Narrative Landscapes by Krissy Clark

Krissy Clark is an award-winning journalist, documentary-maker, and audio artist with a passion for location-aware technologies and their power as storytelling tools. She is currently the Los Angeles Bureau Chief for KQED public radio, where she uncovers the wide array of people, places and events that make Southern California such a fascinating region or, in the words of Wernor Herzog, “a place of cultural substance.”

Clark has spent more than a decade covering public affairs, politics, the economy and the environment for national public radio outlets including APM, NPR, and the BBC. She is a frequent contributor to the business show Marketplace, where she covered the gulf oil spill and its economic implications. She is also a former staff reporter and editor for the weekly syndicated show Weekend America.

In 2009 Clark received a Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford to explore the geospatial web and its applications for innovating journalism, working with the Stanford Computer Science Department, the Bill Lane Center for the Study of the American West, and the Hasso Platner Institute of Design, or d.school.

“Foreclosure City,” Clark’s documentary on the epicenter of the nation’s foreclosure crisis, Las Vegas, made her a finalist for the Livingston Award for Journalists under 35, one of journalism’s highest honors. Earlier in her career she spent several years in a small town in Colorado where she reported on the rural American West for the environmental newspaper High Country News. There, her documentary on the legacy of nuclear weapons development in western states was awarded Best Documentary by the Public Radio News Directors Inc.

Clark graduated cum laude with honors from Yale University, where she earned a B.A. in The Humanities. She is a frequent speaker on journalism and the geospatial web at institutions including Google, Stanford’s Human Computer Interaction Group, and the American Association of University Women.

As a fifth generation Californian, Clark is keenly interested in history and the way people shape places, and places shape people. Her audio installation, Block of Time: O’Farrell Street, was featured alongside MIT’s SENSEable Cities project and Stamen Design’s TenderVoice/TenderNoise at the City Centered Festival in San Francisco, sponsored by the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts. Block of Time and other experiments in narrative landscapes can be found at her website, storieseverywhere.org.