Cee Cee Huffman is joining the Earfluence team as our new associate producer and content strategist. Get to know her, and see how her storytelling skills will help us tell more amazing stories.

In Feb. of 2019, I painted my face blue and white to get other UNC-Chapel Hill students excited about our upcoming home game against Duke. 

“So, we’re just going to kind of see how this goes,” I said.

I was a junior working towards my Bachelor of Arts in media and journalism with a concentration in broadcast and electronic media, frustrated by the recurring thought that my love for storytelling wasn’t enough to carry me through the hierarchical and competitive field of journalism.

But in my apartment on that rainy Friday morning, I dipped my toe into the Carolina blue water of social media, and the waves have been pulling me in deeper ever since. 

My experimental makeup tutorial was a major success, garnering tens of thousands of views across platforms. As a result, I was hired as an intern by UNC-CH’s Office of University Communications and placed on the social team to learn the ins and outs of digital media.

At the same time, I was accidentally becoming a radio journalist. A soprano with a slight Southern drawl, I walked an unexpected path paved by the deep, masculine voices I’d heard on the radio as a kid. 

But there was something honest and intimate about audio storytelling that dissolved my journalistic worries, and I carried my audio recorder in my backpack for the rest of my college career, armed to capture a story at any moment.

In my final semester of college this spring, before the outbreak of COVID-19, my professor tasked the class with finding its passion. And despite my love for Instagram and podcasts, I couldn’t pinpoint mine. It felt like all of the progress I’d made as a content creator and audio storyteller had gone out the window, and I was back at square one, drowning in the waves I’d dived into headfirst.

What I found was, what I call, a passion for nouns, and by that I mean people, places and things. Every noun comes with a unique story to help us celebrate our similarities, differences and qualities that make us all exceptional.

I’m excited to tell so many of these stories as Earfluence’s new production assistant and content strategist and combine my loves for audio storytelling and social media, and I hope you’ll listen.