2025 Student Fellows
Explore where our fellows will spend their summers!
Cecil Egbele
Partner: Foundation for Justice Development and Peace
UC Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism, Documentary
Cecil will explore and document the psychological toll of displacement on IDPs in Benue State, Nigeria, focusing on personal stories that highlight the trauma, survivor’s guilt, and systemic barriers to mental healthcare in the sixth most populous nation in the world. In partnership with the Foundation for Justice, Development, and Peace (FJDP), Cecil will investigate gaps in existing interventions and advocate for sustainable solutions through expert insights and vérité filmmaking. By exposing these challenges and comparing them to global displacement standards, the film will push for policy reforms, increased mental health funding, and greater accountability from national and international stakeholders.
Diana Mulan Zhu
Partner: Red Canary Song
UC Santa Cruz, Film & Digital Media Studies
Diana Mulan Zhu’s project addresses the human rights violations faced by Asian and migrant women workers engaged in sex work and unlicensed massage work, who are disproportionately subject to police brutality, racial profiling, surveillance, and labor exploitation. Migrant sex workers, particularly those of Asian descent, are often caught at the intersection of criminalization, anti-trafficking policies, and racialized misogyny — a system that falsely equates sex work with trafficking while failing to provide labor protections. Through a participatory media workshop hosted in partnership with Red Canary Song in Flushing, NY, Zhu will facilitate a multi-week series of Super8 analog filmmaking and oral history sessions designed specifically for AAPI migrant sex workers. Participants will be taught basic analog filmmaking techniques and co-create their own short films and sound pieces, which will form the basis of a multimedia installation, a community screening, and a single-channel documentary film. The workshop also integrates somatic exercises, abstraction techniques (such as direct film manipulation), and collective storytelling to ensure participant safety and agency. This counter-archival and visual advocacy initiative supports the organization’s broader organizing efforts, including lobbying for the Massage License Decriminalization Act (Cecilia’s Act).
Rachel Wallace
Partner: California Coalition for Women Prisoners
UC Berkeley, Berkeley Law, Jurisprudence and Social Policy PhD Program
International human rights bodies have developed guidelines on access to adequate reproductive healthcare that are anecdotally not being fully realized in carceral settings. This project will primarily seek to understand the landscape of reproductive healthcare in California’s county jails, with the goal of crafting a report on “best practices” related to reproductive rights for incarcerated individuals. This project will also include analysis of health records at county hospitals that serve incarcerated patients in order to better understand reproductive healthcare for this population.
Bhalpriya Sandhu
Partner: DNA Bridge
UC Berkeley, Molecular and Cell Biology: Genetics, Genomics, Evolution, and Development
The goal of this project is to produce a comprehensive report of the established and emerging policies in the DNA testing of migrants and the use of DNA in family reunifications at the border, as well as how it’s used to justify separations. This report will be used as a guide for a white paper that will be produced by DNA Bridge at a later time. The focus of the report will be to catalogue policies, reports, and orders that pertain to the usage of DNA in the context of families at the border.
Meredith Song
Partner: Community Alliance with Family Farmers
UC Berkeley, Goldman School of Public Policy
This fellow will work with Community Alliance with Family Farmer to analyze geospatial data of agricultural land transactions in California and write a policy report. The trend of agricultural land consolidation has impacts for both the climate and human health through extractive agricultural practices, resource hoarding, and contamination of drinking water. The report will summarize the direct impacts of land consolidation on farmworker communities and provide policy recommendations to regulate speculative land transactions.
Savion Ellis
Partner: Central Valley Pride
UC Merced, Interdisciplinary Humanities
Savion will be conducting a series of oral history interviews with members of the LGBT+ community in the Central Valley, working closely with a Peer Advocacy Director at the Central Valley Pride Center in Merced, CA. Historically, the narrative of queerness in the United States has been told through a heteronormative lens, ascribing an understanding of the LGBT+ community that is fundamentally founded on social injustices. Members of the community who lived through horrific atrocities and social injustices (such as the AIDS epidemic) were unable to speak for themselves or their community about events that directly impacted their lives and safety. Savion’s project seeks to amend that through the arts. These interviews will be framed through queer-ecological questions that ground the interviewees in their homes as they discuss their journeys with queerness. Savion will then use these interviews to create a series of erasure poems.
Mario Varo
Partner: Hope Border Institute
UC Berkeley, Political Science
This project will involve in-depth fieldwork at Clínica Hope — the Hope Border Institute’s volunteer-led free health clinic serving asylum seekers in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. Mario will document human rights violations, due process violations, state abuses, and gaps in humanitarian aid, as experienced by asylum seekers. In addition to conducting research, he will support clinic operations by providing Spanish-language medical interpretation. Ultimately, his work aims to provide evidence-based recommendations to strengthen the organization’s humanitarian programs across the Paso del Norte border region, which includes Las Cruces (New Mexico), El Paso (Texas), and Ciudad Juárez (Mexico).
Anonymous
Partner: Anonymous
UC Berkeley, Berkeley Law LL.M. Program
This project investigates the dispossession of an Indigenous sacred site in the Caribbean, examining its intersection with corporate water privatization, environmental degradation, and related public health impacts tied to an industrial park. Using a human rights framework, this fellow will document these issues, produce a white paper in both English and Spanish, and develop strategic, evidence-based recommendations to address environmental harm and strengthen accountability for human rights. By bridging community resistance and international human rights frameworks, this project aims to equip local movements with the tools to challenge environmental harm and promote accountability for human rights violations.
Anonymous
Partner: Sambatra Izay Salama
UC Berkeley, Legal Studies
This fellow will support Sambatra Izay Salama’s project supporting sex workers’ rights and access to sexual and reproductive health, in hopes of strengthening women’s rights and reproductive rights in the country. This fellow will assist their team through the writing of project proposals, briefs, and research assignments, as well as ground-level support. This will include assisting in their family planning and medical facilities, and participating in outreach interventions and workshops.
Anonymous
Partner: Human Rights Watch
UC Berkeley, Department of Geography, Political Economy
This project empowers diaspora Hongkongers in the US, UK, Canada, and Taiwan to assert their right to self-determination by addressing both authoritarian repression and entrenched monetary systems. Collaborating with Human Rights Watch, it combines interviews, roundtables, and emotional resilience strategies to strengthen diaspora organizing efforts. The project culminates in a multilingual toolkit integrating policy proposals, mental-health support, monetary literacy education, and global human rights advocacy to drive impactful change.
Anonymous
Partner: Organización Esferica
UC Berkeley, Engineering
This project will support Organización Esferica in their goal of understanding how lithium mining has led to landscape degradation and the displacement of indigenous communities in Northern Argentina. This fellow will create site specific maps of lithium impacts on rural communities, including agriculture, drinking water availability, and health. This fellow plans to document communities’ resistance to mining, and create educational material on greenwashing and how this displacement is occurring under the guise of the clean energy transition.
Anonymous
Partner: Tipey Joa
UC San Diego, Linguistic Anthropology
This fellow will work with a cross-border grassroots Indigenous advocacy group dedicated to promoting health, cultural preservation, and social justice for Kumiay communities in Baja, California. Their fieldwork will include community outreach, administrative tasks, and legislative advocacy to secure Indigenous rights and mobility across state-imposed borders. This collaboration will contribute to my research on Indigenous sovereignty, cultural continuity, and the sociopolitical dynamics of border enforcement.