JUDGES

Amina Al-Sadi

BEST NEWS FEATURE & IMPACT JUDGE

Amina (she/her) is the supervising editor of Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily news podcast. Amina started as a producer on Today, Explained in 2019, producing episodes on everything from Syria and the Supreme Court to US politics and health care. Amina has always been passionate about audio storytelling and got her start in radio as a teen at KUOW, a Seattle-based public radio station. She went on to help produce the station’s live daily news shows Weekday, The Record, and Week in Review.

Jenny (J) Asarnow

BEST DOCUMENTARY: SHORT & AUDIO UNBOUND JUDGE

Jenny (J) Asarnow is an audio producer and educator. Their work engages communities to tell their stories, and has taken the form of audio journalism, documentary, and sound art, including collaborative, site-specific works like The Corner: 23rd and Union and Saltwater Soundwalk. As an educator, they develop curricula and lead workshops for new producers in the craft of audio narrative. They founded KUOW’s RadioActive Youth Media, and have shared leadership at the Third Coast International Audio Festival, The Seattle Globalist, and Hollow Earth Radio. Their work for public radio and podcasts has been recognized by the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Awards, Webby’s, National Edward R. Murrow awards, Indigenous Journalists Association awards, and others. They were honored to be a winner of the 2013 Third Coast ShortDocs challenge and a judge for the 2021 and 2024-25 Third Coast awards, and serve on Third Coast's board as vice president.

Chris Berube

BEST SERIALIZED STORY JUDGE

Chris Berube is a Senior Producer at the podcast 99% Invisible. During his 15 years as an audio pro, Chris has edited The Dropout and Articles of Interest (Season 2), made a documentary for the 30 for 30 podcast, produced an audio tour for the Guggenheim Museum, and made work for the CBC, the BBC, Slate Magazine and many others.

Isabel Cadenas Cañón

BEST SERIALIZED STORY JUDGE

Isabel Cadenas Cañón (she/her) is the creator and director of De eso no se habla, a narrative non-fiction podcast about memory, silence, and who gets left out of the record. She was part of the second cohort of PRX's Google Podcasts Creator Program and has received, among others, the Ondas Award, the Award of the Spanish Investigative Journalist Association and has been twice a finalist at Prix Europa and Third Coast. She was previously Executive Audio Producer at El País, where she directed the newspaper's daily podcast, and has produced, directed, and edited audio stories for WBUR, Radio Ambulante, Deutsche Welle, and PRX; she’s taught audio storytelling at institutions including Spanish, Basque and Colombian national public radios and her written features have appeared in outlets such as eldiario.es, La Marea, and Público. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from New York University and is the author of two poetry collections and the essay Poética de la ausencia. Her work sits at the intersection of personal stories and collective narratives, exploring questions of gender and memory.

Martina Castro

BEST DOCUMENTARY JUDGE

Martina (she/her) has been telling stories in audio for over 20 years. She spent a decade at NPR and member station KALW before she co-founded Radio Ambulante, NPR’s first narrative journalism podcast in Spanish, and in 2017, she founded Adonde Media at a startup incubator in Santiago, Chile, to tell stories that transcend national borders and language. She has since led multilingual and multinational teams as executive producer and editor with partners such as Duolingo, Spotify, PRX, and Sony Pictures Animation, and has received various awards, including a Webby for Duolingo Spanish and a Premio Ondas for Canción Exploder, the Spanish language spinoff of Song Exploder that she hosted and produced with Hrishikesh Hirway. She’s now based between Los Angeles, CA, Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Uruguay, where her family is from.

Sophie Crane

BEST NEW ARTIST JUDGE

Sophie Crane (she/her) is the Executive Director of the Transom Story Lab and a Lecturer at Dartmouth College. Previously, she was an Executive Producer and Senior Editor at Pushkin Industries and a Series Producer at PBS’s FRONTLINE. She has worked across journalism, documentary, public media, and podcasting as a producer, editor, teacher, and organizational leader. She lives in Vermont.

