Past Event: Emanuele Berry, Alicia M. DeSantis, and David Kofahl

About the Speakers

Emanuele Berry is the Executive Editor of This American Life, where she’s reported and co-produced episodes about the protests in Hong Kong, coronavirus patients at a hospital in Detroit. She also helped make the 2023 Dupont Columbia Award winning episode Talking While Black and the Peabody Award Winning episode on the fall of Roe v. Wade. Before coming to This American Life, Emanuele was an editor and producer at Gimlet Media, where she ran and worked on several shows including The Nod, Undone, and StartUp. Previously, she worked as a public radio reporter in Michigan and Missouri. Emanuele is a 2014 AIR New Voices Scholar and the recipient of a 2015 Fulbright award to Macau, China.

Alicia M. DeSantis is a Deputy Editor at The New York Times and holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Her dissertation, “The Feeling of a Line: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Psychology of the Imagination,” looks at the work of William James, Helen Keller, Mark Twain, John Dewey, Charlotte Perkins Gillman, Francis Galton and others in the context of the first studies of mental imagery. As a journalist, editor and writer, her work has been honored with an Emmy Award, the Edward R. Murrow Award, the Punch Sulzberger Award, as well as medals from the Malofiej Society, the Society of Publication Design and the Society of News Design, amongst others. She teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York. 

David Kofahl is the Director of Interactives at The New Yorker. His multidisciplinary approach to visual storytelling spans interactive media, design, and engineering. His work has earned numerous awards for journalism and innovation, including an Emmy, Peabody, and World Press Award. Before The New Yorker, David worked at Vanity Fair and TIME and led the design and engineering for the magazines’ most ambitious interactive stories. David graduated from the University of Florida, where he studied Political Science.