Engardio

Contact: joel@joelengardio.com

At the American Civil Liberties Union, Engardio combined reporting and multimedia storytelling skills to pioneer more effective ways to mount lawsuits and communicate public education efforts.

He was the ACLU’s first “story finder” and implemented a process that applied journalism methods to plaintiff-finding.

Engardio found plaintiffs who had narratives that played well in both the court of law and public opinion. Then he started an online video department to produce short films featuring the most compelling stories.

Engardio received his undergraduate degree from Michigan State University, majoring in journalism and history. He was born and raised in Saginaw, Michigan. He currently lives in Cambridge, MA.

Joel P. Engardio is a 2011 MPA Candidate at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He is a scholarship winner from the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.

Engardio has written for  Washington Post.com, USA Today, the San Francisco Weekly, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor and P.O.V. magazine.

In radio, he has written essays broadcast on NPR Weekend Edition and KQED San Francisco. In television, Engardio was a production associate for ABC News 20/20 and the network's documentary unit, Turning Point.

Engardio wrote, narrated and directed KNOCKING, a documentary on Jehovah’s

Witnesses that was nationally broadcast on the PBS series Independent Lens in 2007. It was named Best Documentary at the 2006 USA Film Festival.

In public relations, Engardio worked as a senior media strategist for Manning Selvage & Lee. He also organized a national outreach campaign for his PBS documentary and was a media consultant for Stanford University’s Asian Liver Center and Jade Ribbon Campaign.