Marcus Thorne Bagalà - Producer/Music Supervisor, Realm

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Marcus Thorne Bagalà is an Emmy Award winning New York City based composer whose music is a versatile blend of chamber music, electronic synth exploration and traditional folk music. His work spans film, tv, podcast, radio and theatre. Most recently, the feature documentary Trans Pecos: The Story of Stolen Land and the Loss of America’s Last Frontier released, which Marcus scored and sound designed, which paints an honest portrait of what is to come if we allow oil interests to supersede the public good.  Marcus was previously staff composer and engineer at Gimlet Media. His work has been featured in projects that have been awarded Cannes Lions, Clios and Creative Media Awards, as well as developing the principle monster design for the Gimlet/Monkey Paw collaboration Quiet Part Loud. Before Gimlet, Marcus composed music for WBEZ’s This American Life, contributing his music to the Peabody winning episode The Anatomy of Doubt and Pulitzer's winning episode The Out Crowd. Marcus is currently the music supervisor, in-house composer and a producer at Realm. Most recently he produced, scored and was the supervising sound editor for the chart topping podcast Harley Quinn and The Joker: Sound Mind.  In 2021, Marcus won an LA Emmy Award for his (and co-composer Mark Baechle's) score for KCET's Tending Nature. In 2022 Marcus and Mark were nominated for a second LA Emmy for the feature length Tending Nature film. "

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Bryson Barnes - Technical Director, NBC News Group

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Bryson Barnes is a lifelong audio creator who got his start in music. He is the current and founding Technical Director of Audio for the NBC News Group, where he manages audio engineering, creative music supervision and facilitates day-to-day production across the podcast portfolio. Since helping launch the unit, his work includes 10 Apple #1 podcasts to date: Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra, Letters from Sing Sing, Tiffany Dover is Dead*, Southlake, American Radical, Dateline’s Murder and Magnolias, Internal Affairs, Missing in America, The Thing About Helen and Olga and The Seduction, and other offerings from NBC News, MSNBC, Dateline, TODAY and NBC Sports. He has played a key role in helping produce Peabody and DuPont recipients, Pulitzer finalists and Emmy and Ambie nominees. Previously, Bryson has worked on podcasts for 99 Percent Invisible, The New York Times and Reveal. As a composer, his music has appeared in films, podcasts and on television.

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Lorenzo Benedetti - Co-Founder and CEO, Paradiso

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Lorenzo created Studio Bagel in 2012, which he sold to Canal+ group in 2014. He served as Head of Digital Production at Canal+ group. Lorenzo has produced several programs such as “Les Tutos” by Jerôme Niel and “Les recettes pompettes” with Monsieur Poulpe. He recently produced the “CALLS” series by Timothée Hochet for Canal+ in 2019 which was acquired by Apple for international remake.

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Elise Bergerson - Head of Audio, Verve Talent and Literary Agency

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Elise Bergerson is Head of Audio at Verve Talent & Literary Agency and before that owned and operated her own consulting company focused on the podcast industry. She has worked in podcasting for the last decade and has advised countless media companies and creators in the realm of business development, operational scaling, and strategic management. She is the former Business Operations Manager for This American Life and Serial Productions where she oversaw the creation of all operational systems for an enterprise spanning 6 companies and producing among the most popular podcasts worldwide. Prior to that she worked in international conflict resolution. She holds a Bachelors in political science from Barnard College and a Masters in non-profit management and public administration from New York University. She is based in New York.

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Chris Berube - Senior Producer, 99% Invisible

 

Chris Berube is a Senior Producer at 99% Invisible. Recently, he edited The Dropout (ABC News, now a TV show!) and the second season of Articles of Interest (Radiotopia). He's also worked for Slate Magazine, the CBC in Canada and the 30 for 30 podcast. Chris has lost at the Webby Awards six times, and with any luck, he will one day be the losingest person in Webby history.

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Dan Bobkoff - Founder, Rhyme Media

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Dan Bobkoff is an experienced podcasting showrunner, host and reporter. He's the founder of Rhyme Media, a podcast production company that works with clients such as The Financial Times and Goldman Sachs. He served as the executive producer of podcasts at Axios, where he oversaw two daily shows and created the hit How It Happened. He led the audio department at Business Insider, where he developed and hosted Household Name (later known as Brought to You By…). Bobkoff has been a reporter at NPR News, and his work has appeared on Marketplace, Planet Money, and 99 Percent Invisible. He covered the 2008 election from Ohio and was part of NPR's team covering the Boston Marathon bombings. Bobkoff is a graduate of Wesleyan University and holds a master's degree from Columbia University. 

