Ellen Horne is the director of the Podcasting and Audio Reportage concentration in the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Her research is focused on performance, documentation, the perception of authority in voice, labor and production in audio and podcasting. In 2020, she was host, reporter, and producer for Luminary’s Lies We Tell. For WNYC’s Radiolab, Ellen published stories from 2003-2015, reporting stories like ‘Deaf Comedy Jam’ about the role of sign language interpretation in live comedy performance and ‘Hope’ about the trail of trauma behind fraud. She is the founder and editorial director at Story Mechanics, where she is currently in production on a slate of audio projects including a queer history project for Audible, an investigative journalism podcast series about evidence in criminal justice, a science-history theatrical stage show, and an audio installation project.

Horne was an executive producer at Audible and an executive producer for WNYC’s Radiolab, where she won numerous honors including George Foster Peabody Awards, Third Coast Awards, and the Kavli Science Journalism Award.

She has a BA in theater and religion from Cornell College and has taught audio journalism at NYU and Columbia University.

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.

Azadeh Moaveni is a journalist, writer and associate professor at NYU, where she directs the Global Journalism Program. Her books and articles explore the interaction between gender and armed conflict, and how women’s rights, security and political participation are impacted by war and authoritarianism. Her recent research has focused on women’s recruitment to armed groups, feminist foreign policy, and the humanitarian crisis arising from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

As a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and Time Magazine, she covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has reported from Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and Tunisia. She is the author of two books on Iran, Lipstick Jihad, and Honeymoon in Tehran, and co-author, with Iranian Nobel Peace Laureate Shirin Ebadi, of Iran Awakening. Her latest book, Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS, was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize, the Rathbones Folio prize, and was a New York Times Notable Book of 2019. Guest House for Young Widows emerged out of a front-page story for the Times that was a finalist for a group Pulitzer. She writes for the London Review of Books and the New York Times, among other publications.