Sara Fishko

Sara Fishko is a Producer and Host at WNYC, specializing in culture.

Her long-running series Fishko Files has become a staple of WNYC’s cultural programming, tackling a broad range of subjects, from a portrait of media guru Marshall McLuhan, to a meditation on the Symbolist painting  “Isle of the Dead,” to a consideration of the future of film criticism.  The pieces ran on Morning Edition and All Things Considered, as well as Studio 360 and On The Media.

Fishko produced and hosted the ten-part Jazz Loft Project Radio Series, derived from a treasure trove of archival tapes recorded by  photographer W. Eugene Smith in his dilapidated Manhattan home in a loft building in the 1950s and 60s. The series, which ran on WNYC and NPR, later became four special programs known as The Jazz Loft Anthology.  

She has also made compelling hour-long programs featuring interviews with and performances by Keith Jarrett, Dave Brubeck, Ned Rorem and others. Her special program Culture Shock 1913 is a spirited telling of the history and development of Modernist art and culture in the early years of the 20^th century.

Sara Fishko has won multiple awards from RTNDA (Edward R. Murrow Award), The Deadline Club, The Newswomen’s Club of New York (Front Page Award), The Associated Press and The New York Press Club. She received a Deems Taylor Award from ASCAP for the Jazz Loft series, and was selected as a USC/Annenberg Arts Journalism Fellow in 2003 and 2011.

Her blog Fishko Now and Then is about culture now and culture then, and it appears…now and then.