Meet Our Instructors



Rozzell Medina (he/him), Lead Instructor

Rozzell's passion for teaching is rooted in a belief that people learning together, in community, can greatly improve people's lives and our society as a whole. However, this won't happen if we model our classrooms and learning communities after institutions that harm people and the health of our society. So Rozzell looks to nature, Indigeneity, art, and liberation for inspiration to create healthy and creative learning communities. In addition to managing programs and serving as the lead instructor of Humanity in Perspective, Rozzell is the festival director of the Portland EcoFilm Festival. Previously, he founded and directed the creative learning nonprofit, Public Social University, which transformed art galleries, cafes, museums, and public parks into free,  temporary community schools. He also directed the Chiron Studies program at Portland State University, which enabled students to create, design, and instruct official, for-credit classes.

Rozzell grew up in and around Choctaw, Oklahoma; San Francisco, California; and San Antonio, Texas. He has lived in Portland for about 20 years, though he loves wandering off now and then, mostly to visit ancestral homelands in Mexico and New Mexico.

 

Christopher Ian Foster is the author of Conscripts of Migration: Neoliberal Globalization, Nationalism, and the Literature of New African Diasporas (2019). He served as an Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies at Jackson State University and James Madison University after receiving a Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (2015). He has published widely in postcolonial and diaspora studies and has taught courses on globalization for the International Studies Program at Colorado State University. He lives in Portland with his partner and currently teaches in the Black Studies and International & Global Studies departments at Portland State University.
 

Eben Pindyck has written for The New York Times MagazineThe New Yorker, and VICE, among others. He was an O'Brien Fellow in Public Service Journalism at Marquette University.

 

Manya Yana Campos is a Xicana poet, multidisciplinary artist, educator and mother creature. She has been published in Ofrenda magazine, We’Moon, and The Jefferson Journal. She is the author of two chapbooks, Blue Corn, Mixed Masa, and the Occasional Magic Trick and a look of defiance. radiant. She just completed a hybrid manuscript titled Legalize My Mother and is a two-time recipient of the Haines & Friends Visual Arts Grant for her multimedia installation, Latina Geniuses are everywhere. Manya received her MFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art. 

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