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Chris Colbert - CEO and Founder, DCP Entertainment

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Chris Colbert is a Webby & New York Festival award-winning podcast host/producer/writer, as well as the CEO and Founder of DCP Entertainment, a media production & distribution network for underrepresented voices. Having previously worked at SXM and Cadence13, and with names like Jamie Foxx, Touré, Joy-Ann Reid, Zak Levitt, iHeart Media, ESSENCE, PEOPLE, Crooked Media, Sports Illustrated, and the United Negro College Fund, Chris and his team specialize in media partnerships and content development for audio and video projects.

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Jackie Danziger - VP of Narrative Content and Production, Lemonada Media

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Jackie Danziger is the VP of Narrative Content & Production at Lemonada Media. In this role, she develops original series and acts as story editor for narrative shows like Believe Her, Discarded, and The Untold Story with Jay Ellis. She is also the supervising producer of Lemonada’s flagship podcast Last Day, where she has written about the opioid crisis, the rising rate of suicide, and gun violence in America. Previously, she produced limited series for The Clinton Foundation and NARAL Pro-Choice America.

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Keisha "TK" Dutes - Co-Founder, Bondfire Radio

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Keisha "TK" Dutes is the co-founder of Bondfire Radio a community oriented online radio station and has been at the helm of podcasts from producer to executive producer. Since 2005, TK's experience spans terrestrial radio, online, podcast (Good Words with Kirk Franklin, HeadSpace's HiberNation, Buzzfeed's "Thirst Aid Kit", Function with Anil Dash, Hear to Slay) and audio drama. TK's passion for Black history and audio lead to a production of W.E.B DuBois' The Comet, and The Weeksvile Project, a story about a free Black community Brooklyn, N.Y. As a contributing reporter and talent for NPR's Life Kit, her episodes are thoughtfully crafted 1st person accounts about making career changes to conversations exploring mental health, boundaries, inner voice, and more.  She also spreads the gospel of radio and podcasting through workshops and mentorship, and was listed on Current.org's "Black Talents in Public Media You Should Know." Currently, she serves on the board of the Association of Independents in Radio and does independent projects with her friends at her new company, Philo's Future Media. 

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Yael Even Or - Senior Producer/Production Lead, Paradiso

 

Yael Even Or is a Senior Producer and Production Lead at Paradiso US. There, she produced "Seventeen" and “Beyond the Ring with Daisy King” (Paramount). Prior to Paradiso, she produced numerous non fiction podcasts for Audible, among them "Mandela: The Lost Tapes", "Meeting Manson" and an upcoming investigative project with Jon Ronson. Her reporting and commentary appeared in the Washington Post, BBC World Service, Vice, PRI, WNYC, The Jewish Daily Forward, Tablet Magazine, and Okay Africa. Yael worked at KCRW, NPR's member station in LA, PRI's America Abroad, and Israel's Walla News. She has a master's degree in international affairs from The New School.

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Julia Furlan - Podcast Host, Editor, and Professor

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Julia Furlan is a Brazilian-American podcast host, editor and an adjunct professor at The New School and NYU. She’s hosted and produced audio for places like NPR, WNYC, Vox Media and Latino USA. All of her work is rooted in a belief in uplifting underrepresented voices. In her free time, Julia can be found propagating a small jungle of spider plants and learning to make comics.

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Liz Gateley - Senior Creative Executive, Spotify Studios

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Liz Gateley is an Oscar-winning producer who has transformed some of the most culturally-impactful brands, including Spotify, MTV and Lifetime, through groundbreaking and critically-acclaimed content. Over the past 3 years, she built Spotify’s Original Podcast business from the ground up helping to secure deals with Higher Ground, Ava Duvernay and Warner Bros/DC and developing a hit slate of original podcasts including 2020’s Best Podcast of the Year, Wind of Change. She is part of the senior team that led the Podcast BU to achieve 233% growth in Users of Originals & Exclusives.

