Aimee Castenell

Aimée Castenell is an online organizer and human rights activist from New Orleans, LA. She has worked on a wide array of issues spanning from human rights advocacy and documentation, media justice, voter engagement among communities of color and PIC/death penalty.

She started her career working as an archivist, focusing on the collection, documentation, preservation and access to audiovisual human rights media in support of advocacy, prosecution of justice, truth-telling and preservation of the historical record. For the majority of this time she worked in the Media Archive at WITNESS in Brooklyn, NY. She has also worked with UNICEF, Pacifica Radio Archives and the Feminist Archive North.

While her interests and experience have always lived at the nexus of technology and social justice, her first major professional online organizing project came in 2010 when she worked as New Media Manager for One Nation Working Together- a large, coalition campaign based in Washington, DC focused on building a non-partisan civic movement to elect and hold representatives accountable to working people. She most recently completed a project in Communications and Online Advocacy at the U.S. Human Rights Network, a membership-based grassroots domestic human rights organization located in Atlanta, GA. And now she joins ColorOfChange.org after the brief and successful social media launch of PowerPAC's, PAC+, a new national network focused on democratizing money and politics to give voice to America's burgeoning "New Majority."

Aimée studied Activism and Social Change at the University of Leeds in the UK, Archiving and Preservation at NYU and Anthropology and Film Studies at Smith College in Northampton, MA. She is a proud 2010 alumna of the New Organizing Institute's New Media Bootcamp.