Sylvia Ryerson is a multimedia artist, organizer, and PhD candidate in American Studies at Yale University. 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.