Stanford Storytelling Project

MANAGING EDITOR & SENIOR PRODUCER
Tiffany Naiman 

Tiffany is an award-winning documentary film producer, DJ, electronic musician, and the experimental film and music programmer for the Outfest Film Festival in Los Angeles. Tiffany received her Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and also holds master’s degrees in African American Studies and Musicology, and a B.A. in American Literature and Culture, all from UCLA.

ASSOCIATE PRODUCER
Grace Adebogun

Grace is a freshman hoping to major in Human Biology and minor in Creative Writing. In the future, she hopes to become both a pediatric neurologist and a children’s book writer. Grace enjoys writing, exploring the many facets of the human brain, and binge-watching animated tv shows on Netflix.

ASSOCIATE PRODUCER
Namitha Alexander

Namitha is a sophomore majoring in Neurobiology and minoring in Data Science. As an aspiring physician-scientist, she hopes to discover hidden stories of humanity in science and data. When she’s not nerding out about the brain, she’s probably trying new food, telling bad jokes, or getting hooked on another Netflix show.

ASSOCIATE PRODUCER
Liv Jenks

Liv is a sophomore considering a double major in political science and art history. With a background in journalism and editing, she loves helping people refine and hone their stories from first to final draft. Born and raised in San Francisco, Liv loves discovering new walking paths around the Bay Area and cooking with friends and family.

SENIOR PRODUCER
Adesuwa Agbonile 

Adesuwa is a senior hailing from Seattle, majoring in Economics and minoring in Creative Writing. In her spare time, she makes audio for the Stanford Storytelling Project, writes news for the Stanford Daily, and eats pasta.

ASSOCIATE PRODUCER
Karen Ge

Karen is a Symbolic Systems major originally from the Chicago suburbs who loves all things education, learning, and interdisciplinary creation. She alternately writes poetry, studies questions about the mind, and plays ultimate frisbee, but usually can be found geeking out about Jacob Collier or Virginia Woolf. She is deeply excited to be crafting stories with the Storytelling Project!

ASSOCIATE PRODUCER
Regina Ta

Regina is a sophomore studying Comparative Literature and Symbolic Systems. In her free time, she enjoys listening to podcasts, practicing yoga, and writing nonfiction. At SSP, she’s excited to take part in a storytelling community!

ASSOCIATE PRODUCER
Robby Westover

Robby recently graduated with a BA in Economics and is currently in the Master of Public Policy program. He is from Colorado Springs, Colorado. He is very passionate about philosophy and politics. He spends his free time lifting weights in the gym, reading philosophy and the news, listening to podcasts, and occasionally slipping into existential crises.

SENIOR PRODUCER
Melina Walling 

Melina started working with the Storytelling Project at the beginning of her freshman year. She is majoring in English and minoring in psychology and history, and is passionate about uncovering all kinds of stories! In her spare time, she enjoys yoga, photography, hiking, and consuming many different types of media…ask her for book, TV, or podcast recommendations and you’ll probably come away with a very long list.

Lee Konstantinou
Lee Konstantinou is an assistant professor in the English department at the University of Maryland, College Park, and an associate editor at the “Los Angeles Review of Books.” He co-edited the essay collection “The Legacy of David Foster Wallace” with Samuel Cohen, and wrote the novel “Pop Apocalypse.”

Rachel Hamburg
Rachel graduated Stanford in 2011 with an M.A. in English Literature. She loves stories that validate unusual or under-explored perspectives. When she’s not working for SSP, she’s usually freelancing, trying to figure out how to make the news more fun (without sacrificing clarity and complexity), and creating immersive theatre events. Or she’s hanging out at her co-op. Probably in the kitchen.

Claire Schoen
For the past thirty years Claire Schoen has been involved in media production, working on a wide variety of documentary and educational projects. As a producer/director, she has created several documentary films and over 25 long-format radio documentaries, as well as numerous short works. As a sound designer she has recorded, edited and mixed sound for film, video, radio, webstory, museum tour and theater productions. Claire has taught media production in several venues, including U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and Duke University Center for Documentary Studies.

Dana Kletter
Dana Kletter is a writer and musician, a recent Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer in Fiction. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she won Hopwood prizes for Short Fiction and Novel. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming Five Chapters, The Sun, Michigan Quarterly Review, San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Phoenix, and Independent, and on Mammoth, Hannibal, Interscope, and Rykodisc Records. She currently teaches in the Creative Writing Program, and is at work on a novel and a memoir.

