Jessica Bruder is an award-winning journalist and an adjunct professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Her writing focuses on innovation, interactivity and creative thought in culture and business. She is the author of Burning Book (Simon & Schuster), a narrative nonfiction account of the annual Burning Man festival in Nevada's Black Rock desert. The Los Angeles Times called her writing "quietly poetic."
Jessica has more than 120 New York Times bylines. She has also written for The Washington Post and worked as a staff writer at The New York Observer and The Oregonian. She was a senior-level editor at Fortune Small Business until Time Inc. shuttered the magazine at the end of 2009. She currently blogs about arts and culture for Laughing Squid and edits the weekly Innovation Nation column at CNNMoney.com.
On assignment, she has hiked the Simanjiro Plains of Tanzania and traveled across the state of Texas in an RV. She speaks fluent French and, once upon a time, was the worst waitress in all of Paris.
Jessica earned her master's degree at Columbia's journalism school, where she was awarded a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship and named co-valedictorian of her class. She took her bachelor's degree summa cum laude at Amherst College.
In her spare time, Jessica enjoys snowboarding, playing the electric guitar and deploying puns painful enough to crack your sense of humor and make your ears bleed. She is a mediocre but enthusiastic welder and gets her kicks building large-scale interactive art as a proud member of two artists' collectives, The Madagascar Institute and The Flaming Lotus Girls. She has worked on art installation teams at festivals including Burning Man, Coachella, Toronto’s WinterCity, Figment and The Maker Faire.
She likes to take pictures. Her photography appeared in Burning Book and has been published by The New York Observer, Blender Magazine and Laughing Squid. Her HD video footage was featured on the Discovery Channel's Daily Planet show as part of the D.I.Y/-themed "Garage Gurus" week.
Jessica lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. She dislikes writing about herself in the third person, though she'll suffer the task to make a good impression.
You may download a copy of her journalism portfolio here.