Renee Montagne
Renee Montagne, one of the best-known names in public radio, is a special correspondent and host for NPR News.
Montagne's most recent assignment was a yearlong collaboration with ProPublica reporter Nina Martin, investigating the alarming rate of maternal mortality in the U.S., as compared to other developed countries. The series, called "Lost Mothers," was recognized with more than a dozen awards in American journalism, including a Peabody Award, a George Polk Award, and Harvard's Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Journalism. The series was also named a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.
From 2004 to 2016, Montagne co-hosted NPR's Morning Edition, the most widely heard radio news program in the United States. Her first experience as host of an NPR newsmagazine came in 1987, when she, along with Robert Siegel, were named the new hosts of All Things Considered.
After leaving All Things Considered, Montagne traveled to South Africa in early 1990, arriving to report from there on the day Nelson Mandela emerged from 27 years in prison. In 1994, she and a small team of NPR reporters were awarded an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton for their coverage of South Africa's historic elections that led to Mandela becoming that country's first black president.
Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Montagne has made 10 extended reporting trips to Afghanistan. She has traveled to every major city, from Kabul to Kandahar, to peaceful villages, and to places where conflict raged. She has profiled Afghanistan's presidents and power brokers, but focused on the stories of Afghans at the heart of that complex country: school girls, farmers, mullahs, poll workers, midwives, and warlords. Her coverage has been honored by the Overseas Press Club, and, for stories on Afghan women in particular, by the Gracie Awards.
One of her most cherished honors dates to her days as a freelance reporter in the 1980s, when Montagne and her collaborator, the writer Thulani Davis, were awarded "First Place in Radio" by the National Association of Black Journalists for their series "Fanfare for the Warriors." It told the story of African-American musicians in the military bands from WW1 to Vietnam.
Montagne began her career in radio pretty much by accident, when she joined a band of friends, mostly poets and musicians, who were creating their own shows at a new, scrappy little San Francisco community station called KPOO. Her show was called Women's Voices.
Montagne graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California, Berkeley. Her career includes teaching broadcast writing at New York University's Graduate Department of Journalism (now the Carter Institute).
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The new Tutankhamun exhibit is one of the most highly anticipated art shows this year, generating the kind of buzz the boy king once garnered when artifacts from his tomb first toured the United States more than a generation ago.
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Director Ron Howard discusses his latest film, Cinderella Man, a rags-to-riches true story of boxer James Braddock, whose improbable rise during the Great Depression embodied the hopes of the suffering. Howard says that what makes the movie intriguing is the combination of the protagonist's actions both in life and sport.
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A new sensation is piggy-backing on the phenomenon that is the iPod: podcasting. The personalized audio recordings, which can be heard on any digital music player, have given an outlet to marginalized experts and frustrated DJs alike. And media critic Jeff Jarvis says that's the beauty of podcasting.
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The Juilliard School celebrates the 100th anniversary of its charter, marking a century of preparing fine musicians and performers. The school was the first American institution to rise to the level of its European counterparts.
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When a brutal regime ends, those who survive are often left with feelings of guilt, anger and confusion. With the fall of Saddam Hussein, a group of Iraqi-born activists have created the Iraq Memory Foundation to help Iraqis come to terms with their past.
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To celebrate the second day of Nowruz, the Persian New Year, NPR presents selections from a recent concert by the Masters of Persian Music — an Iranian "supergroup" of classical musicians who accompany poems set to song with traditional Persian instruments.
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Jazz historian Frank Driggs has amassed a collection of some 100,000 photographs and mementoes over the years. The materials, worth an estimated $1.5 million, trace jazz from its beginnings with 1920s road bands to meccas of bop such as Birdland in the 1950s.
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Russian police are recommending prosecutors file criminal charges against a Web site that offers cheap music downloads to an international audience.
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Acclaimed documentary filmmaker Ken Burns returns to PBS with Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, a profile of the world's first African-American heavyweight boxing champ.
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Comic book legend Will Eisner died Monday at the age of 87. The artist was best known for his Sunday strip The Spirit, but most may recognize his style from the buxom ladies he painted on the nose of fighter planes in World War II. Hear NPR's Renee Montagne.