Candice Mays

Candice Mays is project director at Mapping Black California (MBC), the only community newsroom with a dedicated data journalism unit in the country. She designs data journalism products that integrate writing, data, and visual mediums to address systemic inequalities affecting Black communities. Mays led a statewide strategic media effort to encourage African American participation in the 2020 Census. Her team’s map of Black hard-to-count populations contributed to California achieving just a 1% undercount of Black residents compared to the national undercount of 3.3%. A project of Black Voice News, MBC’s academically peer reviewed, "Black Worker: Risks and Exposures" COVID-19 dashboard and advocacy with state officials contributed to Assembly Bill No. 1604, making California the first and only state to mandate employee data breakdown by ethnicity. As a creative technologist, Mays advocates for marginalized communities to be integral to the newest frontier of AI's conceptualization and development.