Hannah Kopp-Yates
Hannah believes that stories are the universe’s way of understanding itself. She’s hoping to avoid growing up altogether, but in the meantime she meditates, learns languages, and tries her best to be like a plant, turning towards the light.

Justine DeSilva
Justine graduated from Stanford University with a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, a minor in Creative Writing, and Honors in the Arts. Throughout her undergraduate career Justine performed with five different student groups, was a member of Everyday People a Cappella, was a tour guide, and a member of Delta Delta Delta sorority. She also studied abroad in Cape Town, South Africa and at the University of Oxford.

John Lee
John has taught writing at Stanford since 2005. He received his MFA from the University of Michigan and has been a resident fellow at the University of Wisconsin, Yaddo, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Currently he lives in San Francisco and is completing a collection of short stories about Korean exiles in Asia and the West.

Lizzie Quinlan
Lizzie graduated from Stanford in 2013 with a B.A. in Comparative Literature. A defiantly proud New Jersey native, she currently lives in San Francisco. She has worked at the Institute for Diversity in the Arts for the past two years. Lizzie spends the rest of her time writing songs about nature and playing a small harp named Oscar.

Natacha Ruck
Natacha is a storyteller and a story-monger. She strives to use print, film and radio to deepen our understanding of the world we live in, and to help others reach a better understanding of their lives through narrative and storytelling. Her documentary and video work has appeared at the MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as on National Geographic, NBC NY, and Link TV. Natacha is a Senior Producer and Administrative Associate for the Stanford Storytelling Project where she’s explored what joking, belonging, singing, lying, and returning home from war to to us.

Sophia Paliza
Sophia majored in History with a minor in Arabic. She has recently spent a lot of time singing, and though still madly obsessed with musicals, has decided to take a break to explore other things, like storytelling. She loves learning languages and reading sci-fi, and though she hails from good ‘ol Indiana she is started to feel like a true west coast girl.

Tess McCarthy
Tess McCarthy likes making people laugh and have feelings, usually in that order. As a proud Theater major, Tess has very little free time and a lot of wonderful collaborators. Her ultimate goal is to make things up professionally.

Tina Miller
Tina majored in in Science, Technology, and Society. While at Stanford, she spent her time writing poetry for the Spoken Word Collective, making, scavenging, singing, & breathing music for KZSU radio and Talisman A Capella, and drinking tea. She has also studied broad at Oxford University.

Jett Hayward
Jett is a Bay Area native who loves playing rugby but hates confrontation. She studied International Relations at Stanford and enjoys browsing the top charts of the podcast app in her spare time. She is interested in how stories can create and heal trauma.

Claudia Heymach
Claudia studied Human Biology who is still trying to recover from the awful poetry she wrote in middle school. She is especially drawn to stories about healthcare disparities, ethics, and the brain. She loves how stories have the power to enthrall and to change minds.

Chris LeBoa
Chris LeBoa studied Human Biology, concentrating in disease ecology. He loves a good tale and believes in the power that stories have to bring about positive change in the world. He likes trying to turn scientific studies into fluent narratives and blast NPR at a volume the entire lower row can hear.

Yue Li
Yue is studying math and computer science and listens to too many podcasts while knitting. Her dream is to have a fluffy corgi.

Sienna White
Sienna White studied Atmosphere/Energy Engineering and is Boise, Idaho. If you have a story, she wants to hear it, and if you ever want to talk about meteorology, poetry, commuting-by-ferry, dunes or guinea pigs, she will scramble over anything to get to you. Sienna is interested in how narrative affects our perceptions in life and how our perceptions in life might affect the way we see narrative.

Cathy Wong
Cathy Wong studied computer science and creative writing. She reads a lot of books and can do an OK impression of Kermit the Frog.

Natacha Ruck
Natacha is a storyteller and a story-monger. She strives to use print, film and radio to deepen our understanding of the world we live in, and to help others reach a better understanding of their lives through narrative and storytelling. Her documentary and video work has appeared at the MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as on National Geographic, NBC NY, and Link TV. Natacha is a Senior Producer and Administrative Associate for the Stanford Storytelling Project where she’s explored what joking, belonging, singing, lying, and returning home from war to to us.

Catherina Girardeau
Journalist and independent producer Catherine Girardeau started out as a writer and violinist, and in searching for a way to combine her two passions, stumbled into radio. Since then, she’s made award-winning feature stories and audio tours for PRI’s The World, APM’s Marketplace, Radio Deutsche Welle, the Codebreaker podcast, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and many more. At her media company Earprint Productions, she mentors student interns and teaches writing and audio production workshops for museum digital teams and the USF Museum Studies graduate program. She’s passionate about helping people tell their stories.

