Shanelle Matthews

Shanelle Matthews is a strategist, storyteller, and educator who has spent over a decade building narrative power for social movements. Rooted in the Black Radical Tradition, she has led communications for campaigns at the frontlines of racial, economic, and reproductive justice, including the Movement for Black Lives, the ACLU, the National Network of Abortion Funds, and the Sierra Club. She is the founder of the Radical Communicators Network (RadComms), a community of practice for movement communicators dedicated to advancing liberatory storytelling. Shanelle is also co-editor of Liberation Stories: Building Narrative Power for 21st-Century Social Movements, an anthology chronicling two decades of narrative strategy across the left. Currently, she teaches in the Department of Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Programs at the City College of New York, where her scholarship and pedagogy focus on the rhetoric of social movements and the role of narrative in shaping culture and politics.