Kristina Loring is a story editor, creative director, and audio producer who works across genre and form to create media experiences that you ACTUALLY FEEL in your body. She’s the editor of the podcast The Stoop, a show about blackness, race, and identity in America, for which she won an NABJ award for editing.
She spent the last four years as the Head of Audio at Dipsea, where she led teams of writers, producers, and sound designers to create feminist audio fiction designed to turn you on. There, she was often called the “story doula” or what some industries might call an Executive Producer or showrunner, leading every project from development to execution: from creative directing Dipsea’s celebrity partnerships to establishing the organization as a major player in long-form narrative storytelling and genre-bending sound design.
Before that, in a quest to make podcasting more interactive, she co-created and produced Cooking By Ear: an episodic audio program hosted by James Beard nominated chef Cal Peternell that featured a celebrity guest cook, like Academy Award-winning actor Frances McDormand, musician Big Freedia, director Mira Nair, and comedian Bob the Drag Queen to name a few. In each episode, a guest makes a meal in real-time and invites listeners to follow along, step by step. In the interstices—while the water boils or the onions saute—the stories unfold.
Kristina loves it when the audio arts as we know them go beyond podcasts, or a single set of headphones, to become live shared experiences. Her sound installations transform landscapes using hands-on sculptures that transport listeners to unexpected realms. She blends documentary-style interviews, field recordings, and found sounds to foster connection, intimacy, and new emotional realms for listeners to explore. Her most recent sound installation, “Message in a Bottle,” (2021) was selected as part of the Sound Scene Festival in partnership with the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C. “Message in a Bottle” is an experiential audio installation featuring hundreds of real bottles stuffed with paper scrolls and a printed message – the number of a custom call-in hotline. Dial in to hear renowned artists John W. Love Jr., Jonathan Zenti, and Lyvonne “Pastor Bae” Briggs, to name a few, read premonitions intended to guide listeners through our collective emergence from a year or more of isolation due to COVID.
You can find Kristina under the (sound) waves in San Francisco, CA and Peaks Island, ME.
photo by the babeliest shutterbug around, my wife Ruha Devanesan