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Chrystal Genesis - Supervising Producer, Lemonada Media

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Chrystal Genesis is a host, editor and curator from London now living in New York City. She runs and hosts award winning independence arts, culture and politics podcast, Stance.  Chrystal’s podcast company Stance Studios made shows and narrative series for partners including BBC, Tate Galleries, Adidas, Gucci, The North Face and The European Cultural Foundation. She now works as a Supervising Producer for Narrative at Lemonada Media. She formally worked as a Producer for Sony Podcasts US working with clients including Discovery, Dateline NBC, and iHeart Radio.  Chrystal has hosted BBC Podcast Radio Hour & BBC Front Row and worked at BBC for just under a decade, producing multi-platform arts, news and current affairs content for shows on Radio 4, BBC London, 6 Music, BBC 1, The World Affairs Unit, The Political Unit and BBC World in London and Washington DC. Chrystal produced the launch of a podcast series for HuffPost UK. She formally worked curating and running the youth department for young people aged 15-30 at Southbank Centre, the UK's largest arts centre, and executive produced its youth podcast. Previously Chrystal worked in curation for the organisation’s Performance, Dance, Podcast & Comedy, and Contemporary Music teams.

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JT Green - Founder and Executive Producer, Molten Heart

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JT Green is an audio documentarian by trade and artist by practice. They are the founder of the creative studio Molten Heart, which takes an immersive and artistic approach to podcasts, musical albums, and in-person audio experiences. Molten Heart’s latest co-production, Finding Tamika, has been featured on numerous best of lists (including The New York Times and Vulture) and won a 2023 duPont-Columbia Award. Outside of Molten Heart, they are a multi-disciplinary artist, exploring the spiritual qualities of improvisation, the convergence of health and personal technology, and gender expression on the internet. Their independent audio documentary, PMHx, won the 2021 Third Coast Award for Best Documentary Short. Along with performing at EXPO Chicago, Chicago Home Theater Festival, and NYUs Brooklyn venue, The Garage—they’ve exhibited visual artworks at The University of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Mass MoCA.

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Martín Gonzalez - Senior Audio Engineer, 99% Invisible

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Martín Gonzalez is 99PI's Senior Audio Engineer, based in Brooklyn and from Rhode Island via Argentina. Previously he worked at Pushkin Industries on their shows Broken Record, The Last Archive, Into the Zone, and Revisionist History. Before that, he was a studio & live sound engineer for lots of bands, including Calexico, Blitzen Trapper, Sharon Van Etten, and Julia Jacklin. He is a proud graduate of the Transom Story Workshop and a dropout of Berklee College of Music. In his spare time, he does paint-by-numbers and buys too many records.

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Mangesh Hattikudur - Co-Founder, Kaleidoscope

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Mangesh Hattikudur wants to make your favorite show! Prior to Kaleidoscope, Mangesh headed up podcast development as SVP for iHeartMedia, where he launched critically acclaimed shows (Somebody, Hit Man, Forgotten: Women of Juarez), collaborated with wonderful personalities (from Minnie Driver to Hillary Clinton to the grandmothers of Call Your Grandmother), worked with incredible brands (Buzzfeed's Impeachment Today, Vice News Reports), and even dominated the charts (at one point, his team launched the #1 and 2 shows in the country!) Before that, Mangesh ran creative for Mental Floss, a beloved print magazine and media company he co-founded in college and ran for 17 glorious years.

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Claire Hazan - Head of Studios, Spotify France and Benelux

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Claire Hazan joined Spotify as Head of Podcasts for France and Benelux in March 2020. Working in Paris, she is in charge of the podcast strategy and production activities, including scouting talents and stories to build the local slate of original podcasts. As a producer and journalist with several years of experience in media and digital strategy, Claire previously worked for Europe 1 radio, where she created and managed Europe 1 Studio, the first ever podcast studio for a national radio in France. Previous to that she worked as a journalist for Le Monde and GQ, and supported the digital transformation of key cultural media titles within the Lagardere group in France.