Jon Kleiman
Jon works as a lecturer in Stanford’s d.life lab, helping students apply Design Thinking to the big, thorny life problems they face. Jon has a master’s degree in Learning, Design, and Technology from the Graduate School of Education. Before landing in California, Jon worked in the space of girls’ education in both Rwanda and Ethiopia. He’s been wikileaked.

Nina Foushee
Nina likes collecting: names, words that have lost their meaning, and conversations where people give more than they expected. She is prone to making ethical generalizations from specific situations and then back-peddling wildly. When she was younger, she thought she wanted to be a rabbi. Today, she wants to look at history and ethics through stories.

Will Rogers
Will graduated from Stanford in 2009 (Film & Media Studies). He spent a wonderful portion of the financial downturn at a mountain village in North Carolina, then he gravitated back to Stanford in 2013 to work at the Stanford Storytelling Project andTrue Story, and to go slow in this wild world. He loves taking poetry to places where poetry’s not often taken (eg bathrooms, cars, fields), and to play with the bonds between audio and video, like this.

Charlie Mintz
Charlie spends his time trying to figure out what’s true, and how to tell people about it without being didactic or boring. Or to phrase that more affirmatively: to tell people what’s true while being compelling and conversational. Lately he’s been caught up in Oakland, researching a book about the city, and translating what he learns into radio pieces along the way. He’s just figured out what’s obvious. Now he’s after what’s surprising. He contributes semi-regularly to KALW’s CrossCurrents and his work has appeared on Marketplace as well as in the East Bay Express. In his free time you can find him behind a basketball, over a chess set, or somewhere in the midst of drums.

Alec Glassford
Alec studied computer science (among other things), and he writes sometimes. He likes birds and the rain and scarves and more than a few other things. He listens to infinity podcasts.

Rosie La Puma
Rosie majored in International Relations at Stanford with a minor in Creative Writing. She first discovered the power of voices during high school while collecting stories from other teens for Open Orchard Productions. Her childhood aspiration was to be the first ice cream maker on the moon.

Eileen Williams
At Stanford Eileen majored in psychology and minored in math. When she’s not working, studying or doing research, she spends her time running, listening to infinite podcasts, and playing with her lovable maltipoo puppy, Izzie.

Hadley Reid
Hadley Reid majored in human biology, with an interest in global health and infectious disease. Her parents will tell you she has loved hearing and telling stories ever since childhood (and she wasn’t afraid to critique when necessary!). In her leisure time Hadley can be found drinking chai tea, reading the New York Times, and curating a backlog of food blog recipes, usually simultaneously.

Reade Levinson
Reade is a senior at Stanford and a recent convert to the world of radio. When she’s not wrestling with new software or trying to pass chemistry, you’ll probably find her at the climbing wall. A Palo Alto native, Reade is forever thinking up ways to escape the bay; she spent last summer chasing sky burials in Mongolia.

Kate Nelson
Kate studied human biology with a concentration in global health policy and infectious diseases. Her all-time favorite number is 17, so she’s lucky to be a part of the class of 2017. She’s constantly thinking-up new travel adventures. Last summer, she traveled to natural history museums around the world, recording kit in hand. Kate also loves to restore antique typewriters.

Justine Beed
Justine majored in Anthropology and minoring in Creative Writing. She’s a lifelong nomad, never staying in one country for more than four years. Russia, Namibia, Maryland, Mexico, Paraguay, Japan, Egypt, and now California. The places she’s lived, the people she’s met — their stories are her story. Travel, people, stories, appalachian throwback music, and tea are a few of her favorite things.

Christine Chen
Christine technically studied Human Biology, but informally studied a lot of other things – anagrams, maps, herpetology, how to befriend strangers. She first got involved with the Storytelling Project as a Braden Grantee. Now, she works behind-the-scenes on the website and other projects, attempting to be official but always slightly in awe of the stories and people she gets to meet.

Victoria Hurst
Victoria Hurst graduated from Stanford in 2013 with a in English and a minor in Education. She is very interested in how people interpret the Bible and how it is used in literature. She grew up on an island, but wants to travel the world.

Miles S
Miles is a recovering computer science major at Stanford. He is often found skateboarding wildly through campus or fidgeting with a microphone to capture a compelling sound. He once found a grey M&M when he was young but threw it away thinking it had gone bad.

Xandra Clark
Xandra worked with the Storytelling Project for nearly three years from 2010-2013. She was an actress who simply picked up a microphone to interview her dad, and she ended up as a Senior Radio Producer and the Events Director for the project. Xandra graduated from Stanford with a Master’s degree in Journalism and a Bachelor’s degree with Honors in Theater & Performance Studies. Since leaving Stanford, she has taken up a new job as an Intern at StoryCorps, the largest oral history project in the world.