Anayansi Diaz-Cortes

BEST DOCUMENTARY: NON-ENGLISH LANGUAGE JUDGE

Anayansi Diaz-Cortes is an investigative radio journalist and producer. Known for her groundbreaking work, she spearheaded After Ayotzinapa, an investigation into the disappearance of 43 Mexican college students. The project was recognized by IRE and Third Coast, and was among The New York Times' Best Podcasts. For almost a decade, she was a senior reporter and producer at Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, leading some of the most important stories for the radio show and podcast, including Third Coast winner, Diary of a Home Schooler.

Over the years, her work has appeared on dozens of shows. On This American Life, she chronicles life under the threat of ICE, the infamous Rubber Room in NYC and the reality of Venezuela before and after the elections there. She also dabbles in video podcasts and tech reporting and makes KQED’s Dream Machines. Her work in Spanish and Spanglish has been broadcast on Latino USA, and she has produced alongside Adonde Media and Radio Ambulante. For years, her immigration reporting had a broadcast home at KCRW. She got her start at Radio Diaries, and made a definitive documentary for NPR’s All Things Considered about the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexico City.

Both as a reporter and producer, her pieces have garnered press attention across the world as well as many journalism awards, including an Emmy nomination, the SPJ, Edward R. Murrow, the Overseas Press Club, a Gracie, and a prestigious Ondas award nomination. She has also helped imbue many with the love of audio story telling at UC Berkeley Graduate School for Journalism and beyond. She lives in Berkeley, California with her blended family made up of two tweens, two teens, a pug and a leopard gecko.

Neenah Ellis

BEST NEWS FEATURE & IMPACT JUDGE

Neenah Ellis is a radio journalist who’s worked in daily news, long-form documentary, oral history, podcasting, documentary film and music recording. At NPR, in Washington, DC she worked for “All Things Considered” as a producer and often travelled abroad. For MPR, she created and produced a live, nation-wide music and spoken word performance program. She is the author of “If I Live to be 100: Lessons from the Centenarians,” a New York Times bestseller. She was the general manager of WYSO Public Radio in Yellow Springs, Ohio for 10 years and founded the Center for Community Voices, teaching radio skills to hundreds of local citizens. She was born on the south side of Chicago and raised in “da region.”

Hanisha Harjani

BEST NEW ARTIST JUDGE

Hanisha Harjani is a journalist, educator, and multimedia artist. They're an award-winning reporter, producing work for outlets like NPR, The Guardian, the Markup, and the San Francisco Chronicle. They've helped tell stories about mommy bloggers, anarchist organizing, conversion therapy, dating apps, and satanists — among other things. They currently work as the Community Journalism Director at San Francisco NPR member station KALW, where they facilitate training programs for early-career radio reporters with non-traditional pathways into journalism. They also produce an experimental radio show, transmissions from [the psychic deli], on online community radio stations.

Rikke Houd

BEST DOCUMENTARY JUDGE

As storyteller, documentary artist, mentor, and editor, Rikke Houd is occupied with the unique qualities of sound and how it can both capture a real moment in time and also the intangible, lost and unhearable. Her practice zig-zags between certainty and doubt, exploring methodologies, power structures in storytelling, radiophonic space. She works in Danish, Icelandic, Swedish, Norwegian and English through radio, podcasts, theatre, exhibitions, and site-specific work and often through collaboration. Since 2022, she has been podcast editor-in-chief at the Danish Association of the Blind, and since 2024 creative advisor for the newly established Danish school for sound and storytelling, Æteren.

Anne Jeppesen

BEST DOCUMENTARY: NON-ENGLISH LANGUAGE JUDGE

Anne Jeppesen (she/her) is an audio creator specialised in documentaries and immersive films. She’s based in Copenhagen and part of the artistic duo Superposition. Among her work is the Danish documentary series, Vi blev statens børn, the sound based VR-film, A Vocal Landscape and the sound work and later dome film, Reality looks back. Her work has won several prizes, among them the Art Festival prize at AWE and best podcast at Aesthetica.

