Milano | CNYCA: Feet in Two Worlds: About the Team

About the Team

Macollvie Jean-François, reporter

Macollvie Jean-François is a reporter at the Haitian Times, an English-language weekly based in Brooklyn, New York. Born in Gonaives, Haiti she spent the early years of her life in a quaint town called Saint-Michel de l'Attalaye. Ms. Jean-François moved to Brooklyn when she was 10, attended the city's public schools and won a full scholarship to Baruch College, from which she graduated with a degree in business journalism in 2001. She enjoys traveling, although doing so on a journalist's salary means arrangements are not always the most luxurious.

Karen Frillman, editor

Karen Frillman is currently the Editor at Large for WNYC--New York Public Radio. She has worked as a producer/editor/reporter since 1979. Her contributions include an hour national program on a South African domestic worker (winner of the "Major" Award from the Armstrong Foundation), a series of documentaries on NYC with John Rudolph, the development of a daily morning public affairs show for WNYC and numerous audio cassettes published by Simon & Schuster Audio--including the Grammy nominated—“War Letters”.

Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska, reporter

Ewa Kern-Jedrychowska was born and raised in Warsaw, Poland. In 2001 she moved to the United States where she lives in Queens, New York. She began working full time for the Polish Daily News, where she covers stories about Polish immigrants in the US, in 2003. Ms. Kern-Jedrychowska received an Independent Press Association Ethnic Press Fellowship in 2004 and in the same year won four Ippies – awards given to ethnic press journalists every year by the Independent Press Association. She graduated from the University of Warsaw with an MA in Polish Studies in 2000. Currently she is studying anthropology at Hunter College. "Feet in Two Worlds: Immigrants in a Global City," was her first radio project.

Frank McCourt, host

Frank McCourt, Pulitzer Prize winner and acclaimed memoirist, was born in New York and raised in Limerick, Ireland in the 1930s. At the age of nineteen, he came to the United States to seek his fortune and, after attempts at several odd jobs, McCourt found a brilliant career as a New York City public high school teacher, the last 17 of which were spent at the prestigious Stuyvesant High School. After retiring from teaching, McCourt and his brother, Malachy, performed their two-man show, A Couple of Blaguards , a musical review about their Irish Youth. In September 1996, Scribner published McCourt's memoir about his childhood, ANGELA'S ASHES, which spent 117 weeks on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list and became the #1 nonfiction book of the year for both Time and Newsweek . ANGELA'S ASHES won many awards, including the National Book Critic's Circle Award, the ABBY Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and was chosen by many newspapers to be on their list of the best books of 1996. With over 2.4 million copies in print in North America alone, ANGELA'S ASHES continues to top the paperback New York Times bestseller list, added to by the recent release of the film version of McCourt's touching story, directed by Alan Parker. In September of 1999, McCourt presented the sequel to ANGELA'S ASHES, called ‘TIS: A MEMOIR. Picking up where ANGELA'S ASHES left off, ‘TIS takes the reader through McCourt's amusing and heartfelt transition to New York City from Ireland. Frank's new book, another memoir, TEACHER MAN is forthcoming.

Marianne McCune, reporter

Marianne McCune is a staff reporter for New York Public Radio and contributes regularly to NPR and PRI. She thinks of the New York Metropolitan Area as the center of the world because that's how she covers it: more than a third of New York residents were born in another country and Marianne reports on the resulting cultural, economic, and political links between New York/New Jersey and almost everywhere else on earth. Marianne has won local and national awards for her reporting.

Cindy Rodriguez, reporter

Cindy Rodriguez has been a staff reporter at WNYC since July of 2002. She covers immigration and housing and has done several pieces on the homeless crisis in New York as well as the plight of undocumented immigrants. Rodriguez has contributed to the nationally distributed NPR program Latino USA. She also contributes to PRI's The World. Rodriguez is originally from San Antonio, Texas.

John Rudolph, producer

John Rudolph is the producer of “Feet In Two Worlds: Immigrants in a Global City.” For more than a quarter of a century he has brought world events and the stories of ordinary people to radio listeners around the nation and the globe. Mr. Rudolph has chronicled the life of New York City in documentaries such as “Six Months: Rebuilding Our City, Rebuilding Ourselves,” a WNYC Radio series that explored the impact of the 9/11 attack, and “New York in Black and White: The Sixties, Civil Rights and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis,” which was named Best News Special/Documentary by the New York State Associated Press Broadcasters Association.

Arun Venugopal, reporter

Arun Venugopal was raised and attended college in Texas, but has lived on and off in India, first as a student and later as an advertising copywriter with Ogilvy & Mather. He worked on film productions in New Delhi and New York before becoming a journalist. He is a reporter for India Abroad and its online counterpart, Rediff.com. His work has appeared in Newsday, The Seattle Times, The Washington Post and Beliefnet, where he was a former editor, as well as Outlook magazine and The Economic Times in India.
He contributed to Voices of Healing, an anthology dealing with 9/11 and its impact on the Asian American community. Arun has a Masters in Media Studies from the New School, and lives in Brooklyn with his wife, writer Meera Nair, and their daughter.

Andrew White, editorial consultant

Andrew White is Director of the Center for New York City Affairs at the Milano Graduate School, New School University. He is a journalist with more than 15 years’ experience covering New York City politics, government, neighborhoods and grassroots movements. At the Center, his work explores the impacts of government social policy on working class and rapidly changing New York neighborhoods. White is a co-founder of the Independent Press Association, and a former chief editor of City Limits magazine and executive director of City Limits Community Information Services. He also founded City Limits’ policy research subsidiary, the Center for an Urban Future.