Former Staff and Contributors
Archive of Former SSP Staff & Contributors
Former Managing Editors & SSP Lecturers
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.
Jake Warga
Jake has been an independent radio producer for over a decade and taught humanities and social sciences in Morocco for years before coming to Stanford in the fall of 2015 as a Lecturer in the Stanford Storytelling Program. With a masters in visual anthropology from the university of London, he has reported from far-flung places, producing award-winning radio documentaries for such shows as: NPR’s All Things Considered, PRI’s The World, Studio360, This American Life and many more. Jake also uses photography to tell stories, his images have been exhibited at the Seattle Art Museum and featured on Wired.com among many others. His interests have always been in telling good stories and teaching how good stories are told.
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.
Former Program Coordinators
Christy Hartman
Christy Hartman is the Program Manager for Medical Humanities and Arts at the Stanford School of Medicine.A long-time podcast producer for the Stanford Storytelling Project, 2011-2021, Christy mentored Braden Grant recipients, co-taught narrative storytelling and podcast production workshops. Later, she founded Medical Humanities Story Lab with the Stanford Health Library for the Stanford healthcare community. She sometimes teaches at the intersection of myth, nature, and metaphor.Her personal essays, opinion pieces, and fiction have been published in Souvenir Lit Journal, About Place Journal, the Stanford Daily, and in the book, Aftermath: Explorations of Loss & Grief. Her solo show, "Wolf Teeth" debuted in San Francisco in April, 2024.
Jenny March
Jenny March is an audio documentary producer and community-builder. She particularly loves exploring the human experience through intimate, non-narrated audio portraits. She has taught audio courses at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies and offered "Introduction to Podcast Storytelling" at Stanford. She is also the co-producer of Audio Under the Stars, a summer-long outdoor audio festival in Durham, NC.
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.
Former Fiction Editors
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Former Event Directors & Arts Coordinators
Dan Klein
Dan teaches Improvisation in the Drama Department, the Graduate School of Business and at the d.school. In 2009, Dan was named Stanford Teacher of the Year by the Student’s Association. At the GSB he co-teaches (with Professor Deb Gruenfeld), “Acting With Power” which explores the use of status behaviors to increase organizational effectiveness. Beyond Stanford, Dan has lead similar workshops for various groups, including the High Performance Leadership program at IMD Business School in Switzerland. Dan has also partnered with Stanford Professor Carol Dweck to create interactive workshops on her breakthrough research on Mindset.
Michelle Darby
Michelle Darby is the co-creator and teacher of StoryCraft with the Theater and Performance Studies Department. During the year, she is a Resident Fellow of Rinconada Dorm here at Stanford. Prior to teaching StoryCraft, she was the founder and Artistic Director of Just West Theater Company in Tallapoosa Georgia. In San Francisco, she coordinated and taught Compelling Communications at the Academy of Art University which revolved around creativity, spontaneity, teamwork, performance and leadership skills. As well as directing and acting in the Bay Area, Michelle has studied performance at the Alliance Theater, the American Conservatory Theater, Bay Area TheatreSports, and with Seydways Acting Studio. Michelle has taught and directed for middle schools, high schools, Native American Youth, university students, and professional actors.
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.
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.
Former Course Collaborators
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.
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.
Erik Olesund
Erik Olesund is the Director of Research for New York Times Audio. He oversees all Audience research for the Audio team, including the standalone app for listening (New York Times Audio) and the many podcasts that The Times produces. His work ranges from exploratory field research studies to evaluative remote usability testing; qualitative, abductive data synthesis to quantitative survey and behavioral data analysis; establishing processes and tools to improve the day-to-day operations of a research team to training and advising others on how to conduct their own, robust research.
Former Senior Producers
Alessandra Wollner
Allie is a creative nonfiction storyteller, podcast producer, educator, and community maker. She’s addicted to stories built on intimacy, vulnerability, and characters who sear themselves into your memory. She believes two things are integral to a well-told, true story: an attention to aesthetic beauty and a fierce commitment to integrity. She holds a BA from Brown University and MFA from Ohio State in Creative Nonfiction writing.
Jackson Roach
I make things for public radio and podcasts (some collected here), and I’m the associate producer at The Dig. At different times, I’ve also worked at State of the Human, Radiolab, Generation Anthropocene, Raw Data, Third Coast, and the Seminary Co-op Bookstores.
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 and True 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.
Bonnie Swift
Bonnie is a writer and podcast producer based in Seattle. She is a writer and editor who is dedicated to crafting compelling and insightful stories. She believes that the collective impact of these stories can transform our culture.
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.
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.
Killeen Hanson
Killeen graduated from Stanford in 2008 with a degree in English Literature. After two years of working to communicate differing perspectives graphically through her research at the Spatial History Lab at Stanford and orally with the Storytelling Project, she relocated to Portland, Oregon for an MFA in Applied Craft and Design at the Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA). She’s eager to continue exploring how stories build community.
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.
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).
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.
Former Student Producers
Adesuwa Agbonile
Alec Glassford
Alina Wilson
Alka Natha
Amanda Tu
Ana De Almeida Amaral
Aparna Varma
Aru Nair
Aspen Stuart-Cunningham
Austin Meyer
Azmaan Onies
Brandon Powell
Carolyn Stein
Cathy Wong
Chelsea Davis
Chris LeBoa
Christine Chen
Claudia Heymach
Dan Hirsch
Dan MacDougall
Destiny Cunningham
Eileen Williams
Esteban Toro
Faraida Pierre
Grace Adebogun
Hadley Reid
Hannah Kopp-Yates
Hannah Krakauer
Heidi Thorsen
Helen Anderson
Isabelle Edgar
Jett Hayward
Justine Beed
Karen Ge
Kate Nelson
Laura Xin-Mei Lee
Lila Schroff
Liv Jenks
Lora Kelley
Max Du
Melina Walling
Miles S
Mischa Shoni
Namitha Alexander
Natasha Charfauros
Nina Foushee
Noah Burbank
Preet Kaur
Reade Levinson
Regina Ta
Robby Westover
Rosie La Puma
Shameeka “Smeek” Wilson
Sienna White
Sophia Paliza
Tess McCarthy
Tina Miller
Victoria Hurst
Victoria Yuan
Xandra Clark
Yue Li