Hannah Krakauer
Hannah studied neurobiology and philosophy at Stanford before getting her masters in science writing at MIT. Her radio work has appeared on KUOW Presents, and her writing on Inside NOVA and Scope Magazine. She harbors a mild obsession with the brain activity of cephalopods.

Noah Burbank
Noah is a PhD student in Management Science and Engineering. He studies Decision and Risk analysis, and likes making hip hop. You can find his music at soundcloud.com/nburbank and at noahburbank.com. He loves post- producing audio.

Matt Larson
Matt received his PhD in Biophysics from Stanford in 2010. He is a contributor to the NPR program Snap Judgment, and a producer with the Storytelling Project. At Stanford he divided his time between a basement research lab (where he studies gene regulation) and the basement of KZSU (where he has produced audio essays about scientific fraud, superheroes, unicycles, the San Francisco dump, and sperm banks).

Dan Hirsch
Dan Hirsch graduated from Stanford in 2009 with a BA in American Studies. His work has appeared in the North Bay Bohemian, the Santa Cruz Weekly, the SFGate.com and on the airwaves of WLEZ Jackson, Mississippi. He lives in San Francisco and works for a Bay Area tech company you might know.

Alka Natha
Alka likes weird, she’s all about creative, and a few people would even dare to call her unique. After changing her major 14839 times, she’s fairly set on Product Design and minoring in Computer Science. She’s avidly passionate about people, helping others, gender issues, playing squash, food, laughing, global health and water issues, new experiences, and learning. That’s kind of a lot, but it’s better than being passionate about nothing, right?

Lora Kelley
Lora Kelley is a sophomore from Evanston, Illinois studying Classics in the philosophy track. She is interested in the stories museums tell and how we read things that aren’t written down. Currently awaiting the next installment of Serial, she enjoys podcasts, sketch comedy, “Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me,” and wearing turtlenecks when it’s not that cold.

Mischa Shoni
Mischa is an insatiably curious psychology major at Stanford. She finds human beings to be fascinating, but perplexing. She likes trying to figure them out and encouraging them to better understand themselves through stories. Prior to returning to Stanford in 2013, Mischa worked as a children’s book designer at HarperCollins Publishers, travelled the world as a professional masochist, and acquired a feline sidekick named Kahimi.

Preet Kaur
Preet Kaur majored in Human Biology with an area of concentration in Narrative Medicine. She relishes every opportunity to claim her “Britishness” (8 month pregnant mother went to a family wedding and birthed her at the hospital where Robin Hood used to get his annual bloodletting) but was raised in Turlock, California. For her, stories, especially those with strangers, ward off lethargy from even the longest of train rides. If you’re interested, she invites you to join in on the conversation.

Alec Glassford
Alec studied computer science (among other things), and he writes sometimes. He likes birds and the rain and scarves and more than a few other things. He listens to infinity podcasts.

Christine Chen
Christine technically studied Human Biology, but informally studied a lot of other things – anagrams, maps, herpetology, how to befriend strangers. She first got involved with the Storytelling Project as a Braden Grantee. Now, she works behind-the-scenes on the website and other projects, attempting to be official but always slightly in awe of the stories and people she gets to meet.

Amanda Tu
Hailing from Louisville, Kentucky (the best city in America—no contest), Amanda Tu studies Product Design and Creative Writing. She is deeply fascinated by the crossroads of design thinking with visual, written, multimedia, and oral storytelling. You can typically find Amanda taking advantage of the Bay Area’s outstanding poke bowl scene, chipping away at the television series she’ll create some day (she swears!), or running moderate distances very slowly.

Azmaan Onies
Azmaan majored in Computer Science with a concentration in “Human Computer Interaction”. Coming from Sri Lanka, he’s glad the internet enabled him to enjoy great American radio shows like This American Life and Radio Lab. If he’s not buried under work load, he’s probably trying to get better at tennis.

Helen Anderson
Helen graduated from Stanford in 2014 with a degree in Science, Technology & Society and a minor in creative writing. Caught in the academic quicksand, she found herself unable to leave and decided to chase down another degree, this time in computer science. Sometimes she accidentally ends a sentence with a semicolon. When she’s not writing prose or code, you might find her singing vocal jazz, probably in a stairwell.

