Stephanie Foo
| Stephanie Foo | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1987 (age 30–31) |
| Alma mater | University of California, Santa Cruz |
| Occupation | Radio producer |
| Employer | This American Life |
| Awards | 2016 Daytime Emmy nominee |
Stephanie Foo (born 1987) is a radio producer who has worked for Snap Judgment and This American Life.
Foo attended the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Foo taught high school journalism after college, and began listening to This American Life and Radiolab. She eventually decided to try her hand at it, hitchhiking to a pornography convention in search of a story and ultimately starting a podcast called Get Me On This American Life. Another early audio project was a music podcast called Stagedive, where Foo succeeded in reaching a young demographic.
Foo was an intern then a producer at Glynn Washington's Snap Judgment, based in Oakland, then moved to This American Life.
In addition to producer roles at Snap Judgment and This American Life, Foo has also contributed to Reply All and 99% Invisible. She's drawn notice for work on topics ranging from Japanese reality television (a piece Flavorwire named to its list of the 20 best episodes in This American Life's 20-year history) to race and online dating; The New York Observer praised the latter piece as one of Reply All's "most provocative episodes."
In 2015, Foo launched her own podcast called Pilot, with each installment to serve as a pilot episode for a different genre of podcast. CBC's Lindsay Michael named Pilot to a 2016 list of five best recent podcasts, saying Foo has "created her own playground...A place where she can try things out and see how they go."
Foo served as the project lead on the development of an app from This American Life, launched in October 2016, called Shortcut. Produced in collaboration with developers Courtney Stanton and Darius Kazemi of Feel Train, Shortcut aims to allow listeners to share audio across social media sites as easily as they can share video clips via gifs. In the app, listeners can select an audio clip of up to 30 seconds and then post it directly to social media, where the audio plays alongside a transcription of the clip. At launch, the app operated on This American Life's archives, but the project was later released as open-source code, available for other audio projects to adopt. Writing at The New York Observer, Brady Dale called Foo's project "the number one innovation in podcasting" in 2016, saying, "If anything can ever make audio go viral, it’s a solution like this."
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