Staff | Board | Network | Partners

Sara Abdurahman

Operations Manager

A twin-child of diaspora, much of Sara’s upbringing revolved around reconciling facets of identity to create her individual self. Self between her parent’s diaspora roots, self from her twin sister, self as a young biracial Black girl growing up in California’s Central Valley. From an early age she wondered: What is community? What is belonging? How does race and faith shape the way my family and I engage with the world? Searching for these answers led her to complete degrees in Religious Studies and Human Services at Cal State Fullerton. While most of her beliefs continue to shift, she firmly believes in storytelling as a core aspect of community building, [inter]personal healing and liberation. If left to story-tell herself, she will likely talk about her twin sister Susana, a slideshow of dogs whom she is a beloved aunt to, or her recent binge of Friday Night Lights.

Rae Breaux

CSS Partnership Manager, Communicating Our Power

Rae is an organizer, trainer, photographer, and full spectrum doula based in Los Angeles. She has over a decade of experience developing intersectional, cross-movement strategies around race, class, gender, and the systemic drivers of the climate crisis. Rae has a strong background in coordinating and implementing creative direct actions, ranging from technical actions to coordinating sustained mass mobilizations, and as a movement photographer using the power of images to create narratives and tell the stories of people and the planet.

When not organizing or on the streets, she is supporting people in her community as a doula, making pottery, and gardening or making art with her kid, partner, and pet rabbit and lizard.

Tihi Hayslett

Interim Managing & Programs Director in Program

Tihi Hayslett is a queer activist, writer and storyteller who has been a part of the CSS training network since his first Advanced Training in 2015. While working as an online campaigner for the Working Families Party, Tihi won consumer campaigns against Netflix, UPS, and worked with a coalition to remove David Koch from the Boards of the Smithsonian and PBS. He currently works at Demand Progress, leading online campaigns in the tech sector focusing on privacy and human rights. Tihi holds an MFA in Creative Writing and his debut short story collection, Dark Corners, is published by Running Wild Press. As one of the few fluent Dothraki speakers in the world, Tihi recently worked on the upcoming Netflix series Daybreak as a Dothraki Language Consultant.

Mariana Mendoza

Public Trainings Senior Manager

Born and raised in Mexico City, currently living in Los Angeles, Mariana (she, ella, mariana) is an organizer, narrative nerd, and popular educator. She comes from justice and just transition organizing, and most recently worked in defunding carceral systems and implementing alternatives to incarceration and harm reduction practices for young people and adults in Los Angeles. She is committed to using her labor, energy and love into building collective-determination, demanding justice, asserting our right to healing and care, and creating opportunities for imagination and cultural change. When she is not organizing, learning, or eating with loved ones, she is usually climbing rocks.

Lenina Nadal

Communications and Network Engagement Senior Manager

Lenina loves story-based strategy tools and enjoys making impactful media, developing and leading strategic comms plans, storytelling, and collaborative leadership training. She has worked doing all these things with amazing national and local organizations like the Right to the City Alliance, the Bronx Cooperative Development Initiative, Global Action Project, and the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition. She taught Latinx literature and history, media and organizing skills at the New School, Hunter College and Brooklyn College. She received an MFA in Integrated Media Arts at Hunter College and studied historical documentary filmmaking at George Washington University. She likes to play Roblox with her daughter, tend to her balcony garden, dance, write, read and send love letters, and create care packages.

Meghan O'hara

Director of Operations and Finance in Operations

Bio coming soon…

Nayantara Sen

Executive Director

Nayantara is a narrative and cultural strategist, trilingual storyteller, racial and social justice trainer, fiction writer and first-generation Bengali immigrant. For the last 15 years, she has built capacity and programs at the intersections of: story-based, narrative, arts and cultural strategies, social movement strategies, racial and gender justice, immigration, and systems change. She is recovering arts administrator with expertise in oral history, Theatre of Oppressed, and cultural organizing — and has worked across the philanthropy, arts and social justice sectors.

Nayantara is a creative capacity and movement-builder at heart. Previously, she worked as the: Senior Director of Field and Funder Learning at Pop Culture Collaborative; Director of Narrative & Cultural Strategies at Race Forward; Programs Director at Food Culture Collective, and Lead Designer and Narrative Strategist for the Butterfly & Chrysalis Labs for Immigrant Narrative Strategy. 

She is the author of Butterfly Lab Narrative Project Design Toolkit, the Creating Cultures and Practices for Racial Equity, How the Light Gets In: Narrative Power-Building through the Arts,  Storyline Partners’ Stories for Change, and the widely referenced Cultural Strategy Primer. 

She serves on the advisory boards of MOSAIC America, Food Culture Collective, South Asian SOAR, the Collective Change Lab’s Systems Storytelling Initiative, and is a practitioner-member of AWE (Another World Exists), a national artist and organizing collective. She lives in the Bay Area and loves hiking, poetry, cooking and dancing.

Staff | Board | Network | Partners