ABOUT

Lea Thau is a Peabody Award-winning producer and director. She is the producer and host of the popular podcast Strangers. Slate named an episode of Strangers one of “The 25 Best Podcast Episodes Ever,” and Strangers won the 2015 Public Radio March Madness Bracket Contest, beating out shows like This American Life, Serial and Radiolab for the top honor. 

 

Lea is also a storytelling teacher and coach. She has worked one-on-one with the likes of Ethan Hawke, Marc Maron, Gabriel Byrne, Darryll “DMC” McDaniels, Gay Talese, Suzanne Vega, and many, many others, as well as with postgraduate fellows at Harvard and inner city kids in New York and Los Angeles. She directed the 100th anniversary of the Pulitzer Prize at Harvard with personal stories by Pulitzer winners from different decades, and she has taught storytelling for business at Google, Nike, Intel, Saatchi & Saatchi, Tiffany & Co, Proctor & Gamble, and many other companies. She previously served as Executive & Creative Director of the live storytelling organization The Moth for a decade, where she created The Moth Podcast and The Moth Radio Hour. Originally from Denmark, she first came to the U.S. as a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University in the City of New York in 1996. She lives in Los Angeles with her family. 

 

“Holy cow, Lea Thau! Thank you, thank you for your humor, warmth, and sincerity — I hugely and ravenously love what you are doing on Strangers. I savor that puppy each time it comes out with a special cherished, sacred feeling and I seriously can’t think of a better gift. A reliable portal to gentleness in the world. That it awaits every month eases something panicked and dark in me.” –Lulu Miller (NPR, Radio Lab, Invisibilia)

“Lea Thau is a secret ninja story conjurer. If you were locked in a room with her for a few hours, you’d come out telling your best story, because she knows better than you do where your stories lie and she’ll find a way to summon them from deep inside you. Look out.”

“Lea Thau’s stories get under my skin.  They linger, they re-arrange the way I think. They are full of observation and wonder. Her honesty, her piercing words, the array of people that I know because she transports me there, her voice that I am mesmerized by…”Strangers” is music you need to hear.”