving the Green Book from LWC’s client Macmillan Podcasts. That show won the inaugural Ambie for Best History Podcast.
Elizabeth Nakano, Sound Designer
Elizabeth Nakano is an independent audio producer based in Los Angeles. A radio documentary she helped produce–Two Years, Diaries of a Divided Nation–recently won a regional Edward R. Murrow award. In 2021, California Love, a podcast for which she produced half the episodes, won a “Best Sound” Webby award. Previously, she worked on shows at Stitcher, Spotify, and Radiotopia, and contributed to shows such as 99% Invisible and Twenty Thousand Hertz.
Mark Betancourt, Lead Fact Checker
Mark Betancourt (he/him) is a freelance reporter based in Washington, D.C. His work has appeared in print, radio and television, and often focuses on the ways in which large-scale systems fail or harm people living in poverty. His investigative reporting has been featured in High Country News, Reveal, The Detroit News, Vice and The Nation, on topics ranging from the massive overtaxation of homeowners in Detroit to the lack of mental health care for wildland firefighters. He also writes about science and technology for Air & Space and Eos. Follow Mark on Twitter.
Sarah McClure, Fact Checker
Sarah (she/her) is a producer and award-winning investigative journalist based in Los Angeles, California. She has written and produced for The Wall Street Journal, Fusion Investigative, Univision, Agence France-Presse, The New York Times and Type Investigations. Her 2020 investigation about Amish sexual assault was a winner of SPJ Sigma Delta Chi for National Magazine Writing. Follow Sarah on Twitter.
Michelle Baker, Photo Editor
Michelle Baker (she/ her) managed a distributed team of photographers around the country to capture images of all subjects for this season and season 3. She is a multimedia journalist proficient in video, audio and digital journalism, with a focus on visual storytelling. She studied Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she was selected to take part in the NPR Next Generation Radio program and honed her skills and love for public radio.
REPORTERS
Eve Abrams
Eve Abrams is a radio producer, writer, audio documentarian, and educator who stitches stories together from her command center, just off Saint Claude Avenue in New Orleans. Eve currently produces the audio project Unprisoned, which tells stories at the intersection of the criminal legal system and human lives. It has received a Gabriel Award, a New Orleans Press Club Award, and was a Peabody Finalist. Eve’s TED Talk, The Human Stories Behind Mass Incarceration, showcases some of the New Orleanians she met while making the first season of Unprisoned. Her 2015 documentary Along Saint Claude received the Edward R. Murrow award and a New Orleans Press Club Award. Her radio stories have aired on a host of national programs such as Morning Edition, The Tavis Smiley Show, Reveal, and This American Life. She edits the award winning radio program, TriPod.
Lisa Bartfai
Lisa Bartfai (she/her) is an independent radio producer, translator, and media educator splitting her time between rural Maine and Southern California. Her work explores the intersection of culture and politics and can be heard on NPR stations and podcasts all over the country. During her years in radio, she has come to specialize in reporting from prison and other underserved communities. Bartfai is a proud 2016 Audio Academy graduate. Bartfai oversees audio projects from idea to finished program, and delivers broadcast-ready, NPR quality radio in a timely manner.
Mark Betancourt
Mark Betancourt (he/him) is a freelance reporter based in Washington, D.C. His work has appeared in print, radio and television, and often focuses on the ways in which large-scale systems fail or harm people living in poverty. His investigative reporting has been featured in High Country News, Reveal, The Detroit News, Vice and The Nation, on topics ranging from the massive overtaxation of homeowners in Detroit to the lack of mental health care for wildland firefighters. He also writes about science and technology for Air & Space and Eos. Follow Mark on Twitter.
Cecilia Brown
Cecilia is a documentary film and audio storyteller. In 2020 she graduated with a master’s in multimedia journalism from the University of Oregon. She has freelanced as a videographer, editor and producer for documentary production companies that include Expedition Studios, Storyline Media and Blue Chalk Media. She has had work published by This American Life, Listeners podcast and the Portland Mercury, and has received multiple awards, including “Best Oregon Filmmaker.”
Jeneé Darden
Jeneé Darden is an award-winning journalist, author, public speaker and mental health advocate from Oakland, Calif. She hosts the weekly arts segment Sights & Sounds and covers East Oakland for public radio station KALW 91.7 FM. Jeneé has reported for NPR, Marketplace, KQED, KPCC, The Los Angeles Times, Ebony, Refinery29 and other outlets. In 2005, she reported on the London transit bombings for Time magazine. She is the author of When a Purple Rose Blooms (Nomadic Press), a collection of essays and poetry about her personal journey through Black womanhood. She curates the reading Let Her Tell It! about Black women and mental health. Jeneé holds a BA in ethnic studies from UC San Diego and a master’s in journalism from the University of Southern California.
Chad Davis
In 2017, Chad joined the St. Louis Public Radio team as the fourth Race and Culture Diversity Fellow and is currently a General Assignment and Arts Reporter. He is graduate of Truman State University where he studied Public Communication and English and served as the executive producer of the on-campus news station, TMN Television.
