John Biewen
Audio Program Director
Center for Documentary Studies
Duke University

John Biewen is a public radio journalist and documentary producer whose reporting on social, cultural and economic issues has taken him across the United States and to Europe, Japan, and India.

Biewen was a correspondent and producer with American RadioWorks, the documentary unit of American Public Media, from the unit’s founding in 1998 until 2006. His one-hour specials explored the lives of military families in North Carolina, and of low-income single mothers and their children in Wyoming, Tennessee and New Jersey. He produced an award-winning three-documentary series on the U.S. prison buildup, “The Lock-Up Society.” He documented the impact of globalization on working people from Pittsburgh to Bangalore. His historical documentaries have explored Freedom Summer, the Korean War, the founding of the modern hospice movement, and the expulsion of African American populations from rural communities in the post-Reconstruction period.

In 1997-98, Biewen covered the Rocky Mountain West as a staff reporter for NPR News.

His work has received numerous honors, including two Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Awards for coverage of the disadvantaged, the Scripps Howard National Journalism Award, the Edward R. Murrow Award, the Third Coast International Audio Festival’s Public Service Award, and the Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association.

Biewen teaches Duke undergraduate students in the university’s Documentary Studies Certificate program and leads summer audio institutes that draw participants from across the country. A graduate of Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota, with a degree in philosophy, Biewen lived and taught English in Osaka, Japan, in 1985-87.

To listen to some of his audio documentaries, please visit:

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