About Sound Portraits

COMPANY PROFILE

Established as a not-for-profit 501(c)3 corporation in 1994 by MacArthur Fellow David Isay, Sound Portraits Productions is an independent production company dedicated to telling stories that bring neglected American voices to a national audience. Whether on the radio, in print, or on the Web, Sound Portraits is committed to producing innovative works of lasting educational, cultural, and artistic value.

Sound Portraits's radio documentaries (broadcast on National Public Radio's All Things Considered and Weekend Edition) are audio profiles of men and women surviving in the margins. Told with care and dignity, the work depicts the lives of Americans living in communities often neglected or misunderstood. Sound Portraits frequently collaborates with people living in these hard-to-access corners of America, giving them tape recorders and microphones and helping them tell their own stories.

Sound Portraits is known not just for its cutting-edge radio documentaries but also for its innovative approaches to disseminating ideas, sparking discussion, and broadening the national debate on such issues as poverty, juvenile justice, prison, and race. After broadcast, their documentaries live on through extensive education outreach in classrooms across the country. In 1997, Sound Portraits was awarded funding from the MacArthur Foundation to bring the documentary Ghetto Life 101 into thousands of classrooms in collaboration with the national education outreach organization Facing History and Ourselves. This was just the beginning of an effort to make Sound Portraits work available as a learning tool, a mission that has grown with the company.

E.B. White once wrote that public radio has a special duty: "To arouse our dreams, satisfy our hunger for beauty, take us on journeys . . . and address the ideal of excellence and not the idea of acceptability." Sound Portraits is committed to making that vision a reality.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Our current Board is an involved and committed group of foundation, corporate, and non-profit leaders that includes the Pulitzer Prize-winning president of the New York Times Foundation, the President of the Public Welfare Foundation, a vice president of the MacArthur Foundation (retired), and the Senior Vice President of one of the fastest-growing private companies in New York City, and a former U.S. Senator.

Woodward A. Wickham Chairman
(Retired) Vice President, John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

David Isay President
Sound Portraits Productions

Richard Hecht Treasurer
Partner, Marks, Paneth and Shron

Jim Moore Secretary
Senior Vice President, Human Resource Development, FreshDirect

Senator William Bradley
Managing Director, Allen & Company LLC

Brian Byrd
Senior Government Relations Advisor, Law Offices of Claudia Wagner

Gladys Chen
Former Senior Vice President, Banc of America Securities

Truda Cleeves Jewett
Assistant Executive Director, External Affairs, ChildrenÕs Aid Society

Deborah Leff
President, The Public Welfare Foundation

Tom Moore
Former Group Vice President, Proctor & Gamble Co.

Jack Rosenthal
President, New York Times Foundation

Adele Silver
Independent Consultant to Art Museums and Cultural Agencies

STAFF BIOS

Dave Isay, Executive Producer
Dave Isay is the founder of StoryCorps and its parent company Sound Portraits. Over the past two decades his radio documentary work has won nearly every award in broadcasting including five Peabody Awards, two Robert F. Kennedy Awards, the Edward R. Murrow award, and two Livingston Awards for young journalists. Dave has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1994), a MacArthur Fellowship (2000), and a United States Artists Fellowship (2006). He is the author (or co-author) of four books based on Sound Portraits radio stories including: Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago (Scribner, 1997) and Flophouse (Random House, 2000).

Karen Callahan, Director of Operations
Karen began working at Sound Portraits as an intern after completing the writing and radio program at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies. She was production assistant on Youth Portraits and the Yiddish Radio Project, and later co-produced short pieces for Sound Portraits, including "Parents at an Execution" and "Clemency." Previously, Karen worked at the Urban Institute in Washington, DC.

Heather Burke, Development Officer
Heather comes to Sound Portraits from a career in publishing. After graduating from Wesleyan University with a degree in English, she moved to Washington, D.C., where she worked as a writer and editor for the Library of Congress. Returning to her hometown of New York City and settling in her adopted borough of Brooklyn, she continued in book publishing until departing for Sound Portraits to further pursue her love of great stories--spoken as well as written.

Matthew Ozug, Producer
After learning to love radio from the good people at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine, Matthew finally left New England to join Sound Portraits in May 2002.

Shana Bromberg, Operations Assistant
Shana began working at Sound Portraits after graduating from Barnard College, where she studied anthropology and music. She was previously an intern at NPR's Arts and Information desk and at WNYC, at the Leonard Lopate Show and at Studio 360.

Dalton Rooney, Webmaster
Dalton is currently studying photography at Brooklyn College. His previous position was the Director of Information Technology at the Corporation for Supportive Housing. He has experience in programming, system design and technology support.

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Sound Portraits Productions, 80 Hanson Place, 2nd Floor, Brooklyn, NY 11217
Telephone (646) 723-7020 | Fax (646) 723-7026

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