Hysterical: W. Kamau Bell Who's With Me?
About the Artists
Kamau Bell
Nato Green
Seema Yasmin
W. Kamau Bell is a stand-up comedian, director, producer, and dad. For seven seasons, he was the host and executive producer of the five-time Emmy Award-winning CNN docuseries United Shades of America. Kamau won a Peabody Award for his Showtime docuseries We Need To Talk About Cosby. He is also the co-author of the New York Times bestselling book Do The Work: An Antiracist Activity Book. His first book was his memoir with the easy-to-remember title: The Awkward Thoughts of W. Kamau Bell: Tales of a 6' 4", African American, Heterosexual, Cisgender, Left-Leaning, Asthmatic, Black and Proud Blerd, Mama's Boy, Dad, and Stand-Up Comedian. Recently Kamau directed and produced the HBO documentary 1000% Me: Growing Up Mixed. As a stand-up comic, Kamau has recorded two comedy specials. The second one, Private School Negro, is available on Netflix. Kamau is on the board of directors of DonorsChoose - a non-profit that helps teachers raise money for class projects, and Live Free - a non-profit dedicated to ending gun violence, mass incarceration, and mass criminalization. Kamau also is the ACLU’s Celebrity Ambassador for Racial Justice. He lives in Oakland, California. He cares a lot... maybe too much.
San Francisco native Nato Green is the country’s only semi-functional hybrid of comedian, writer, and union organizer. Nato Green released his second comedy album The Whiteness Album on Blonde Medicine Records, appeared in the film Sorry to Bother You. Nato’s writing has appeared in the LA Review of Books, the San Francisco Examiner, In These Times, VICE, Truthdig, Huffington Post, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, The Rumpus, and The Bold Italic. Nato has been named San Francisco’s Best Comedian by the SF Bay Guardian, SF Weekly, Huffington Post, SFist, and CBS. Nato is the creator of Iron Comic, the hit Iron Chef-spoofing comedy game show. Nato has also been a union organizer for twenty years, working as an organizer, union rep, and negotiator with UFCW, ILWU, CNA, SEIU Local 1021, and founding Young Workers United, the country’s first worker center for young and immigrant workers in the low-wage service sector. The Episcopal Archbishop once called him the antichrist.
Seema Yasmin is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, poet, medical doctor and author. Yasmin served as an officer in the Epidemic Intelligence Service at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention where she investigated disease outbreaks and was principal investigator on a number of CDC studies. Yasmin trained in journalism at the University of Toronto and in medicine at the University of Cambridge.
Yasmin was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in breaking news in 2017 with a team from The Dallas Morning News for coverage of a mass shooting, and recipient of an Emmy award for her reporting on neglected tropical diseases and their impact on resource poor communities in the U.S. She received multiple grants from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting for coverage of gender based violence in India and the aftermath of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. In 2017, Yasmin was a John S. Knight Fellow in Journalism at Stanford University investigating the spread of health misinformation and disinformation during public health crises. Previously she was a science correspondent at The Dallas Morning News, medical analyst for CNN, and professor of public health at the University of Texas at Dallas. She teaches crisis management and crisis communication at the UCLA Anderson School of Management as a Visiting Assistant Professor.
She is the author of 12 non-fiction, fiction, poetry and childrens books, including: Can Scientists Succeed Where Politicians Fail? (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025) which was co-authored with Nobel laureate Dr. Peter Agre; What the Fact?! Finding the Truth in All the Noise (Simon and Schuster, 2022); Viral BS: Medical Myths and Why We Fall For Them (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021); Muslim Women Are Everything: Stereotype-Shattering Stories of Courage, Inspiration and Adventure (HarperCollins, 2020); If God Is A Virus: Poems (Haymarket, 2021); Unbecoming: A Novel (Simon and Schuster, 2024); Djinnology: An Illuminated Compendium of Spirits and Stories from the Muslim World (Chronicle, 2024); and The ABCs of Queer History (Workman Books, 2024). Her writing appears in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, WIRED, Scientific American and other outlets.
Yasmin’s unique expertise in epidemics and communications has been called upon by the Vatican, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, the Aspen Institute, the Skoll Foundation, the Biden White House, and others. She teaches a new paradigm for trust-building and evidence-based communication to leadership at the World Health Organization and CDC. In 2019, she was the inaugural director of the Stanford Health Communication Initiative.
Her scholarly work focuses on the spread of scientific misinformation and disinformation, information equity, and the varied susceptibilities of different populations to false information about health and science. In 2020, she received a fellowship from the Emerson Collective for her work on inequitable access to health information. She teaches multimedia storytelling to medical students in the REACH program.