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| Hello, Goodbye to Supervising Producer Liana Simstrom |
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Hello, goodbye. I’m Liana, a supervising producer at NPR. |
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| You can follow me on Twitter. |
Invisibilia Origin Story: I started working for Invisibilia in early 2016 as a temp. The show was preparing to return for its second season after being off the air for over a year and NPR wanted to get the word out that the show was back. So they hired me to project manage the launch of Season 2! To say I was learning on the job would be an understatement. I had never worked on a podcast or even in media before and NPR was a whole new world. What started out as a 6-month gig turned into an 8-month gig and then, eventually, a permanent role on the team. I’ve worn many, many hats at Invisibilia, from stepping in as showrunner on Season 3 to my current role as a supervising producer. Now I work on a lot of podcasts at NPR, but Invisibilia will always be my first podcast love. |
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Invisibilia LIVE at the NPR Collective in 2017. (Left to right: Alix Spiegel, Hanna Rosin, me, and Cara Tallo.) |
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BTS moments seared into brainIn the pre-pandemic times, when the whole Invisibilia team was located in DC, we used to do a “witches coven” after every season. Usually it was at Alix’s house. We would gather for a night of ritual burning (we sacrificed our to-do lists to a cauldron of fire) and mischief (one year we had a competition called “Drinks of Many Colors,” and someone, I will not be naming names, passed out and did not make it home that night). It was such a nice way to celebrate our hard work and enjoy each other’s company outside of the office. |
An (appropriately blurry) shot of the drinks of many colors. |
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| I was also in charge of licensing music for Invisibilia and have a lot of good (and bad!) memories around that work. Like the time I managed to license a track from Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon (for a wildly low fee) and then we didn’t use it (that’s a good and bad memory, ha). Or the time I was able to license songs from one of Somalia’s biggest pop stars for “The Other Real World.” And of course, the time we asked you, our listeners, to share your music with us. We got HUNDREDS of submissions, which I had the honor and privilege of listening through. Turns out we have a very talented audience; Invisibilia has been scoring our episodes with listeners’ original music ever since! |
| An internal Invisibilia launch party, featuring Invisibilia jigsaw puzzles - available for purchase here and here. (Left to right: Yowei Shaw, Hanna Rosin, Cara Tallo, me, Alix Spiegel, Rebecca Ramirez.) |
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| A shot from the Invisibilia Facebook Live event in 2016 that I helped organize - you can watch the recording of the event here, which features an interview with Invisibilia friend Aparna Nancherla and an incredible shadow puppet performance by Manual Cinema. (Left to right: Lulu Miller, Hanna Rosin, Alix Spiegel.) |
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Favorite episodes you've worked on: This is the hardest question of them all, because every single episode carries special meaning for me. But I’ll highlight one that’s kind of a deep cut, because I’m not sure more recent Invisibilia fans will know about it.
When I first started at Invisibilia, I had a dream about getting some of our stories animated. My pipe dream was a full animated video anthology series (Netflix, hit me up!). While that never came to fruition, I did get to work with several illustrators over the years to animate several of our back catalog stories - from the rat maze and contagion stories in Season 1, the marshmallow test story in Season 2, the alien hand and locusts stories in Season 3, and the maladaptive daydreaming story in Season 5. But my favorite was an animation for "The (Future) Friendship Machine." It's not just an accompanying animation--it's a whole episode made for video. The first part of the episode tells the story of a fascinating experiment about how we pick our friends. The second part was done in collaboration with Ian Chillag of the hilarious podcast Everything Is Alive and features a delightful essay from the point of view of the fMRI machine in the study (and we got actor Matt Malloy to voice the fMRI machine!). |
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Invisibilia insights you’ve actually used in real life: Over the years, Invisibilia has done several stories about living with uncertainty. From Abby Wendle’s story about “The Weatherman” in Alabama to Alix’s stories about climate change (“Two Heartbeats A Minute”) and how to face a terminal diagnosis (“An Unlikely Superpower”), we’ve tackled the issue from a lot of different angles. I’m a meticulous planner by nature and sitting in uncertainty has never been a great talent of mine. Recently, between the global pandemic and difficult family health struggles, I’ve found myself living in ambiguity more than ever before. I’ve had more tools to face these situations because of the lessons I learned from Invisibilia. Below are some of my favorite group shots from across the years! |
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Image Slideshow:
1). Top left to right: Yowei Shaw, Liza Yeager, B.A. Parker, Hanna Rosin, Anne Gudenkauf, Abby Wendle. Bottom left to right: Cara Tallo, me, Alix Spiegel, Leena Sanzgiri.
2). Top left to right: Yowei Shaw, Abby Wendle, me, Anne Gudenkauf, Rebecca Ramirez. Bottom left to right: Cara Tallo, Hanna Rosin, Alix Spiegel, Meghan Keane.
3). Left to right: Rebecca Ramirez, Meghan Keane, Abby Wendle, me, Alix Spiegel, Hanna Rosin, Cara Tallo, Yowei Shaw.
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