Media Sutra, Inc.

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Chicago, IL
Media Sutra, Inc.

POC-led company with Indo-Caribbean roots. We are filmmakers, resource mobilizers, healers, coaches, consultants & artists for justice.

Partner with us to become more visible, sustainable and impactful. Media Sutra is a socially responsible company, owned and employed by people of color with over 40 years of combined experience in filmmaking, storytelling, coaching, facilitating, consulting and resource mobilization. We support our client partners to be creative, strategic and transformative. By working with us and incorporating our unique approach, you will become increasingly visible, impactful and sustainable. We are grounded in the vision of a world where everyone thrives by living a joyful, purpose-driven life fueled by self and community determination. Check out our offerings, and contact us today to get started:
- Film Production
- Facilitation & Transformative Coaching
- Strategic Consulting
- Resource Mobilization Strategy
- Event Design & Arts Integration
- Transformative Storytelling
- Communications & Campaign Support
- Leadership Development, Workshops & Retreats

01/09/2026

We are living in a moment that asks more of us than quiet care alone.

We feel it in our bodies — the way grief settles, the way fear moves fast, the way imagination keeps calling even as the ground shifts beneath us. Lives are being taken, families torn open, and communities terrorized by systems that claim safety while delivering harm.

These are not abstractions. These are people.

Silverio Villegas González (38), a father killed by ICE at a checkpoint in Illinois.
Keith Porter (43), killed by an off-duty ICE agent in California.
Renee Nicole Good (37), a poet and mother killed during a federal enforcement action in Minnesota.
Jaime Alanís (57), a farmworker fatally injured during a workplace raid.
Jocelyn Rojo Carranza (11), a child lost after ongoing trauma and threats tied to ICE.
Roberto Carlos Montoya Valdez (52), chased by ICE and struck and killed while seeking safety.

And so many more — names unrecorded, stories unfinished, families still searching.

Grieving together matters. Tenderness matters. Art, ritual, embodiment, and song matter deeply. And this moment asks us to pair care with courage.

Healing and resistance grow together — shared, resilient, alive. Care, survival, imagination, and resistance are bound to one another across generations, across identities, across place.

We say their names because they mattered.
We tell the truth because silence costs lives.
We stand in solidarity with every family and community carrying this weight.

This could have been any one of us.

Call to Action

Say the names.
Protect the vulnerable.
Choose solidarity.
Demand accountability.

Abolish ICE.

✊🏾✊🏾✊🏾

12/22/2025

Winter Solstice Greetings ❄️ Yesterday the light turned. Today, we’re still listening.

Winter has arrived quietly—asking for presence, patience, and trust in what’s forming beneath the surface. This is a season we move through with care,
rooted in relationship, guided by land,
dreaming forward together.

Come wander with us ❄️❄️❄️

❄️

12/20/2025

The Fire 🔥 Between us by — throw back to our keynote at the national conference

✨✨✨

12/17/2025

We followed art back to its roots—and forward to what’s possible. Thank you and for including us in the piloting of your curriculum: Art ✨ Economics ✨ Transformations ✨ EAT!

Together, over 3 days, our cohort traced the ways artists have been asked to survive—and tapped into the worlds we’re already building.

Swipe 👉🏾 for reflections from on Day 3 — Art as Communal.

Here’s a little on the 3 C’s that framed our 3 days together 👇🏾

Commodity: Art shaped by markets. Value tied to sales. A superstar economy that concentrates resources while thinning the field of what gets made. We named how scarcity distorts imagination when survival depends on selling.

Command: Art funded by patrons and the state—from popes to philanthropy. We held the tension: public investment can bring stability and scale, and it can also bring gatekeeping and control. We explored models that fund artists while expanding democratic choice.

Communal: Art before money. Creation rooted in relationship, reciprocity, and shared responsibility. We asked what communal art looks like now—co-ops, land trusts, mutual aid, shared infrastructure, and practices of repair that make collaboration last.

Artists have always been world-builders. Let’s build together, on purpose!

12/05/2025

So excited to share this graphic novel that we helped to create in partnership with

Unlocking Our Superpowers: SEL Goes to School!

Check out the graphic novel here 👇🏾
https://simplebooklet.com/selgoestoschool

Whether you’re a para, teacher, principal, parent or caregiver, after-school counselor or director, or CBO community, you are invited to share in this gift.

11/19/2025

Our first time at the National Convening felt like walking into a love fest—one held by the brightest minds and biggest hearts in the BIPOC documentary ecosystem.

Being among 130+ leaders from 70+ organizations—across movements, geographies, and generations—was a reminder that building narrative power is strategy and deep soul work.

We left Chicago with:

🎬 A reminder of our lineage of self-determination, and why BIPOC artists must own the means of production and distribution, especially in a moment when mainstream networks cannot be trusted with our truths.

🎬 Inspiration from the Chicago Media Coalition, whose hyperlocal, relational, interdependent leadership showed what it looks like to build community power from the ground up.

🎬 A sense of belonging that can only be created when people gather in courage, creativity, tenderness, and rigor.

🎬 Clarity that narrative work is movement work—rooted in solidarity across movements fighting for racial justice, Land Back, reparations, gender justice,
economic justice, and more.

🎬 A renewed commitment to abundant funding, refusing to center scarcity when our stories—and our people—deserve so much more.

