Kara Oehler is a radio documentary producer, media artist, and interactive designer. Her work over the past decade has focused upon pushing the boundaries of narrative journalism both on the air and across multiple platforms, combining investigative storytelling with participatory media, building new systems and opportunities for education and artistic practice, and consulting others on imagining new futures of digital media.
Kara is the Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Zeega, an open-source HTML5 platform for creating interactive documentaries and winner of the 2011 Knight News Challenge. During 2012, she is a Radcliffe/Film Study Center Fellow at Harvard University and a Rockefeller Fellow with United States Artists. She is also the co-creator of Mapping Main Street, a collaborative documentary created with AIR's MQ2 initiative, NPR, the CPB and the Berkman Center at Harvard. She is co-founder of metaLAB (at) Harvard, where she is the Documentary Arts and Media Innovation Fellow.
Kara was the co-director of The UnionDocs Collaborative, a Brooklyn-based laboratory for non-fiction media research and group production, and Capitol of Punk, an award-winning interactive documentary which is a part of Yellow Arrow, a seminal project in locative media and participatory storytelling. She is also a transmission artist with free103point9. Since 1999, her public radio stories and public media projects have received George Foster Peabody, Edward R. Murrow, Associated Press, NFCB Golden Reel, PRNDI and Third Coast International Audio Festival awards and been exhibited at MoMA (New York), and the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard, among other venues. Her radio stories, often created with longtime collaborator Ann Heppermann, have aired nationally and internationally on shows like NPR's Morning Edition, Weekend Edition, WNYC's RadioLab and Studio 360, Marketplace and the BBC.
Kara's work has been featured in Newsweek, The Washington Post, Current, SPIN, The Brooklyn Rail, Very Short List, among others. She has taught courses and workshops on multimedia storytelling, writing for radio and non-narrated audio documentary at CUNY's Graduate School of Journalism, Duke's Center for Documentary Studies, Sarah Lawrence College and Universität Konstanz. Her work has been funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Association of Independents in Radio's MQ2 initiative, the Arizona Humanities Council, and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Contact: karaoehler [at] gmail.com
Kara's work has been featured in Newsweek, The Washington Post, Current, SPIN, The Brooklyn Rail, Very Short List, among others. She has taught courses and workshops on multimedia storytelling, writing for radio and non-narrated audio documentary at CUNY's Graduate School of Journalism, Duke's Center for Documentary Studies, Sarah Lawrence College and Universität Konstanz. Her work has been funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Association of Independents in Radio's MQ2 initiative, the Arizona Humanities Council, and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Contact: karaoehler [at] gmail.com
