Marcos Nájera is OPB’s executive editor for Arts & Culture.

In a nutshell…

He’s an artist/journalist hybrid who tells stories on the news: radio, TV and print. He also tells stories on a stage. Usually about brown people. He believes in glitter, confetti and sushi. He wishes somebody would teach him how to play basketball and/or electric guitar.

If you want to read a little more…

Nájera is a former arts correspondent for the NPR/Los Angeles daily culture show “The Frame” and host of the PBS documentary film podcast “The Rise & Fall of the Brown Buffalo.” That film and podcast were profiled in the New Yorker.

He currently lends his voice as a news anchor for This Way Out queer radio.

As an actor, Nájera appears in the PBS/Latino Broadcasting Corporation film “The Daily War.” He collaborates regularly with performance artist Guillermo Gomez Peña and playwright Anna Deavere Smith. His documentary theatre project with USC’s Keck School of Medicine explores mental health in BIPOC/queer communities. It’s called “Neuroplasticity: The Brown Brain.”

As an educator, Nájera has taught original multilingual storytelling, journalism and theatre at schools including the NYU Tisch School of the Arts and NYU’s Institute on the Arts & Civic Dialogue, UC Irvine’s Claire Trevor School of the Arts, California State University (Northridge and LA), San Francisco’s La Pocha Nostra Troupe and the Mark Taper Forum at Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles.