Cece Mitchell speaks out from Iowa Public Radio’s studio on Grand Avenue. Photo: Duane Tinkey
Writer: Anthony Taylor
This story begins in 1981, on the South China Sea. There, crammed in with a dozen or so of her family members on a little fishing boat, sat a young Vietnamese girl named Phuong.
The boat bobbed, dead in the water, 100-some miles from the port town of Cam Ranh, Vietnam. Weeks had passed since the family made its desperate escape from its war-torn homeland, and the companion boat that was supposed to follow with food and fuel hadn’t made it out of port. Now, powerless and running out of supplies, Phuong sat on the exposed deck and listened as family members debated which of them could be eaten to help the rest survive.
Thankfully, the answer was “none of them.” The boat was eventually spotted by a Swiss vessel that passed nearby and shuttled the refugees to a camp in the Philippines. Two years later, Phuong would join the waves of Vietnamese refugees who made it to the United States, landing first in Illinois and then Texas, where she worked as a seamstress in a sweatshop, earning enough to get a degree at Texas A&M University.
In her senior year, Phuong — now going by Martha — got pregnant with a girl of her own. After she graduated, she made one more move to a farm outside of Grinnell and settled into a quiet life with her husband and baby daughter Cecilia more than 8,000 miles from where her story started.
Today, Cecilia “Cece” Mitchell carries a legacy shared by millions of other first- and second-generation Americans. She knows intimate, firsthand accounts from parents and grandparents, stories of sacrifice, loss and struggle in the search for new homes and better lives for their children and their children’s children.
It’s a legacy Mitchell carries with her as a voice of Iowa Public Radio’s Studio One.
IPR is Mitchell’s first and only job out of the University of Northern Iowa, where she earned a master’s degree in 2019. It’s “just about my only real job ever,” she said. And now, six years in, she wholeheartedly calls herself an IPR lifer, in it for the long haul.
With her move from Cedar Falls to Des Moines, Mitchell is Studio One’s lone presence in the capital city and has become a regular face at music venues like xBk and the Temple Theater, as well as festivals like Hinterland. She’s attracted a legion of fans who appreciate her genuine zeal for local music, her bright honest demeanor, and her signature tagline: “Hey there, guys, gals and nonbinary pals, I’m Cece Mitchell, and you’re listening to Iowa Public Radio’s Studio One.”
As one might expect of a new college grad with her whole life still stretching out ahead, Mitchell didn’t initially plan to stay at IPR for long. She saw it as a good place to learn but figured she’d move somewhere bigger. But as she settled into the job and found her own voice, she grew to see the station as home.
It’s that confidence that makes her such a vibrant, valuable part of IPR’s coverage. She is enthusiastic, genuine and unafraid to follow her own muses. “I remember we were doing a segment on Ani DiFranco for the old ‘All Access’ show,” senior music producer Tony Dehner said. “She spent about a minute talking about Ani’s guest appearance on ‘King of the Hill.’ [Senior Producer]
Mark [Simmet] and I were powerless to stop her, but it made for great radio.”
Dehner and Mitchell in particular have developed a strong rapport over the years, tested and strengthened through the challenges of live broadcasts.
They trust each other and appreciate each other’s differences. Dehner praises Mitchell’s energy, as well as her broad taste in music and willingness to explore genres; Mitchell describes Dehner as “an incredibly safe person and someone I’d trust with my life.”
“We both share this opinion that we don’t want to be pretentious about music,” she said. “A lot of people get kind of precious about their ‘elite music taste,’ but Tony is very humble about everything.”
In 2024, IPR acquired the frequency at 94.1 FM and began broadcasting Studio One 24 hours a day. The change ballooned Mitchell’s on-air presence from nine hours a week to nearly 30, and with it, the number of Studio One’s listeners and fans.
“The least important thing about Cece is that she’s just really f—ing cool,” said Lily DeTaeye, a local musician. “She walks into a room and people just know who she is.
“A much more important thing is that she has been a nonstop champion of local, regional, indie music and has walked the walk in every way,” DeTaeye added. “Cece and her team at IPR are a huge part of why Iowa has the music scene it does.”
For her part, Mitchell doesn’t view herself as any kind of indie music tastemaker. However, she is aware of the influence that comes with her on-air presence. She knows that at any given moment, a little girl out there could be lying in her room, listening to Studio One, telling herself she wants to be Cece Mitchell when she grows up.
That’s why Mitchell values authenticity and why she tries to be open about her own life’s struggles and successes. Her friends on Instagram or Facebook are aware of her candid posts about her struggles with mental health, her journeys through weight gain and loss, and her ongoing, sometimes stumbling path toward self-realization. She admits she’s still a work in progress — who isn’t? — but she’s in love with her job, proud of her personal growth and happy to attest that it does, indeed, get better.
“It’s really important to me to be honest and up front with people,” she said. “I don’t care about being seen as some wild inspiration or anything, but I want to be visible. Because I do want other people to see.
“My mother came here as a refugee. I come from nothing. I’ve always had to work for everything in life. So I hope that my work can stand as my testimony that these things are possible.”
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