About

I’m an independent documentary producer and public radio reporter. I work part-time at KQED News on an experimental radio and online project, and have reported for NPR, The California Report, KALW’s Crosscurrents, CNN.com, Philosophy Talk, Snap Judgment, High Country News, and the Oakland Museum of California’s Oakland Standard. I’m also working on an hour-long radio documentary, entitled Shipwrecked on Dry Land, about evolution and extinction in California.

I was a 2009 fellow with Middlebury Fellowships in Environmental Journalism, a 2011 journalist-in-residence at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, and a recipient of a grant from the Society of Environmental Journalists’ story fund.

I’ve collected oral histories in Mississippi; interned at the Arts Desk at NPR, where I produced obituaries for people who hadn’t died yet; worked for the defense in the death penalty trial of Jamil Al-Amin (the Black Panther and SNCC leader who changed his name from H. Rap Brown); and rejected hundreds of unsolicited manuscripts as an intern at a literary agency.

As a public radio evangelist, I have successfully recruited one of my brothers (Seth Samuel is an engineer at KALW), and tried to teach multiple interview subjects who show the vaguest polite interest how to use a flash recorder.

I have a degree in Ancient Greek from Oberlin College, am a co-founder of the record label True Panther Sounds, and am a minor character in a book about my family, written by my award-winning journalist mom.

• Read my resume
• Contact me at molly dot samuel at gmail dot com