Jessica Bruder is an award-winning journalist and editor who teaches as an adjunct professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Her writing focuses on innovation, interactivity and creative thought, with an emphasis on contemporary subcultures, the ongoing D.I.Y. renaissance and start-up ventures. She writes Start, the New York Times' blog on young indie businesses and 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 150 New York Times bylines, with articles in the Style, Arts & Leisure, Business, Metro, Travel, Technology and City sections of the newspaper and in The New York Times Magazine. She has written for The Washington Post and The Christian Science Monitor and worked as a staff writer at The New York Observer and The Oregonian. Her stories have also appeared on CNN's website and in The International Herald Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times and The Houston Chronicle. She also blogs about arts and culture for Laughing Squid.
Jessica was a senior editor at Fortune Small Business until Time Inc. shuttered the magazine in late 2009. That year, she launched CNNMoney's Innovation Nation column, for which she assigned and edited weekly stories.
On assignment, Jessica hiked the Simanjiro Plains of Tanzania, got hooded and handcuffed in the trunk of a Hyundai, juddered across Texas in an R.V., and panned for gold with prospectors in the heart of the Mother Lode. She speaks fluent French. Once upon a time, Jessica was the worst waitress in all of Paris.
Jessica earned her master's degree at the Columbia Journalism School, where she won a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship and was co-valedictorian of her class. She took her bachelor's degree summa cum laude at Amherst College.
In her spare time, she enjoys snowboarding, playing electric guitar in Lightning Kites and Here Come the Warm Jets: LIVE! and deploying puns painful enough to make your ears bleed. She is a mediocre but enthusiastic welder, a demon when wielding a plasma cutter. She gets her kicks building large-scale interactive sculpture 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, Flipside and The Maker Faire. She also enjoys devising macabre parlor games with Dark Passage.
Jessica likes taking pictures. Her professional photography appeared in "Burning Book" and has also been published by The New York Times, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, 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 CV here...and a portfolio of clips lives here. [These, frankly, could all use updating. Someday soooooon....]