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Chenjerai Kumanyika - Assistant Professor, New York University

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Chenjerai Kumanyika is an assistant professor in NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Alongside his scholarship and teaching, disciplinary service on the intersections of social justice and media, Kumanyika specializes in using narrative non-fiction audio journalism to critique the ideology of American historical myths about issues such as race, the Civil War, and policing. He has written in scholarly venues such as Popular Music & Society, Popular Communication, The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture, as well as public venues such as The Intercept, Transom, NPR Codeswitch, All Things Considered, Invisibilia, and VICE. Kumanyika is also the co-creator, co-executive producer and co-host of Uncivil, Gimlet Media’s podcast on the Civil War and he is the collaborator for Scene on Radio’s influential Season 2 “Seeing White,” and Season 4 on the history of American democracy. Kumanyika’s work has been recognized with several prestigious honors including the George Foster Peabody Award (2018) for Uncivil and The Media Literate Media Award (NAMLE) for Scene on Radio (2021). In 2021, he received the Union of Democratic Communications’ Dallas Smythe Award for his career accomplishments and advocacy. Kumanyika studied mass communication and critical media studies at The Pennsylvania State University’s Donald Bellisario College of Communication where he earned his Ph.D.

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Brendan Klinkenberg - Executive Editor, Gimlet 

 

Brendan Klinkenberg is an Executive Editor at Gimlet. Previously, he was a reporter and editor at Rolling Stone, Complex, and Wired. He lives in Brooklyn

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Andrew Kuo - CEO & Co-Founder, SomeFriends

Andrew Kuo is CEO and Co-Founder of SomeFriends, the audio-first media company telling stories by and about people of color, for everyone, with the mission of championing inclusion through diversity. Prior to founding SomeFriends, Andrew served as Managing Director of 88rising, the leading Asian youth culture brand. During his tenure, he launched their TV and film studio, resulting in a first-look deal with Sony Pictures, closed their Series C funding and created the Paradise Rising music label. Andrew’s start in entertainment began as Vice President of International Business Development and Strategy at A+E Networks, after spending time on Wall Street as an investment banker at Deutsche Bank and corporate lawyer at Skadden Arps.

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Stevie Lane - Supervising Producer, Heavyweight

 

Stevie Lane is the Supervising Producer at Heavyweight, which has been nominated four times for IDA Documentary Awards. Previously, Stevie helped develop Radiotopia’s Everything is Alive, was a producer on the podcast StartUp, and has had work featured on This American Life. She graduated from Bowdoin College, where she studied Political Philosophy. 

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Emily Lynne - Co-Creator, HEADS WILL ROLL

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Emily co-created and stars in the Audible ten-part serialized audio story, HEADS WILL ROLL, opposite her sister, Kate McKinnon, and is currently writing an animated pilot adaption for Broadway Video and Peacock. The duo also wrote a draft of the Amblin comedy THE LUNCH WITCH with McKinnon attached to star.  Emily’s horror-comedy AFTER BITE, about a malcontent who is bitten by a zombie and has one night to confront her demons before becoming undead, recently attached SNL director, Hannah Levy, and acclaimed horror producer Steven Schneider (Paranormal Activity, Split, Insidious) to produce. Emily can be heard voicing various political figures in Stephen Colbert’s animated Showtime series, OUR CARTOON PRESIDENT, including Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump, Nancy Pelosi, Karen Pence, Queen Elizabeth, Stormy Daniels, and others. She can also be heard voicing several roles in the Viacom animated feature, WASHINGTONIA. Emily has appeared in Netflix’s THE ILIZA SHLESINGER SKETCH SHOW and FRIENDS FROM COLLEGE.

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Amanda McLouglin - Creator and CEO, Multitude

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Amanda McLoughlin is the creator and CEO of Multitude, an independent podcast collective and production studio based in New York City. Multitude produces original shows, publishes free resources for podcasters, and helps clients of all sizes create, market, and grow great shows. Before starting Multitude in 2018, she was a YouTuber and small business advisor. She was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Media list in 2021, and continues to spend her days helping other creators make a living by making great stuff online. @shessomickey

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Kristen Meinzer - Host, How To Be Fine and By The Book

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Kristen Meinzer is an award-winning podcaster, culture critic, royal watcher, and author. Her podcasts, which include How To Be Fine, By The Book, Movie Therapy with Rafer & Kristen, Newsweek's Royal Watch, and others, have been named to best-of lists by Time, O The Oprah Magazine, Vulture, Indiewire, and more. As a culture critic and royal watcher, Kristen regularly appears on the BBC, CBC, NPR, CNN, Vox, and other outlets. As an advocate for women and people of color in the podcasting space, Kristen has served as mentor in the Spotify Soundup program, a keynote with She Podcasts, and a 2021 appointee in the U.S. Speaker's Program, working with South African storytellers shining a light on gender-based violence. Her book, So You Want to Start a Podcast, won the Audie Award for best business/personal development audiobook of 2020. Kristen was named a 2020 Woman of the Year by The Women's Center in Washington DC and one of the 50 Most Influential Women in Podcasting by Quill in 2021.

