Sylvia Ryerson

Assistant Professor in the Department of American Culture, University of Michigan; Postdoctoral Scholar in the Michigan Society of Fellows

Sylvia Ryerson is a multimedia artist, organizer, and scholar. Prior to graduate school, she worked at the documentary arts center Appalshop, in Whitesburg, Kentucky. There she served as a reporter and the Director of Public Affairs Programming for Appalshop’s community radio station WMMT-FM, and co-directed and hosted the Calls from Home radio show. She has co-produced numerous community-based participatory media projects working with movements for the just transition from fossil fuel extraction, the abolition of the prison industrial complex, and migrant justice. Her media & written work has appeared in the New York Times, American Quarterly, the Boston Review, Kentucky Educational Television, NPR, the BBC, the Marshall Project, and other outlets. She is a founding member of the Racial Capitalism and the Carceral State Working Group at Yale and of the Building Community Not Prisons coalition currently working to stop the construction of a proposed new federal prison in Letcher County, Kentucky.

Read about Calls from Home, an award-winning documentary film directed by Sylvia Ryerson.