Raquel Cepeda

Raquel Cepeda is an award-winning new-media journalist, editor, and documentary filmmaker. A cultural activist, her work focuses on issues affecting communities of color around the world.

Cepeda directed and produced Bling: A Planet Rock, a feature length documentary about American hip-hop culture’s obsession with diamonds and all of its social trappings, particularly how the infatuation with “blinging” became intertwined in Sierra Leone’s decade long conflict. She is currently in production on Before I Deconstruct, a documentary project exploring Latino identity, including her own, through the science of DNA testing and genealogy.

A former editor in chief for Russell Simmons’ Oneworld magazine, Cepeda’s writings have been anthologized and, for over a decade, her byline has been featured in People, the Associated Press, Sesame Street, Paper, Village Voice, MTV News, CNN.com, and many other publications. In addition to being a talking head for a cross-section of media outlets as an expert on Latino issues and hip-hop culture, she has also contributed to WNYC, CNN and CNN’s Inside the Middle East as a freelance reporter.

She lives with her daughter and husband, a writer and television producer, in her beloved New York City.

I, Latina?: My Year Trippin’ Through My Ancestral DNA, Running the Fuku Down, and Making Peace with Dad Along the Way

This compelling narrative, a chronicle of Cepeda’s year-long journey to discover the truth about her ancestry while looking at what it means to be Latina in “post-racial” America, will be published in spring 2012 by Atria Books, a division Simon & Schuster.