Nishat Kurwa

BEST SERIALIZED STORY JUDGE

Nishat Kurwa joined Vox Media in 2017 to establish its podcast network, where she is SVP and Executive Producer. She has played a key role in building the network into one of the largest podcast publishers in the U.S., overseeing programming strategy, new show development, and Vox Media's podcast production team. As EP, she has launched many acclaimed shows: she originated Pivot alongside hosts Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway; co-developed the daily news show Today, Explained; and created the narrative series Land of the Giants, which was adapted for television by CNN+ and Vice TV. She has also led the development of video franchises across content categories, including A Touch More with Sue Bird & Megan Rapinoe, On with Kara Swisher, and Tefi Talks. Kurwa previously led the digital publishing team at American Public Media's Marketplace, and served as Senior Producer and News Director at the Peabody Award-winning independent production company Youth Radio for more than a decade.

Emily Kwong

BEST SERIALIZED STORY JUDGE

Emily Kwong (she/her) is an NPR audio journalist working at the crossroads of sociopolitical history, family memory, and science. Since 2021, Emily has been the co-host of Short Wave, NPR's flagship science show sharing new discoveries, everyday mysteries, and the science behind the headlines. Short Wave met a crucial need for science-based information during the Coronavirus pandemic and won the 2021 Ambie Award for Best Knowledge, Science or Tech Podcast. Emily is also the host and co-creator of Inheriting, a show about Asian American and Pacific Islander families. The first season won the 2025 Ambie Award for Best Society and Culture Podcast, the Silver Signal Award for Best History Podcast, and the 2025 RFK Journalism Award in Radio. Emily got her start as a youth media instructor at WNYC’s Radio Rookies and a daily reporter at the community radio station KCAW in Sitka, Alaska. For four years, she chased stories up fishing boats and onto volcanoes, broadcasting to an island community.

Tobin Low

BEST NEW ARTIST JUDGE

Tobin Low is an award-winning radio maker who currently serves as an editor at This American Life. He is best known as the co-creator and co-host of the LGBTQ podcast Nancy, which was recently named to TIME’s 100 Best Podcasts of All Time. His work has also appeared on shows like Radiolab and More Perfect.

Miguel Macias

BEST NEWS FEATURE & IMPACT JUDGE

Miguel Macias is overnight lead audio editor for NPR, based in Spain, where he also reports from. Prior to returning to his home country in 2023, Miguel spent more than two decades living and working in the U.S. Most recently Miguel was a Senior Producer at NPR's All Things Considered, in Washington, D.C.

Prior to joining NPR in 2021, Miguel was Supervising Senior Producer for Latino USA, where he led a team of talented producers and editors. Before that, Miguel was an Associate Professor at Brooklyn College CUNY, where he taught radio production and journalism for a decade. Before moving into academia, Miguel worked as the Los Angeles Bureau Chief for Youth Radio, as an Associate Producer for the Marketplace Morning Report, and as an Associate Producer for WNYC's Radio Rookies. Miguel is also proud to have worked as a volunteer for the NGO MADRE. As such, he has trained Indigenous radio reporters in Peru, instructed video editing to teenagers in Colombia and taught radio production to activists in Nicaragua.

Miguel received a Peabody Award in 2006 as the Associate Producer for WNYC Radio Rookies' Mosholu series. In 2022 he received an Ondas Award for his audio documentary, Limbo.

Liz Mak

BEST DOCUMENTARY JUDGE

Liz Mak is an award-winning audio producer and reporter from Los Angeles. Previously, she worked at the public radio show and podcast Snap Judgment, and reported for NPR member station KALW in San Francisco. She also taught at the Transom Story Workshop. Currently, Liz is on staff at the worker-owned audio production cooperative Mumble Media. Liz’s documentary work focuses on the lives of immigrants, refugees, and communities of people who live on the margins. Her stories have taken her to search for hidden graves on a remote Indonesian island, document the 2016 protests at Standing Rock, and interview a man who - except for his socks - was fully in the nude. Her writing, photography, audio and video work have appeared in various outlets, including NPR, KQED, Studio 360, PRI’s The World, and The New York Times.

