LUCINA MELESIO

Lucina Melesio Friedman is founder and managing director at Kizaya. She is an award-winning journalist, host and multimedia producer who has reported from Mexico City, New York City, London and Washington D.C. Her stories have featured on Spotify, the New York Times’s T-Brand Studio, Al Jazeera English, The Washington Post, The Telegraph, Gatopardo, FiveThirtyEight, Scientific American, Physics World, Newsweek, Univision, BBC World Service, among other outlets.

 

From 2020-2021 Lucina hosted and oversaw production of Un Poco de Contexto, a Spotify Original podcast in Spanish about current affairs in Mexico. The 32-episode weekly series was produced by Kizaya Media for La Puerta Estudios and Spotify. First aired in May, it consistently rated #1 Top News Podcast in Mexico up until the end of its first season in November 2021.

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In 2019-2020 Lucina was Senior Producer and Manager of Spanish Language Division at Gilded Audio in New York City. She was the lead producer for So You Want To Work Abroad, a 6-episode podcast series about taking your career global made for The New York Times's T-Brand Studio, sponsored by Cole Haan. Other podcasts she helped produce during this period were the Webby Award-winning podcast Abuse of Power, an Audible Original series about wrongful incarceration in the U.S.; Innovation Uncovered, a series about how science, technology and creativity are shaping reality, made for The New York Times's T-Brand Studio and sponsored by Invesco; and Get Money, an Acast Original podcast limited series about personal finances for Millennials. 

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In 2019 Lucina produced native advertising content and ads for Gilded and Spotify’s clients. In 2018-2019 she and her colleague Asa Merritt managed production for ESPN's 30 for 30 Podcasts' pilot episode on Mexican Lucha Libre, Don't Drop the Mask. ​

 

In 2016, Lucina produced the first pilots and episodes of Sparks, FiveThirtyEight's science podcast. She also assisted FiveThirtyEight's podcast team in the production of the special mini series Kitchen Table Politics and the show What's The Point. From 2013-2015 Lucina produced and assisted production for science podcasts and radio shows for Physics World, BBC World Service, BBC Radio 4 and IC Radio.

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As a Fulbright Scholar she earned an MA in Journalism at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism in 2016, and as a Chevening Scholar an MSc in Science Media Production at Imperial College London in 2014. She is also a graduate in Physics from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico since 2011.