You've met the hosts of All Things Considered — Robert Siegel, Melissa Block, Audie Cornish and Weekend's Arun Rath. Who else works on the show? Here are some brief bios, starting with the staff that puts the show together each weekday:
Jonathan "Smokey" Baer is an associate producer. He joined NPR in the early 1970s — seriously. He began his career at WBFO in Buffalo, N.Y., working with NPR founder William Siemering. Over the years, Smokey has produced stories with Susan Stamberg, Robert Siegel, Scott Simon, Jacki Lyden, Audie Cornish, Nina Totenberg ... well, all of them.
Theo Balcomb, an associate producer, creates many of the sights, sounds and songs you experience on air and online (Theo is one of the guiding hands behind ATC's Twitter feed). She grew up on a small dairy farm in Maine and graduated from Barnard College of Columbia University. And, yes, she's big in Japan. @theobalcomb
Julia Redpath Buckley is the show's acting executive producer. She started as an intern on All Things Considered in 1993, and she has done every job on the program except hosting. As a producer, she has helped shape NPR's election coverage over the past 20 years. She also has traveled to Iraq, Israel, the Gaza Strip, South Africa, Egypt, parts of Europe and many U.S. states. Julia grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. She graduated from Berkeley. Before coming to NPR, she worked as a French and Italian interpreter in Italy.
Franklyn Cater is a senior producer and editor of All Tech Considered, the weekly technology segment. He is also editor of the NPR Cities Project, which he created to cover urban issues as subjects of global importance in light of rapid urbanization around the world. Franklyn was the 2010 Mike Wallace Fellow in Investigative Reporting at the University of Michigan. He has worked in nearly every capacity in the NPR newsroom since his arrival in 1998. Prior to NPR he worked for broadcast outlets including CNN, Mutual Broadcasting/NBC Radio and CBS Radio. He's originally from Chicago and now follows the "hapful" Nats along with the hapless Cubs. @FranklynCater
Jessica Deahl is an assistant editor. She books guests and develops segment ideas for All Things Considered. Jessica started working in radio in 2006 as an assistant to the bureau chief in NPR's Jerusalem Bureau. She studied at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and is a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, son and dog.
Greg Dixon is a producer. He joined All Things Considered in 2007 as the show's director. For four years, he chose all the music heard during the show. Since 2011, he has worked as a producer. Though his job generally involves racing to a brutal 4 p.m. ET airtime at NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C., his assignments for the network have included trips to post-Taliban Afghanistan, post-tsunami Japan, post-Morsi Egypt and post-ISIS invasion Iraq. @NPRGreg
Monika Evstatieva is the show's director. That makes her ATC's live broadcast conductor and chief music selector. Monika coordinates the music coverage with a strong emphasis on storytelling. Previously, Monika spent six years creating and building NPR's diversity program Tell Me More. As part of the team, Monika won multiple honors, including an NABJ Salute to Excellence award and an Edward R. Murrow Award. She is a graduate of the American University in Washington, D.C., and the American University in Bulgaria, her native country. In her free time, she studies languages and watches football (the American kind). @mevstatieva
Melissa Gray is a senior producer. She's the curator of the ongoing series Found Recipes and was the woman behind the Men Series, which explored men's changing roles in society. Melissa, who holds two fine arts degrees and is known around the newsroom for her cartoons, got her start at member station WUGA in Athens, Ga. From there, she went on to report for Peach State Public Radio in Atlanta. She joined NPR in 1999. Years later, her determination to "learn how to really bake a damn good cake" led her to experiment on the ATC staff. You can read all about it in her cookbook, All Cakes Considered. Melissa lives by this motto: "We have to make our own fun. Nobody else will make it for us." @melissagray69
Andrea Hsu first joined NPR and All Things Considered in 2002. As a senior producer, she loves connecting listeners with people who have stories to tell, from Mormon voters in Arizona and popcorn farmers in Ohio to men and women who have agreed to donate their bodies for scientific research. She has chronicled the disappearance of a washer-dryer factory in Iowa and the intentional flooding of a 2,000-year-old city in central China. She came to NPR via National Geographic, the BBC and the long-shuttered Jumping Cow Coffee House. She was born in Ohio and lives with her husband and son in Washington, D.C.
Renita Jablonski is one of the show's senior editors. Before joining the ATC team, she worked on NPR's Newscast desk and then as an editor of Morning Edition. That means if you need to know which D.C. pizza shops deliver at 1 a.m., she can help. She could tell you the same about Los Angeles, where she worked as producer and fill-in host of the Marketplace Morning Report. Renita won several awards during her time as a host, reporter and producer at Cleveland member stations WCPN and WKSU. And she's happy LeBron is back. @Renitaski
Bridget Kelley is the supervising senior editor. She's also known as the planning editor. Bridget works with NPR editors and ATC colleagues to plan and program the show, including news coverage, host interviews and feature stories. Before joining the ATC staff in 2013, she worked as supervising senior producer of Weekend Edition and as supervising senior editor of Morning Edition.
Justine Kenin started as an intern for Talk of the Nation in 1999. From there she went to Weekend Edition Saturday and then to ATC. Her favorite recent stories include the award-winning Dear Mr. President and the Backseat Book Club series. She also enjoyed bringing the delights of baseball to listeners. Outside of work, she's most tickled to have written a book with her daughters, We Grew It, Let's Eat It! @JustineKenin
Carol Klinger, an associate editor, has worked for All Things Considered since 1995. Before that, she worked for radio and television networks in California and Washington, D.C. In the early 1990s, she designed what she believes to be first website for a radio show, complete with transcripts, with the help of two 16-year-old boys. At ATC, Carol has booked just about everyone, from world leaders to explorers at the North Pole.
