Leya Hale, 36, lives in St. Paul. She was born and raised in the Los Angeles area. She is Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota and Navajo Dine. She is a storyteller, a documentary filmmaker and a producer with Twin Cities PBS (TPT), where she’s been working for the past eight years.
She graduated from California State University, Fullerton in Orange County, studying radio television and film. She attended graduate school at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, S.D., where she earned a degree in American Indian Studies and worked as a production assistant on a documentary about women in the Red Power movement. This is where Hale says the door to filmmaking opened for her.
Hale has won multiple regional Emmy awards for her work. She is currently the Merata Mita fellow at the Sundance Institute, an imagineNATIVE 2020 Native fellow and an ambassador with Thrive’s “My Sisters are Warriors” initiative.
Producer: Shaldon Ferris (Khoisan, South Africa)
Interviewee : Leya Hale (Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota and Navajo Dine)
Image: Leya Hale
Music: "Anania2", by The Baba Project, used with permission.
"Burn your village to the ground", by The Halluci Nation, used with permission.