Ariana Martinez

BEST DOCUMENTARY: NON-ENGLISH LANGUAGE JUDGE

Ariana Martinez (they/them) is a multimedia artist, radio maker, and educator based in Bronx, NY. Ariana has produced radio features for BBC Radio 4’s Short Cuts and BBC Radio 3’s Between the Essays. They have worked as a sound designer and engineer for Magnificent Noise and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Audible Originals, Pineapple Street Media, and elsewhere. Ariana's audio work has appeared at HearSay Festival (Ireland), Open City Documentary Festival (UK), LUCIA Festival (Italy), BANGOUJA Festival (Lithuania), and OORZAKEN Festival (Netherlands).Their work has also been supported by UnionDocs (NY), the Ragdale Foundation (IL), The James Castle House (ID), the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (ME), the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Movement Research (NY). Ariana has written about the art of radio making and creative practice for Transom, Weird Noise, and elsewhere. Ariana is a dedicated media educator and has taught courses for the CUNY Newmark School of Journalism, The New School, NYU, The Salt Institute for Documentary Study, The Vocalo Storytelling Workshop with WBEZ, and AIR Media's Sound Path. Currently, Ariana is a part-time lecturer teaching print and time-based media at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts and among the founding editors of Sound Fields, a new publication dedicated to audio documentary theory and practice.

Lu Olkowski

BEST SERIALIZED STORY JUDGE

When not hosting Love Me, Lu Olkowski is an independent producer and story editor. Her work has been featured on NPR, This American Life and Radiolab among others. She’s known for getting “great tape” which sometimes means following people around for a really long time, the best part of being a producer. Some of her favorite experiences have been recording with women in Troy, NY, longshoremen at the Port of Los Angeles, and mushers on the Iditarod trail. Under her editorial leadership, Throughline became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Rough Translation won an Edward R. Murrow award and Reveal won the Columbia-duPont. This summer she hopes to record the sound of seals singing.

Vaida Pilibaitytė

BEST DOCUMENTARY JUDGE

Vaida Pilibaitytė (she/her) is a radio journalist, documentary producer and mentor with 20 years of experience at the Lithuanian national public broadcaster LRT. Her professional focus is mainly on environmental issues, but also history, culture, and human rights. Vaida’s co-production with Deutsche Welle received a Silver medal in the Environment category at the New York Festivals in 2004. Her audio documentary work has won multiple national awards, was featured on BBC Radio 4’s Short Cuts, Third Coast International Audio Festival, EBU Audio Storytelling Festival (formerly IFC), and nominated for the Prix Europa twice. In 2021-2023 she was a programmer of BANGUOJA festival – the first audio festival in Lithuania with a focus on human rights. Since 2024, Vaida coordinates LRT RADIO ACADEMY, a new training and mentorship program for aspiring audio storytellers. She is also a member of the EBU Audio Storytelling Group and executive producer of 51st EBU Audio Storytelling Festival held in Vilnius in 2025.

Lucia Scazzocchio

BEST DOCUMENTARY: SHORT & AUDIO UNBOUND JUDGE

Lucia Scazzocchio (she/her) is an award winning audio producer/sound artist, educator and founder/lead producer at Social Broadcasts, where audio making meets community engagement and participatory art practice, weaving conversations and personal stories to reveal broader social themes.' Social Broadcasts' are often collaborative and immersive, experimenting with many different forms of audio as well as creating interactive environments as well as exploring how we listen to stories in both the private sphere and public environments. Lucia is also the producer and sound designer for the indie hit podcast Lowlines, audio producer and co-writer of the children’s dramatised audio series In The Beginning and the founder and curator of xmtr.fm a sonic storytelling portal for independent audio makers and is the dynamo behind the annual XMTR Audio Arts Festival in St Leonards on Sea, UK.

Jonathan Zenti

BEST DOCUMENTARY: NON-ENGLISH LANGUAGE JUDGE

Jonathan Zenti is an Italian author and audio producer whose work explores the complexity of human relationships. He has made pieces for Italian Public Radio RAI, the BBC, CBC and ABC Australia, and has collaborated with podcasts including The Heart, Love Me, Shortcuts and Spooked. He has won the Hearsay Award and a Third Coast Award and has been a finalist at the Prix Italia, Prix Europa, and Radiotopia’s Podquest. He started his English-language podcast Meat. One day he will finish it. He is the co-founder of MIRP, an international peer-to-peer gathering for independent audio makers devoted to craft and creative freedom. Today he produces his own podcasts in Italian — Zentierini, TOTALE, and Problemi — and oversees the creative and editorial direction of podcasts for other outlets. He runs his own audio design studio, Studio BAU.