Anjuli Sastry Krbechek
Anjuli Sastry (she/her) is a producer on It's Been a Minute with Sam Sanders and a 2021 Nieman Journalism Foundation Visiting Fellow. During her Nieman fellowship in spring 2021, Sastry created, hosted and produced the audio and video series Where We Come From. The series tells the stories of immigrant communities of color through a personal and historical lens.
Since 2017, Sastry has been a producer on the NPR podcast and weekend radio show It's Been a Minute with Sam Sanders. In that role, Sastry cuts interviews, writes scripts, books guests, scores episodes, plans future coverage, leads editorial direction of episodes and more. She's produced episodes that look at gun violence in Oakland, a deep dive into the history of drag culture and interviews with folks like John Legend and Jennifer Lopez. She also produces live shows in places like Iowa and Chicago and directs weekly tapings of It's Been a Minute.
Sastry started her career at NPR on the flagship newsmagazine All Things Considered. In this role, Sastry led the show's social media team, was the lead producer for the 25th anniversary of the Los Angeles Riots series and reported in the Southwest and Mexico with Melissa Block and Elissa Nadworny for the special series Our Land.
She's worked as a producer for Marketplace and Press Play at KCRW, and her work has appeared in NPR's Life Kit, Morning Edition, Weekend All Things Considered and ABC News.
Sastry is a co-founder of the Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color Mentorship Program at NPR. She and her co-founders received the NPR Diversity Success employee award for their work in 2018. She was also part of the inaugural 2018 Online News Association Journalism Mentorship Collaborative and has spoken about mentorship at Werk It: A Women's Podcast Festival and the Third Coast International Audio Festival.
In 2019, Sastry was named an AIR New Voices Scholar.
Hailing from the San Francisco Bay Area, Sastry earned her bachelor's degree in political science from the University of California, Berkeley and graduated with honors from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
-
Food writer Priya Krishna and her mother, Ritu Krishna, discuss influences on their Indian cooking. They explore assimilation through food and why recipes like dal represent comfort for their family.
-
Colette Baptiste-Mombo and her family moved to an all-white suburb at the height of the civil rights era. She shares how racist attacks changed her life, and how she deals with generational trauma.
-
César Magaña Linares is a temporary protected status, or TPS, holder from El Salvador. As an activist and law student, he's redefining what it means to be an immigrant, beyond the headlines.
-
Assimilation has a cost. As a third generation Chinese American, NPR Short Wave's Emily Kwong is rediscovering the language her father once knew, and what that means for where she comes from.
-
A strong mentoring relationship can change your career and help you outside of work.
-
In East Oakland, Calif., where gun violence is chronic, some are grateful that after Parkland, America pays more attention to the issue. But as an East Oakland youth says, "It's our time to talk."
-
This weekend, Youth Cinema Project students screened their films for the public. The program aims to create a pipeline to get kids of color in underachieving schools into the filmmaking industry.
-
Metz worked as an agent for years before her acting career finally took off. She says, "It was like watching your boyfriend take another woman out every day."
-
Nguyen and Thi Tran started Starry Kitchen out of desperation. Now the couple has a new book with their best recipes and stories of their adventures in the culinary world.
-
Key's new Netflix show is about how even in your 40s, you can still make mistakes. The actor tells NPR he never expected to make it in the entertainment industry: "I stumbled up into this," he says.