PROGRAM: IRA GLASS & JAD ABUMRAD

IRA GLASS is the host and creator of the public radio program This American Life. The show is heard each week by over 5 million listeners on public radio stations and podcasts. Glass began his career as an intern at National Public Radio’s network headquarters in Washington, DC in 1978, when he was 19 years old. He put This American Life on the air in 1995. He also served as an editor for the groundbreaking podcasts Serial, S-Town and Nice White Parents. Under Glass’s editorial direction, This American Life has won the highest honors for broadcasting and journalistic excellence, including seven Peabody awards and the first Pulitzer Prize ever awarded for audio journalism. In 2021 This American Life episode ‘The Giant Pool of Money’ was inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry, the first podcast ever so honored.

JAD ABUMRAD is the creator and former host of Radiolab, a public radio program broadcast on nearly 600 stations across the nation and downloaded more than 12 million times a month as a podcast.

Abumrad employs his dual backgrounds as composer and journalist to create what’s been called “a new aesthetic” in broadcast journalism. He orchestrates dialogue, music, interviews and sounds into compelling documentaries that draw listeners into investigations of otherwise intimidating topics, such as the nature of numbers, the evolution of altruism, or the legal foundation for the war on terror.

He’s won three George Foster Peabody Awards, and in 2011, Abumrad was honored as a MacArthur Fellow (also known as the Genius Grant). The MacArthur Foundation website says: “Abumrad is inspiring boundless curiosity within a new generation of listeners and experimenting with sound to find ever more effective and entertaining ways to explain ideas and tell a story.” Abumrad also created and hosted three seasons of More Perfect, a series about untold stories of the Supreme Court, which The New York Times called “…possibly the most mesmerizing podcast.” And in 2019, Jad Abumrad created Dolly Parton’s America (along with osm Audio’s Shima Oliaee), a Peabody Award-winning 9-part series that explores a divided America through the life and music of one of its greatest icons. In April 2022, Abumrad began a joint appointment at Vanderbilt University as a Distinguished Research Professor of Cinema and Media Arts and of Communication of Science and Technology at the College of Arts and Sciences, and he will have an advisory role with Vanderbilt’s Communications and Marketing team.