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Arielle Nissenblatt - Founder, Earbuds Podcast Collective

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Arielle Nissenblatt is the founder of EarBuds Podcast Collective. She is the Community Manager at SquadCast.fm. She is a graduate of the Salt Institute of Audio Documentary Studies. Nissenblatt is a podcast marketing and audience growth enthusiast, having spoken on panels at conferences such as Radiodays Asia, Sounds of New York, Podcast Movement, American University, and more. She is one of the founders of Podcast Taxonomy, an international effort to categorize roles and credits in the podcast industry. She is the cohost of the Sounds Profitable Podcast and recently launched a podcast about podcast trailers.

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Emi Norris - Managing Director, Paradiso US

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Emi is Paradiso US’s Managing Director and Executive Producer of the podcasts “Love Under Lockdown” (Stitcher/Studio71), “A Gay in the Life” (Spotify Live), “Beyond the Ring with Daisy King” (Paramount), “Seventeen” and the upcoming original fiction comedy “Conference Call.” Prior to Paradiso, Emi worked in originals partnerships & distribution at VICE and Refinery29 and in strategy at Bertelsmann. She also spent seven years in the independent film industry, first in production on films by directors Luca Guadagino and Alfonso Cuarón and later in international TV sales and digital distribution at start-ups FilmBuff in New York and Under the Milky Way in Paris. She holds a BA from Tufts University and an MBA from Columbia Business School.

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Mimi O'Donnell - Head of Scripted/Fiction, Spotify and Gimlet

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Mimi is the Head of Scripted/Fiction at Spotify and Gimlet, overseeing a variety of Spotify original scripted shows like Case 63, Quiet Part Loud, Red Frontier, Gay Pride & Prejudice and Two Princes. Before coming to Gimlet she was the Artistic Director of the Labyrinth Theater Company. She also spent many years as a Costume Designer for Theater, TV and Film.

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Molly O'Keefe - Head of Development, Paradiso

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Molly O’Keefe is the Head of Development for Paradiso where she has produced “Seventeen,” “Conference Call,” “In The Ring with Daisy King” (Paramount) and “The Baker Street Four” (Audible UK). She previously oversaw Artist Programs at Tribeca Film Institute, whose mission was to fight gender and racial inequality in entertainment. Prior to that, she was a development and production executive at Sundance Productions and Red Hour. Molly has consulted for the Sundance Episodic and Screenwriter's Labs, Warner Bros Director’s Program, WarnerMedia’s OneFifty and producer Debbie Liebling. She is a graduate of Emerson College and based in Los Angeles. 

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Shima Oliaee - CEO and Founder, Shirazad Productions

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Shima Oliaee is the CEO and founder of Shirazad Productions, a company created to report and produce underrepresented stories and voices that have been erased from history. Her first independently-made audio series Pink Card premiered at ESPN 30 for 30 on December 8, 2022, and was nominated for Podcast of the Year by the Ambies. Her next investigative 8-part series will premiere this winter in 2023. Shima co-created the 9-part series Dolly Parton’s America, which received a George Foster Peabody Award, an Edward R Murrow Award, a New York Festival of the Arts Award, along with several other national honors. Her audio doc The Flag and the Fury won a 2021 duPont-Columbia Award and Best in Show at the National Headliner Awards for best audio documentary.  Shima created and co-hosted  The Vanishing of Harry Pace for Radiolab, nominated for Best Audio Documentary by the IDA. Her series UnErased was named the best podcast of the year by KQED News in 2018. After studying music and cinema-television at the University of Southern California, Shima received her graduate degree in psychology, worked as a teacher, translated for the UN, and worked in comedy television - including the Golden Globe winning Brooklyn Nine-Nine - before returning to her first love, audio.

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Lauren Passell - Founder, Tink Media

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Lauren Passell is the founder of Tink Media, a podcast growth company. She is the editor of Podcast the Newsletter and Podcast Marketing Magic, is the co-host of Feed the Queue, and writes about podcasts for Lifehacker. She has spoken about podcast marketing for Radio Bootcamp, SXSW, Podcast Movement, Podfest, London Podcast Festival and more. She is a judge for Signal Awards and the International Women's Podcast Awards. Follow her on Twitter @laurenpassell.

