A sample listing of Jay Allison's radio productions and collaborations. Click on titles for more information and to hear audio samples.

Series:

Life Stories: First Person Portraits
An award-winning series of first-person portraits and essays by and about ordinary citizens--not newsmakers, but the rest of us--from small towns, rural areas, and urban neighborhoods usually overlooked by mainstream reporting. (Produced with Christina Egloff)

Lost & Found Sound
An ongoing series about the sounds of the century--what we saved and what it says about us. (Produced with The Kitchen Sisters, Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson)

Beyond Affliction: The Disability History Project
A four hour documentary series about the shared experience of people with disabilities and their families since the beginning of the 19th Century. Won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. (Produced with Laurie Block)

Animals and Other Stories
This radio series is a collection of a short pieces reflecting on life, love and death among the species. It contains monologues, montages, portraits and dreams. Some are funny, some are strange, some enlightening, some sobering.

Breakdown and Back
This is a series of three half-hours on one woman's experience of a nervous breakdown. It blends reality and fantasy--her poetry and music, real and imagined scenes, and interviews with her family and friends. Peabody Award winner. (Production with Marjorie Van Halteren and Lou Giansante)

Miles Davis Radio Project
The definitive radio biography in 5 hour-long programs, plus a live music special. This series won the Peabody Award and many others. (Produced with Steve Rowland and Quincy Troupe)

Breaking the Cycle: How do we stop child abuse?
A series of four hour-long documentaries plus a national call-in. Hosted by Susan Stamberg and Alex Chadwick and distributed by NPR. (Produced with Dan Gediman and Milestone Productions)

Legacies: A History of Women and the Family in America
A series of eighteen half-hours produced with Christina Egloff for the Annenberg/CPB Project. It serves as a college-level course with an accompanying book. The series uses period music, actors reading from letters and diaries, a narrator, and scholar interviews. It covers the period from English Settlement to the Civil War. (Produced with Ellen Rothman and Elizabeth Pleck)

Living in the Arts
A series of short meditations and collages on what it means to try to be an artist in America. Broadcast on NPR's All Things Considered..

Representative Pieces:

Jungles of Memory
A story of war and sanctuary, of beasts and obsession. It is the story of one Vietnam veteran, writer James P. McMullen, whose own salvation came through his struggle to save something else. (Produced with Christina Egloff)

New York City: 24 Hours in Public Places
A sonic day in the life of New York, produced with tape gathered by more than a dozen radio producers living in NYC and taking a seminar with Jay Allison. (Produced by the New York Independent Producers in Sound)

Hometown Texas: To Mother With Love
A collaboration with Ginger Miles about her trip home to a little West Texas town to care for her dying mother--an elegy for home and family.

Down for the Neighborhood: Street Gangs in East Los Angeles
A portait of life in the barrios. It includes gang members, police, convicted murderers, mothers, social workers, reformed gang fighters, and general street life--day and night.

Cowboys
An audio meditation on the Myth of the American Cowboy. It contains interviews with cowboys, children, historians, gunslingers, Wyatt Earp impersonators, rodeo riders, old-timers, poets, singers, and Gene Autry. Produced for the Smithsonian Institution.

Faces, Mirrors, Masks: 20th Century Latin American Fiction
Two programs in a series of 13 half-hour documentaries: "Juan Rulfo: A Kind of Silence", produced with Christina Egloff and featuring Edward James Olmos, Charles Ludlam, Meredith Monk. "Jose Maria Arguedas: The Death of a Dancer" produced with Katie Davis and Ariel Dorfman, featuring Hector Elizondo and Pat Carrol.