Jennifer Longmire-Wright is an assistant editor. She books guests on deadline and helps to develop show ideas and topics. Also an award-winning producer, she got her start in journalism and public radio at WEAA in Baltimore. She received a master's degree in communications management from Morgan State University, where she served as an adjunct professor in the department of communication studies. Jennifer lives in Northern Virginia with her husband, Arthur. @jlongmirewright
Gabe O'Connor has been a production assistant at All Things Considered since 2009. He's a spokesman for gentle giants everywhere. Before joining the show, he was an associate producer at NPR's Only A Game for eight years. Prior to that, he sold shoes and was the world's worst bouncer. Gabe somehow obtained a broadcast journalism degree from the University of Missouri despite failing communications law more than once. He spends his spare time with his twin daughters (born in 2013) — so, he has no spare time. But, if he DID have spare time, he would enjoy sports, movies, music and hanging out with his long-suffering wife. @Galacticmule
Bilal Qureshi is a producer, editor and reporter. He joined the show in 2008 after a year as an NPR Kroc Fellow. Bilal is passionate about stories that combine politics, history and culture. He has produced features from the road about congressional campaigns, photography and the publishing industry's struggles with diversity. In addition to planning the movie conversations you hear on ATC, Bilal occasionally reports on artists, filmmakers and writers from around the world for NPR's Arts Desk. Bilal was born in Kohat, Pakistan, grew up in Richmond, Va., and graduated from the University of Virginia and the Columbia University School of Journalism. @bqilal
Art Silverman, a senior producer, has worked at NPR since 1978. A graduate of Emerson College in Boston, he came to radio after seven years at a daily newspaper in Claremont, N.H. Art grew up in Livingston, N.J. He describes his role at NPR as "a machine used to convert coffee into radio." His love of radio goes back to a childhood spent playing with tape recorders and listening to Jean Shepherd. In 1985, Art produced and wrote a documentary called Goodbye, Saigon on the 10th anniversary of the end of the war in Vietnam. He was involved in the 1999 Peabody Award-winning series "Lost & Found Sound" and was part of the NPR team in Sichuan province, China, when an earthquake struck in May 2008. @ArtSilverman
Graham Smith is a senior producer. He's responsible for investigation and research, field recording, studio production and showrunning. Graham's interests include photography, punk and jazz, the outdoors, gardening and cooking. He suggests entirely too many stories on gun culture, marijuana politics, climate change and Islamist fighters. Graham has gone on assignment to conflict zones, including Afghanistan and Iraq, and to a wide range of other places — including West Africa, Lake Placid and the bayou. He received the Murrow Award for Hard News for his reporting from Afghanistan. He also works with independent producers to shape their stories and bring them to a larger NPR audience. Graham earned another Murrow, as well as the RFK Journalism award and a Peabody for his collaborations with Youth Radio. Graham's blog while on the road: http://the-athenian.blogspot.com @GPublic
Jinae West is an assistant producer. Before joining NPR, she interned at the Las Vegas Sun, The Onion and The Colbert Report. Since coming to All Things Considered in 2011, she has contributed to the show's breaking news coverage, recorded interviews with politicians and reported her own stories. She occasionally makes the hosts talk to robots. @jinaewest
The Weekend Staff:
Tom Dreisbach is an associate producer. He has previously worked for weekday All Things Considered, NPR's Washington Desk and member station WHYY in Philadelphia. @TomDreisbach
Daniel Hajek is a production assistant and lead producer on the "My Big Break " series of reports. Before joining NPR, he worked at member station WGLT in Normal, Ill., where he hosted a late-night jazz show. After graduating from Illinois State University, he interned at NPR West on the National Desk and returned to WGLT as a reporter. @dannyhajek
Phil Harrell is a senior producer. He started in radio as a rock 'n' roll DJ/program director at progressive WRNR in Annapolis, Md. He was one of the co-creators of the now-defunct Bob Edwards Show for XM and Bob Edwards Weekend for PRI. At NPR, he has produced a little bit of everything — from politics to pop music. Most memorably, he worked through the nights after the disintegration of space shuttle Columbia and after the death of President Ronald Reagan — producing mini-documentaries for Weekend Edition. Currently, he's an award-winning producer of music features for the weekend hosts.
Rebecca Hersher is a producer. She has worked on a wide variety of radio stories for NPR. She has covered the Ebola epidemic and the war in Afghanistan, the Mormon Church and the world of online sperm donation. Her series Inside Alzheimer's tells the story of one man's experience with the disease in his own words. She came to NPR from Nature Medicine, where she wrote about biomedicine and pharmaceuticals. You can hear more of her work here.
Steve Lickteig is the executive producer. He has worked on every NPR newsmagazine, including two shows that no longer exist, Anthem and Sounds Like Science. He is also the director of the documentary film Open Secret.
Muthoni Muturi is the supervising senior editor. She began her career at NPR in 2001 as an intern on the Washington Desk. Since then, she has traveled the country as a field producer and editor during NPR's coverage of major news, from elections to natural disasters.
Priska Neely is an assistant producer. She coordinates film coverage for the program and frequently directs the show. She also occasionally reports pieces — mostly about films and robots. Check out her work here. In her free time, she writes songs, including this wacky one about condiments.
Becky Sullivan is an assistant producer and frequently directs the show. Her work for NPR has taken her from the U.S. Capitol to courtside at the Staples Center to a sorghum farm in rural Kansas. She handles much of the show's coverage of books and the economy and often reports about sports. Before coming to NPR, she worked at WNYC and Kansas Public Radio. Outside the office, she enjoys grilled cheese sandwiches, all things Kansas City and bicycling.
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