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Valentina Powers - Head of Content Operations, Gimlet

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Valentina is the Head of Content Operations at Gimlet, where she oversees strategy operations and other aspects of process and planning to ensure we are set up to the best we can to execute on strategy and work efficiently with cross-functional stakeholders at Spotify. She also manages the post production team of audio engineers and composers. Previously, she worked at New York Public Radio where she was running Operations and Program Management for the Product and Technology team. Valentina has been in the audio space for most of her career where she started as Production Assistant for a freelance radio documentary producer.

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Sayre Quevedo - Award Winning Multimedia Artist and Journalist

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Sayre Quevedo is an artist and journalist. He works across mediums to tell stories about intimacy, identity, and human relationships. Quevedo began as a reporter with Youth Radio in Oakland, California at the age of 15 in 2008. Since then his work has been featured on NPR, Marketplace, BBC Short Cuts, Love Me on the CBC, McSweeney's and Radio Atlas. In 2018 his piece 'Espera' received the Third Coast/RHDF Directors' Choice Award and his other piece 'The Quevedos' was nominated for a Best Audio Documentary award by the International Documentary Association (IDA). The following year he won the 2019 Third Coast/RHDF Gold Award for Best Documentary for 'The Return' . It was also nominated for a Best Audio Documentary award by the IDA, his second nomination two years in a row. In 2023 Quevedo was nominated twice for Best Stand-Alone Audio Documentary by the IDA and won for his piece, 'Documenting a Death by Euthenasia.' Quevedo was the Fall 2019 Podcaster-In-Residence for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, an Associate Producer for The Daily at The New York Times and NPR's Latino USA, and a Producer for VICE News.

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Heather Rogers - Audio Producer and Reporter, Gimlet

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Heather is an audio producer and reporter. She comes from a background in long-form and investigative journalism. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, ProPublica and The Intercept. Her most recent book, Green Gone Wrong, takes a critical, on-the-ground look at climate-change solutions, like carbon offsets and organic farming. At Gimlet, she’s worked on a range of shows over the last seven years, including StartUp and Conviction.

 

Shoshi Shmuluvitz - Managing Producer, Campside Media

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Shoshi Shmuluvitz is managing producer and editor at Campside Media. She makes audio documentaries and narrative podcasts on anything from politics to true crime to the story of a woman who had sex with her husband’s ghost. She produced shows including Infamous, about scandals that brought down the rich, famous and powerful; Tabloid, a Webby-nominated investigation into Ivanka Trump; and Meltdown, a look at the disastrous mishandling of the 2008 financial crisis and how it led to the rise of Trump. She also has a background in international reporting. 

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Claire Tighe - Podcast Producer and Journalist

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Claire Tighe is an award-winning podcast producer and journalist. Her recent projects include Unsealed: The Tylenol Murders with The Chicago Tribune and Mandela: The Lost Tapes (Audible) with Rick Stengel, the Former Under Secretary of State in Obama admin. Claire was as founding staffer of the audio unit at NBC News and MSNBC, where she covered major stories including the presidential impeachment, the COVID-19 pandemic, the racial justice movement, and the 2020 election. Claire has worked on podcasts for Netflix, Adam McKay at Sony, Epic Magazine, Preet Bharara, and feature episodes for Vox's On with Kara Swisher, Insider, WHYY, and Sierra Club Magazine. Claire is a recipient of the 2020 New York Press Club award and 2019 Amnesty International USA Media Award for Outstanding Student Journalism. Her shows have earned recognition as a Top 10 Show on Apple Podcasts, and nominations for Webbys and the NAACP awards. A graduate from New York University’s Reporting the Nation master's program, Claire was an Arthur L. Carter Fellow, and earned her bachelor’s degree in Women’s and Gender Studies with honors from Dickinson College. Claire teaches podcast journalism at NYU, CUNY Hunter and the Salt Institute.