Ruxandra Guidi
Guidi is the instructor and editor of Arizona Sonora News, Arizona University’s capstone media course. She grew up in Venezuela and has been a freelance journalist, editor and teacher for two decades, both in the U.S. and throughout Latin America. Guidi specializes in magazine writing, audio reporting and podcasting, and has contributed to High Country News, The Atlantic, Pacific Standard, BBC’s The World, Latino USA, The Guardian and NPR. She is the president of the board of Homelands Productions, a journalism nonprofit cooperative founded in 1989, and a contributing editor for the nonprofit magazine High Country News. In 2018, she was awarded the Susan Tifft Fellowship for women in documentary and journalism by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Since 2005 she has also collaborated regularly with her husband, photographer Bear Guerra, under the name Fonografia Collective, focusing on “empathetic and culturally sensitive documentary storytelling about everyday people around the world.”
Andrea Y. Henderson
Andrea Henderson joined St. Louis Public Radio in March 2019, where she covers race, identity and culture as part of the public radio collaborative Sharing America. Andrea comes to St. Louis Public Radio from NPR, where she reported for the race and culture podcast Code Switch and produced pieces for All Things Considered. Her art appreciation allowed her to cover arts and culture for the Houston African-American business publication, Empower Magazine. She also wrote arts stories for Syracuse’s Post-Standard and The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina. Andrea graduated from the University of Texas at Arlington with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and earned her master’s degree in arts journalism from Syracuse University. For three years, she served on the board of the Houston Alliance of Fashion and Beauty as the media chair, and she is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists.
Carolina Hidalgo
Carolina is a producer at WNYC’s Radio Rookies, where she works with young people as they report personal audio stories about their lives and communities. Previously, Carolina worked at St. Louis Public Radio as a digital reporter and senior photojournalist. There, she wrote stories, produced audio features and made photos with a focus on justice reform, inequality, race and immigration. The 70 Million Season 2 episode “The Work of Closing a Notorious Jail” which she reported and produced won a Third Coast/Richard H. Driehaus award. In 2019, she reported from the United States-Mexico border as part of an International Women’s Media Foundation fellowship. In 2018, she was named one of The Lit List’s “30 photographers to watch.” Carolina’s work has been recognized by the Peabody Awards, the Third Coast awards, the Edward R. Murrow Awards, the Missouri Broadcasters Association, the Florida Society of News Editors, Pictures of the Year International, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the National Association of Black Journalists.
Pamela Kirkland
Pamela Kirkland (she/her) is an award-winning journalist based in Atlanta and a field producer for CNN. She's covered breaking news events around the country ranging from hurricanes to elections and worked for The PBS NewsHour reporting on long-form stories about the opioid crisis, immigration, education, and more. She joined the NewsHour in 2015 from the Washington Post where she was part of the video team that produced the Emmy-nominated “N-word Project." She's traveled the country—covering three presidential campaigns, Congress, and the White House. She graduated with a degree in Political Science and Communication from the University of Pittsburgh.
Sonia Paul
Sonia is a journalist and audio producer born and based in Oakland, California, and the daughter of immigrants from India and the Philippines. Her work is discussed in journalism, social work, criminal justice and religious studies courses, and cited in books, surveys and research papers about trends within minority communities, international digital media, politics, economic growth and gendered violence. She’s reported, produced and researched radio stories, podcasts and audio projects for NPR, PRI, KQED, Studio 360, Marketplace, Self Evident, Radiolab, Collective Next, The Washington Post, Vox Media, Pushkin Industries and more. In 2017, she was named a “rising star” and a senior fellow with the Fund for Investigative Journalism and Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism. In 2019, she received an honorable mention as an AIR New Voices Scholar. Sonia graduated with honors from Columbia Journalism School, where she studied as an Anne O’Hare McCormick Scholar. Her personal podcast is Loitering: The Occasional, But Lovable, Traveling Mini Pod, named after the “Why Loiter” movement fighting for women’s right to safe space (subscribe here!).
Daniel Rivero
Daniel Rivero is a reporter and producer for WLRN, covering Latino and criminal justice issues. Before joining the team, he was an investigative reporter and producer on the television series "The Naked Truth," and a digital reporter for Fusion. His work has won honors of the Murrow Awards, Sunshine State Awards and Green Eyeshade Awards. He has also been nominated for a Livingston Award and a GLAAD Award on reporting on the background of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt's tenure as Attorney General of Oklahoma and on the Orlando nightclub shooting, respectively. Daniel was born on the outskirts of Washington D.C. to Cuban parents, and moved to Miami full time twenty years ago.
Nina Sparling
Nina Sparling is a journalist and audio producer based in San Francisco, where she covers inequality, politics, and the environment. She got her start in journalism covering food, agriculture and technology in New York. Her writing has appeared in outlets including the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Paris Review. Her radio work has been featured on KQED, Alaska News Nightly, and NPR. Nina is an alum of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
Looking for previous teams? Check them out: