Sharon Shelton Corpening

Senior Advisor | She/Her

Sharon Shelton Corpening is Senior Program Director with the Disability Culture Lab. She is a savvy media relations strategist and content creator whose newsroom and production experience helped clinch exciting wins for the Center for Popular Democracy’s unemployment insurance reform, housing, economic, and climate justice campaigns. 

Formerly an award-winning broadcast journalist/field producer for public radio and public television, and a top pick for National Public Radio’s Diversity Initiative, her combination of skill sets —journalism, content strategy, and content creation —makes her a formidable weapon for change in the fight for disability and racial justice. 

Corpening is an enrolled member and clan mother in the Pokanoket Tribe/Pokanoket Nation with Narragansett, Pequot, Pokanoket, Meherrin, and Virginian Indigenous ancestry. An autodidact and shameless INTJ/INFJ creative, Corpening is  also a visual storyteller who’s currently forming a documentary production company  that will launch the RED-ish podcast —a video podcast about the history, culture, and experience of Afro-Indigenous and other mixed race Indigenous tribespeoples in the Americas this Summer.