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Heidi Vanderlee - Founder and Owner, Positive Jam PR

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Heidi Vanderlee is the owner and founder of Positive Jam PR, and has been working in entertainment and public relations since 2012. Podcast clients include: Sarah Marshall of You're Wrong About and You Are Good, Alex Steed of You Are Good, Multitude, Paradiso, Daniela Taplin Lundberg of Hollywood Gold and Stay Gold Features, Starburns Audio, and The War Report with Gastor Almonte and Shalewa Sharpe. Other clients include Mara Wilson, Allison Raskin, Chris Gethard, Josh Gondelman, Gabe Mollica, Asian Comedy Fest, Shout Your Abortion and Comedy Gives Back. 

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Cher Vincent - Supervising Producer, NPR

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Cher is currently a Supervising Producer at NPR, working with such shows as Louder Than a Riot. She was most recently a Senior Producer at Pushkin Industries, where she piloted and produced shows like Some of My Best Friends Are with Khalil Gibran Muhammad and Ben Austen, and Well-Read Black Girl with Glory Edim. Previously, she was the Senior Producer of Slate’s Thirst Aid Kit and in 2020, the Senior Editor of the award-winning podcast Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America for Vox Creative. She has also produced stories for The New York Times, Gimlet Media, Spotify, Endeavor Audio, and many other places on the internet. She served as Story Editor for Finding Tamika at Molten Heart. After years of enjoying podcasting as a public school science teacher in Chicago, Cher co-founded the podcast collective, Postloudness, in 2016. She currently resides in Brooklyn and is often told she is delightful.

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Britta von Schoeler - Head of Broadway Video Enterprises

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Britta von Schoeler heads Broadway Video Enterprises (BVE) – the division of Broadway Video, Lorne Michaels’ global media and entertainment company, charged with creating revenue growth and amplifying the company’s portfolio of brands across all media. In her position, von Schoeler helms the strategic planning and implementation of partnerships for Broadway Video Entertainment’s programming library, which includes the NBC Emmy Award-winning sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live, as well as The Other Two, Documentary Now!, Schmigadoon, Miracle Workers and many others. Additionally, von Schoeler conceives and executes on unique business opportunities creating globally recognized brands such as Más Mejor, BVE’s comedy content studio powered by Latino voices. She is the Executive Producer of Amazon’s Kids in the Hall and Producer of HBO’s Los Espookys. Von Schoeler also launched Broadway Video’s audio division and oversees the production of all podcasts including New York Times Best Selling Audible Originals like Heads Will Roll (written and starring Kate McKinnon) and Hit Job (starring Pete Davidson and Keke Palmer), and Hot White Heist (named as a Best Podcast of 2021 by Vulture and starring Bowen Yang). von Schoeler’s efforts extend the reach of the BVE brands globally. Her portfolio of projects ranges from global distribution of traditional media – including the production of new series and formats – to leveraging Broadway Video’s family of talent and intellectual property for experiential executions such as live tours and exhibits to the creation of product lines. In addition, von Schoeler handles the creation of authentic premium content integrations for top brands. Prior to joining BVE in 2001, von Schoeler worked for BBC Worldwide Americas, Inc. overseeing consumer products production and marketing for numerous popular shows, including Absolutely Fabulous. In addition, she was Manager of Business Affairs at Discovery Communications, Inc. She is a graduate of Vassar College.

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Nina Weinsten - Independent Development Executive

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Nina Weinstein is an independent development executive with an extensive background in non-fiction television for major and cable networks. Weinstein re-joined NBC News for the third time as Director of Development for MSNBC in 2015, developing and producing longform programming and series as well as supervising all acquisitions. She was Executive Producer of MSNBC’s highest rated series and documentaries and worked with many of the network anchors (Rachel Maddow, Nicolle Wallace, Katy Tur and Jacob Soboroff.) She also developed and supervised the successful series What’s Eating America with Andrew Zimmern. In 2020 Weinstein moved to NBC News Studios as Executive Story Editor until leaving the network in 2022. Weinstein previously worked for four years in Los Angeles as Executive Producer at Bloomberg Television where she created the documentary biography series “GameChangers.” She has supervised, produced and written for shows for Bravo, NBC News, CBS News, Court TV and has produced for Meredith Vieira, Ed Bradley, Steve Kroft, and Maria Shriver. Ms. Weinstein’s work as a television news producer/writer of documentaries and newsmagazine reports has been widely recognized and honored. Her previous work in various roles at Scripps Howard Productions, National Geographic television and CBS News received two Emmy Awards, an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award and an Academy Award nomination.

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