Steven Renderos

Salvadoran-American digital-rights and racial-justice organiser and Executive Director of MediaJustice, the Oakland-headquartered US national grassroots organisation that anchors the Media Action Grassroots Network (MAG-Net) and challenges how corporations and governments use media and technology against communities of colour. Renderos succeeded MediaJustice co-founder Malkia Devich-Cyril as Executive Director at the 2019 rebrand of the Center for Media Justice. He is the principal Latino / Salvadoran-American voice on the corpus's US tech-and-racial-justice register and the public face of MediaJustice's ongoing data-centre-and-AI-infrastructure organising programme.

Renderos grew up in a one-bedroom Los Angeles apartment inside a 10-unit building populated largely by relatives and neighbours from El Salvador, an immigrant-household upbringing during California's Proposition 187 anti-immigrant period that he names as the political formation he carried into a career challenging media bias and the underlying communications infrastructure on which it sits. A community-based organiser before joining the Center for Media Justice as staff around 2012, he led national campaigns at MediaJustice over the decade prior to his executive directorship that delivered lowered prison phone-call costs, the 2015 net-neutrality rules, Amazon's withdrawal of facial-recognition tools from law-enforcement sales, and the deplatforming of Donald Trump from Twitter — together the campaign record that frames MediaJustice's tech-justice arc from broadband and the public-airwaves through to platform accountability and biometric surveillance. His framing of MediaJustice's mission anchors on the United Nations Article 19 freedom-to-communicate tradition rather than US constitutional free-speech doctrine, naming that "real 'free' speech is about being able to receive information as much as it is about being able to express something."

From 2024 onward Renderos's named public-facing leadership has anchored the data-centre-and-AI-infrastructure organising programme MediaJustice co-leads with Kairos Fellowship through the Fight Data Centers campaign. His 9 September 2025 framing of the data-centre build-out, on the release of The People Say No: Resisting Data Centers in the South — that the AI / data-centre infrastructure layer is "a crisis of a lifetime that deserves our immediate attention and organizing", with data centres consuming the electricity of entire cities, draining billions of gallons of drinking water, and siphoning public resources through subsidies and tax giveaways while delivering very few permanent jobs or local benefits — supplies the corpus's clearest current public-facing articulation of MediaJustice's grassroots-organising case against the US hyperscale data-centre build-out. He sits on the boards of Americans for Financial Reform and Upturn, advised Just Futures Law's Take Back Tech Fellowship in 2020, and is a 2013 Rainbow PUSH Coalition Top Inspirational and Engaged Leader and a 2020 Rockwood Leadership Institute fellow. His named-byline and broadcast media-commentary footprint runs through the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and The Guardian, alongside his own media production — co-founder of the Radio Pocho Latinx-music programme on KFAI Minneapolis (2010), creator and co-host (with Brandi Collins-Dexter) of the Bring Receipts podcast (launched 2021), and executive producer of the Revolutionary Spirits podcast history of Francisco Madero — connecting his organising work to the wider community-radio and cultural-production register from which his Salvadoran-American Los Angeles formation runs.