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. Her forthcoming book, i, Latina? My Year Trippin’ Through My Ancestral DNA, Running the Fuku Down, and Making Peace with Dad Along the Way, 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 2012 by Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster.

Cepeda directed and produced the NAMIC (National Association for Multi- ethnicity In Communications) Vision nominated film 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. The film features Paul Wall, Puerto-Rican emcee Tego Calderon, and Raekwon (Wu Tang Clan) as well as Kanye West, Juelz Santana, Jadakiss, and former child soldier/author Ishmael Beah. Cepeda co-produced the documentary with VH1/MTV Networks and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). A news version of the film, edited for content and time, aired on VH1 in 2007, engaging 35% of the network’s audience (3.3 million viewers).

Bling is regularly screened the world over in countries like Ghana, Austria, France, Norway, Australia, across the United States, where Cepeda is often invited to speak at conferences and panels about human rights issues like child soldiering, conflict, and using popular culture as a tool for social change.

Cepeda 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.

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Djali Rancher

|ˈʒɛˌɑli| |ˌrøntʃər|

noun

1. a commercial operation that produces content in both film and multimedia journalism: The concept for the feature documentary “Bling: A Planet Rock” was created by Raquel Cepeda for djali rancher in 2001.

2. a production company that develops and produces celebrity-driven, globally conscious documentaries and feature films: Raquel Cepeda is a product of the hip-hop generation and a filmmaker and writer who is able to present, via her djali rancher production company, urban culture in the authentic language of a fluent partici- pant.

ORIGIN time immemorial: (1) West African, djali (sometimes spelled jeli and jali) translation: “griot”. Today, we may argue that these repositories of oral tradition have adapted hundreds of years later and found a promising vehicle in hip-hop’s lyrical manifestation: The god Rakim Allah is one of hip-hop’s djali Supremes. (2) djali is Cepeda’s daughter’s name.

ORIGIN early 19th century: verb rancher [-ing] from Spanish rancho; to run a ranch, in this instance, a ranch teeming with fresh concepts.