The People Behind This I Believe
Host and Curator
Jay Allison is well-known to NPR listeners as the host and co-producer of the All Things Considered and Morning Edition series Lost & Found Sound, Hidden Kitchens, and the post-9/11 Sonic Memorial Project, all created with his friends The Kitchen Sisters. As an independent journalist and documentary maker, Allison has won most of the major broadcasting awards, including five Peabodys. With his non-profit organization Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Mass., he is founder of the Cape and Islands public radio stations and two acclaimed websites encouraging citizen involvement in public broadcasting, Transom.org and the Public Radio Exchange (prx.org).
Executive Producer
Dan Gediman is a reporter and producer whose work has been heard on All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Fresh Air, Marketplace, Soundprint, Jazz Profiles, and This American Life, for which he produced a profile of his brother, a Tom Jones impersonator. During his 20-year radio career, Gediman has won many of public broadcasting's most prestigious awards for programs such as Breaking The Cycle: How Do We Stop Child Abuse and I Just Am Who We Are: A Portrait of Multiple Personality Disorder. He also worked with legendary radio playwright Norman Corwin to produce 13 by Corwin and 50 Years After 14 August, which won the duPont-Columbia Award.
Co-Producer
John Gregory has worked in public radio for almost 20 years in development, programming, production, and marketing. His documentaries have explored environmental and agricultural issues, history, rural healthcare, workplace violence, and domestic abuse. He has won the George Foster Peabody Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award.
Senior Editor
Viki Merrick was a radio producer and production coordinator for ABC News in Rome, Italy, and location/production manager for film documentaries. Since the founding of Atlantic Public Media in 1995, she has been producing essays and features for national broadcast on NPR and for the Cape and Island public radio stations, WCAI/WNAN. Viki is an editor on the Peabody award-winning website, Transom.org, and a collaborator on the two Peabody Award-winning series, Lost & Found Sound and The Sonic Memorial Project.
Editor
Emily Botein is an independent producer based in Brooklyn. She was senior producer for PRI's The Next Big Thing from 1999 to 2005. Her freelance radio projects have ranged from tracking down Gulf-Coast shrimpers in Texas to recording suicide prevention tests for teenagers in Harlem. Pre-radio, Emily honed her interviewing skills developing exhibits at the Smithsonian's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.
Outreach Director
Mary Jo Gediman is the Outreach Director for This I Believe, working collaboratively to extend the reach of the radio program into schools, local communities, and houses of worship nationwide.
Submissions Reviewers
The team from Atlantic Public Media includes Jay Allison and Viki Merrick, and fields all incoming essay submissions. They have many years of experience reviewing material from listeners and new public radio voices for projects like Lost & Found Sound, Life Stories, The Sonic Memorial Project, Hidden Kitchens, public radio stations WCAI/WNAN, and the Public Radio Exchange (prx.org). All members of the team are editors of the Peabody award-winning website, Transom.org.
Samantha Broun is an independent radio producer. She currently works for Atlantic Public Media where she is the project manager for Transom.org and curates a weekly podcast with The Nature Conservancy. She is a graduate of The Salt Institute for Documentary Studies. Prior to her life in radio, she worked with youth for over 15 years.
Sydney Lewis is the author of three oral histories and an assistant and transcriber for acclaimed oral historian Studs Terkel. She has edited award-winning radio essays for WBEZ radio in Chicago and has written for Chicago Tribune Magazine. Sydney produces content for Atlantic Public Media for local (WCAI/WNAN) and national air.
Melissa Robbins has worked as an independent producer and as an associate producer with The Kitchen Sisters and Homelands Productions. She studied radio production at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies and has previously worked as a newspaper reporter in London and New York City.
Helen Woodward produces for Atlantic Public Media content for local (WCAI/WNAN) and national broadcast. A British citizen, she was previously an environmental policy consultant before moving to the U.S.
Composer
The composer of the series' theme music is Georg Brandl Egloff. After graduating from the Berklee College of Music in Boston, Egloff moved to New York City, where he performed with many jazz and blues musicians including blues greats Ruth Brown and Linda Hopkins. In the mid-90s, Egloff
worked with dozens of rock singers including Jeff
Buckley, Joan Osborne and Johnny Thunders (from the
New York Dolls). Since moving to Los Angeles, Egloff has composed music for many television programs, including "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," "The West Wing" and "ER," as well as for Showtime, HBO and many more. His film work includes "The Big Time," "The Jimmy Show," "Terminal," "Over My Dead Body" and "Lucky." More information.
