Pamela Kerpius

Founder, CEO + Lead Correspondent
Pamela Kerpius is Founder, CEO and Lead Correspondent of Migrants of the Mediterranean (MotM). Since 2016 she has been following people in the migrant community—from Lampedusa, across Italy and the EU—in documentation of their Journey Stories and ongoing lived experiences in Europe.

Her work began on a simple holiday to Lampedusa island in July 2016 when she witnessed people in the migrant community, primarily from Sub Saharan West Africa, on a central beach where they were segregated from European vacationers on rocks adjacent to the shore. Uncomfortable with the treatment they received and complicit in a system that benefitted her and excluded others, she set out on two more trips to Lampedusa in 2016 to investigate the migration phenomenon and help correct the system by humanizing it. The 2016 rounds culminated in November 2016 with her first encounters and interviews with people who had been recently rescued at sea and who were being housed in the island’s reception center. Kerpius saw this as a moment to document the history of people that society was turning its back to by capturing their stories one-by-one, as a public historical record and as individual ancestral files for participants. In over eight years she has captured over 100 stories, and has traveled through Italy, Germany, France, Belgium and The Netherlands in continuation of many of those stories.

She is the host of the MotM podcast Open Encounters, which records the voices of the people in the MotM community in conversation. She is also the lead administrator of the organization, and its face, having spoken regularly at public events, as a guest on podcasts, and in university classrooms and conferences across the US and Canada. She currently splits her time between Phoenix, Arizona, where MotM is based; The Hague, Netherlands, and Rome, Italy. The Arizona base has provided access for the MotM expansion to the US-Mexico border, where she has reported the organization’s first stories, making MotM officially global in its scale in 2024.

Alongside her work in migration and human rights advocacy, she is a creative director and copywriter in advertising, where her writing has been seen in campaigns for many national brands and Fortune 500 companies. She is a published author and film writer, having written for multiple online publications, and as a contributor to the book Violating Time: Memory, History and Nostalgia in Cinema (Continuum Press, 2008); and as a student, as a participant in the 2002 Telluride Film Festival Student Symposium, she saw the movie that introduced her to Lampedusa, Sicily, Respiro, a story that was based-in and shot on the island that invoked her initial interest in it.

She is a long-time student of history, having received her Master’s in Cinema Studies from New York University in 2005, and two Bachelor’s degrees from the University of Colorado, Denver, in History and English, with a Film minor in 2002; as well as a Diploma from the Spanish government via Instituto Cervantes for her Spanish language studies. She speaks advanced Italian, and remains a student of Spanish and Dutch, and looks forward to her friends in the migrant community teaching her everything from Wolof to Mandinka to Arabic. She enjoys the sea, hiking, design, excellent food, and introducing you to each and every one of the incredible people she meets on behalf of MotM across the globe.