Jennifer Vanasco

Jennifer Vanasco is the News and Culture editor at WNYC, where she edits the daily news for air and arts features, and covers the arts and the economics of culture. 

She previously was the Minority Reports columnist for Columbia Journalism Review, where she analyzed how the mainstream media covered social minorities, and the editor in chief of MTV's LGBT news and politics website 365gay.com. Her nationally-syndicated, weekly newspaper column Common Life ran for 14 years and won the Peter Lisagor Award for opinion writing from the Society of Professional Journalists three times. She has also won the New York Radio Festivals Silver Award, the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association Excellence in Radio Award, the National Headline Award, plus other awards from the Associated Press, the New York State Broadcasters Association, the Webbys and others. She's published work in anthologies, and was a fellow at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center and SPACE at Ryder Farm. She is an adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University, is on the faculty of the critic's program at the O'Neill, and was invited by the U.S. State Department to coach Iraqi journalists on media ethics at the United Nations. She graduated from Wellesley. You can follow her on Twitter @JenniferVanasco