Lizzie Quinlan
Lizzie graduated from Stanford in 2013 with a B.A. in Comparative Literature. A defiantly proud New Jersey native, she currently lives in San Francisco. She has worked at the Institute for Diversity in the Arts for the past two years. Lizzie spends the rest of her time writing songs about nature and playing a small harp named Oscar.

Justine DeSilva
Justine graduated from Stanford University with a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, a minor in Creative Writing, and Honors in the Arts. Throughout her undergraduate career Justine performed with five different student groups, was a member of Everyday People a Cappella, was a tour guide, and a member of Delta Delta Delta sorority. She also studied abroad in Cape Town, South Africa and at the University of Oxford.

Brandon Powell 
Brandon graduated from Stanford in 2014 with a B.A. in English & Creative Writing and an unofficial minor in student theatre. He has produced shows on both the MemAud mainstage and on Marguerite buses. Ask him about the gay teen novel he’s writing…actually, no, don’t ask him. Besides Broadway, Brandon’s dream is to live out his days in a small New England town with Bernese Mountain Dogs (plural). Contact him if you can help with this.

Laura Xin-Mei Lee
Laura loves green tea, Pixar movies, and sitting on the floor. She dreams of one day opening a self-care sanctuary in a redwood forest: half yoga studio, half Japanese tea house. (Alternatively, redesigning airplane cabins to support more limb-sprawling.) Other hobbies include rearranging furniture, packing lunchboxes, dancing to bluegrass music.

Chelsea Davis
Chelsea Davis is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford. Her research and teaching focus on wartime fiction, the literary Gothic, and horror film. When she isn’t studying stories, she likes to make them. Her radio work has appeared on State of the Human, 99 Percent Invisible, and BackStory, among other venues, and she gets her genre geek kicks as an Associate Editor for the horror podcast Pseudopod.

Andrew Todhunter
Andrew is the author of three books, including the PEN USA Literary Award-winning A Meal Observed, and dozens of articles for national publications including National Geographic, The Atlantic and The Wall Street Journal, among others. His subjects range widely, from a frozen gully in the Scottish highlands, to the ship’s bar of a German freighter, to the pastry kitchen of a Parisian restaurant. He has worked on numerous film and projects, including productions for Lucasfilm and National Geographic Television. and teaches at Stanford through the Department of Biology and the Program in Writing and Rhetoric, and co-directs The Senior Reflection, a creative capstone course series for scientists in the arts.

Austin Meyer
Austin is from beautiful Santa Rosa, California and majored in Creative Writing. When he isn’t playing the beautiful game for the Stanford Men’s Soccer team, Austin is jammin away on his mandolin, making music videos with friends, or relaxin under a tree. Always up for an impromptu conversation or storytelling exchange, if you see Austin out and about, make sure to give him a shout. He’s the one with the freckles.

Faraida Pierre
Faradia studied Human Biology and minored in French. She became involved with The Stanford Storytelling Project as a story editor while studying abroad in Paris. Originally from Miami, Florida, she’s a fan of humidity and telling a good story.

Liz Bradfield
Liz is the author of two collections of poetry: Approaching Ice (Persea, 2010) and Interpretive Work (Arktoi Books, 2008). The founder of Broadsided Press, her poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Field, and elsewhere. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, she works as a naturalist and web designer. Her favorite animal today? The rhinoceros auklet. Visit her websites: Ebradfield.com, Broadsided, & Pelagic Design.

Esteban Toro
Esteban received his PhD in Developmental Biology from Stanford in 2009. His grandfather instilled in him a love of storytelling by saying things like: “See that tree over there? You can use its fruit to patch up the holes in your hydroplane’s radiator.”

Micah Cratty
Micah was one of the founding producers of the Storytelling Project. He studied International Relations and Creative Writing at Stanford before graduating in 2008. He now lives and writes in Los Angeles.

Austin Smith
Austin Smith grew up on a family dairy farm in Illinois. His first full-length collection of poems, Almanac, was published by Princeton University Press in September. He lives in a cabin near the booming metropolis of La Honda and is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction.

Heidi Thorsen
Heidi has long explored interests in storytelling through her undergraduate majors in English and Drama, and a creative honors thesis in Feminist Studies (Inclusive Language: Rediscovering Women in the Bible through Poetry) at Stanford University. She worked with the project as Events Manager during the 2012-2013 school year.

Dan MacDougall
Daniel is a graduate of Stanford, where he studied computer science. He was also a member of the Stanford Savoyards. When not making radio, you may find him enjoying wacky musical theater, cooking delicious and exotic foods, or playing Scrabble. He was once described as “a perfectly goofy but lovable book-wormish adventurer.”