RECORDED PANEL: WEdnesday, October 22 from 12-1pm PT / 3-4pm ET
Narrative Audio Storytelling Is Still Alive
Covering Complex Stories from an Immigrant Lens
Join the Feet in 2 Worlds team for a conversation on how narrative audio storytelling and journalism can cover nuanced and complex stories from an immigrant lens — by featuring those voices as both subjects and producers.
RSVP via Zoom to attend.
RSVP via Zoom to attend.
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About this panel
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Wednesday, October 22, 2025
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12pm PT / 3pm ET
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60 min
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Free
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This webinar is recorded and made available after the event.
In a reactive media landscape, how can we encourage nuance, thoughtfulness, and complexity in audio storytelling?
Join the Feet in 2 Worlds team to hear why its reporters haven’t given up on narrative audio storytelling. In this conversation, journalists Iggy Monda, Paulina Velasco, and Lushik Lotus-Lee explain their approaches to producing and editing longform audio and share what they have learned from reporting on climate change, misinformation, and the economy.
Iggy, Paulina, and Lushik explain the concrete steps they took before, during, and after production to cover these topics within immigrant communities with nuance. Immigrant communities around the country are so often talked about when it comes to climate change, misinformation, and labor, but these journalists worked to center their experiences and expertise by talking to these communities, resulting in more impactful, nuanced stories.
They’ll talk about finding characters with stakes, pushing back against predominant doom-and-gloom narratives, translating data into human-centered stories, and centering immigrants as active shapers of solutions in crisis.
This conversation will be moderated by Feet in 2 Worlds Managing Director Mia Warren and Managing Editor Quincy Surasmith.
Key Takeaways
- Attendees will walk away with a framework of how to cover complex topics while centering immigrant perspectives in audio storytelling.
- Panelists will discuss decisions that factored into the production of specific stories — providing examples of mistakes and successes in the editing process.
- Attendees will walk away with a sense of what a Fi2W story tries to achieve, and a definition of Fi2W story values.
Who is this panel for?
This webinar is aimed at students and new practitioners of audio storytelling, as well as more seasoned journalists interested in covering stories from an immigrant perspective.
Meet the MODERATOR
Mia Warren
Mia (미아) Warren (she/her) is an award-winning audio producer, journalist, and documentarian living in Brooklyn, NY. Prior to her role as Managing Director of Feet in 2 Worlds (Fi2W), Mia was a Senior Producer at Sony Podcasts, where she developed several original narrative shows.
In 2020, Mia was the inaugural Editing Fellow at Fi2W, where she produced and edited a Golden Crane award-winning season of the A Better Life? podcast, which explored how the U.S. COVID-19 response impacted immigrant communities. As a producer at StoryCorps from 2015-2019, she created segments for their weekly broadcast on NPR’s Morning Edition, contributed to their 2019 Peabody-nominated podcast season, and collaborated on Un(re)solved, StoryCorps’ Emmy Award-winning civil rights series with Frontline.
Mia is a 2024 Emerging Leader at the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) and a 2024 Current Rising Star. She is part of the Asian American Journalist Association (AAJA)’s 2025 Executive Leadership Program (ELP) and a recipient of the Dinah Eng Leadership Fellowship. Mia is a 2025 LION Publishers community ambassador running a peer learning group for immigrant news leaders across the country. She is also a participant in the 2024-2025 UnionDocs Collaborative Studio in Ridgewood, Queens. Follow her on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
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Meet the Moderator
Quincy Surasmith
Quincy Surasmith is an audio producer and journalist based in Los Angeles, California. He is the host and executive producer of Asian Americana, a podcast featuring stories of Asian American culture and history. Quincy is also a co-founder of Potluck: an Asian American Podcast Collective, and is an alumnus of NPR’s Next Generation Radio. Previously, he was the producer-editor for the podcast #GoodMuslimBadMuslim and produced at Southern California Public Radio/LAist. Follow him on Bluesky.
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Meet the PRESENTER
Iggy Monda
Iggy Monda is a born-and-bred New Yorker. When he was young, he dreamed of being the second coming of Derek Jeter. Unfortunately, while Jeter is 6’3”, Iggy…is not. But he is a multilingual journalist of average height that has produced audio series, video explainers, and written articles for Religion of Sports, Yahoo! Finance, NBC’s Today.com, and Overtime. Iggy has covered a range of beats from the business of Aeroterror between Venezuela and Hezbollah to the anti-vax movement in the US. He most recently hosted Roughhousing and Home, Interrupted, a seven-episode series that explores the connective tissue between the climate crisis and immigrants across the U.S.
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Meet the PRESENTER
Paulina Velasco
Paulina Velasco is a multilingual reporter and audio producer based in Los Angeles, California. She has made narrative documentaries and interview shows for ten years for a variety of outlets, including Marketplace, LWC Studios, Slate, Pacifica Radio, and local NPR member stations. She writes for The Guardian about immigrants’ experiences in Southern California and particularly at the San Diego-Tijuana border—just ten miles from where she grew up.
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Meet the PRESENTER
Lushik Lotus-Lee
Lushik Lotus-Lee is an award-winning podcast producer and editor who started out as an intern at NPR. Since then, Lushik has produced shows for large networks like SiriusXM and Wondery as well as public radio outlets. She also enjoys working with independent creators to conceptualize and launch shows. Lushik is passionate about telling stories that leave a lasting impact on listeners.
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