🎬 A deeper belief in building our own ecosystem, not waiting for the mainstream to validate us, but strengthening the infrastructures we control: our own platforms, pipelines, distribution channels, and narrative strategies.

Chicago affirmed that collectively we’re building infrastructure for liberation. And at the center of it all is creativity love. The kind that refuses extraction, insists on truth, and keeps calling us toward the world we know is possible.

Grateful to be part of this community. Grateful to keep building. Grateful for the love that carries us.

11/17/2025

Some of the strongest movements we’ve ever known were born in kitchens, community cyphers, and backyard gatherings — where love, creativity, and kinship were the fuel.

We come from a lineage where family (birth and chosen) is strategy, art is infrastructure, and relationships are the original organizing tool. It is a sort of superpower for us, instead of a liability.

And when that kind of energy converges, cities shift. Cultures transform. Whole futures rearrange themselves.

Swipe ➡️ to see how massive political WIN in NYC was powered by story, sound, artistry, memory, and the kind of familial and communal love you can’t fabricate for optics. The kind that builds trust, moves people, and makes progress possible.

When creativity is centered, kinship is honored, and love is core, we can make magic together.

✨✨✨

11/16/2025

We love a good love story — especially love between artists like and rooted in justice, creativity, and power to the people ✊🏾 We believe that when love fuels liberation, social movements grow stronger.

And if you know Media Sutra… you already know ❤️‍🔥

Their journey started with a swipe. Zohran first met Rama on the dating app Hinge in 2021—two kindred spirits drawn together by shared values.

Rama, a Brooklyn-based illustrator and storyteller born to a Syrian family, had been making work that bridged diasporic experience and visual activism.

Zohran, the historic mayor-elect of New York City (first Muslim, first Indian-American in the role), carried into their partnership his deep commitment to movement and community power.

Behind the scenes you’ll find the creative roots: Zohran grew up on film sets—his mother is filmmaker Mira Nair —and his love of music led him to rap under the name Young Cardamom, blending languages and cultures through hip-hop.

Rama and Zohran formalised their commitment in early 2025, first in a civil ceremony at New York City Hall, then in a more private celebration.

Today, their union stands as a love story anchored in creativity, justice, and transformation—a testament to what happens when love is both personal and political.

11/14/2025

This morning, we had the honor of witnessing the unveiling of Gian Galang’s powerful new CHARM mural at the Orange County School of Dance — a stunning testament to what happens when art, community, and purpose meet on the same wall. ✨🎨

Congratulations to Gian for creating a piece that not only beautifies the space, but sparks conversation, connection, and pride. These are the kinds of moments that remind us why arts and culture are the heartbeat of strong, sustainable, hyper-local communities.

Deep gratitude to our partners at the Orange County Arts Council and Arts Mid-Hudson, along with NYSCA, Governor Hochul’s office, and the Town of Monroe, for making this celebration possible. Your commitment to uplifting artists and investing in community-rooted creativity is how culture shifts, neighborhood by neighborhood.

At Media Sutra, we believe art is infrastructure — a catalyst for belonging, imagination, and collective power. Today’s unveiling affirmed that. We’re grateful to be in community with collaborators who share that vision.

Here’s to more murals, more movement-building, and more creative dreams that become anchors for the communities we love.

11/13/2025

Excited to launch our Made With Love series — tips and tools for artists, activists, cultural workers and creative entrepreneurs committed to justice, wellness, and world-building.

This first guide, “From Busyness to Devotion,” is especially tender for us because we’ve lived the burnout. We’ve sought wholeness from fragmentation.

We know the feeling of being stretched in every direction while our art — our passion & purpose — waits quietly for us to return.

Because creativity and justice are not separate lanes — they are the same river. They both require presence and courage. They both ask us to resist the pull of busyness and remember who we are beneath the noise.

Media Sutra itself was born from that return.

Reclaiming time for creativity is how we stay whole in a world that asks us to split ourselves apart.

Our art is sacred. Our creative practice is resistance.
And showing up for our Artivism is how we show up for the future.

In Loving Solidarity,
The Media Sutra Team

09/14/2025

Ten years ago, twelve parents, teachers, and community members—now known as the Dyett 12—went on a 34-day hunger strike to save the last remaining open-enrollment public high school in Chicago’s South Side. Their courage sparked a national conversation on education justice and showed the world what’s possible when communities rise up in solidarity.

Friday night, at the 10th anniversary celebration, we honored that legacy with testimonials from the Dyett 12 and from Mayor Brandon Johnson, who himself joined the strike in its final days.

We were honored to screen a short trailer for our forthcoming documentary, 34 Days: The Fight for Dyett—a film that tells the story of ordinary people who risked everything for their children’s right to education.

At a time when public education is under attack across the country, this film is a rallying cry—a catalyst for further organizing, for re-imagining schools rooted in justice, and for reminding us that when communities stand together, transformation is possible.

📽️ We can’t wait to share this film with the world. The fight continues.

09/11/2025

We’re living through a battle of narratives. The dominant ones distract, distort, and divide. Emergent stories plant seeds of change, root us in truth, and carry visions of a just future.

➡️ Swipe to explore how we thrive together through transformative storytelling that builds narrative power to shift culture.

📣📣📣

Address

Chicago, IL

Website

http://mediasutra.net/

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