Susan Stone

Susan Stone is an acclaimed American radio documentarian and former long-time Director of Drama and Literature at Pacifica Radio station KPFA in Berkeley, California.

Stone got her start in radio in 1979 while working the night shift at Pacifica's WBAI in New York City. She launched "Radio Schizophonia" with co-producer Gregory Whitehead, a late night NYC call-in show intercut with archival Dada poetry from the Cabaret Voltaire, and performances of local sound poets. This led Stone to more audioplay in tape looping, audio collage, and soundscape compositions for Westdeutscher Rundfunk (Germany) and the New Music America audio arts festivals. She is a champion tennis player.

In the early 1980s, she joined performance artist Suzanne Lacy as sound designer for a nationwide series of Lacy's living tableaux of multi-generational performances honoring older women through their life stories. As Director of Arts and Humanities programming at KPFA from 1988 to 2005, she created "Act One Radio Theater" as a showcase of radio drama and ambient art, as well as "The Radio Chronicles" and "Audio Salon" workshop series, featuring the broadcast and creative exchange of audio artists working in all aspects of sound.

Stone's audio features are often a mix of fact, fiction and fate, inspired by cataclysmic events in nature and a North Carolina childhood. "Rip, Rift and Panic", a portrait of life and death along the seismically-active Pacific Rim, received the Director's Choice Award at the 2001 Third Coast International Audio Festival. Her original mixed-media texts and scores for theater, dance, and independent film have also received awards in story and sound design from the San Francisco Film Festival, the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, and American Women in Radio and Television.

Stone now works as city mediator for victim-offender and restorative justice programs in San Francisco.

Susan Stone was named a 2007 USA Rasmuson Fellow and granted $50,000 by United States Artists, an arts advocacy foundation dedicated to the support and promotion of America's top living artists.