Brainstorm Speaker Series: Jad Abumrad

Tickets for Jad Abumrad will be available to reserve here on Friday, October 9th, 2026 at 10:00 AM MST.

Center for the Arts, Teton County Library, and The Jackson Hole News&Guide are pleased to present the fourth season of the Brainstorm Speaker Series with support from The Library Foundation and Friends!

Please join us November 15th, for an evening with Jad Abumrad!

**New this year, any seats that remain empty 10 minutes before showtime will be offered to patrons on the standby waitlist. This will help ensure that this free series reaches as many members of the Jackson community as possible.**

Jad Abumrad

MacArthur Fellow Jad Abumrad is the creator and former host of Radiolab, a public radio program broadcast on nearly 600 stations across the nation and downloaded more than 12 million times a month as a podcast.

Abumrad also created More Perfect, a series about the Supreme Court, which the New York Times called “possibly the most mesmerizing podcast.” Other projects include the Vanishing of Harry Pace, Unerased, and Dolly Parton’s America (along with osm Audio’s Shima Oliaee) a Peabody Award-winning 9-part series that explores a divided America through the life and music of one its greatest icons. His podcast Fela Kuti, Fear No Man, about the Nigerian musician and political activist Fela Kuti, won the Peabody Award in the Arts category and was chosen the Best Podcast of 2025 by the New Yorker, the New York Times and the Guardian. His new podcast is The Obit Project hosted by Jad Abumrad and Jule Banville, working with the Montana Media Lab and the University of Montana School of Journalism.

Abumrad employs his dual backgrounds as composer and journalist to create what’s been called “a new aesthetic” in broadcast journalism. He orchestrates dialogue, music, interviews and sounds into compelling documentaries that draw listeners into investigations of otherwise intimidating topics, such as the nature of numbers, the evolution of altruism, or the legal foundation for the war on terror. He’s won three George Foster Peabody Awards, and in 2011 he was honored as a MacArthur Fellow (also known as the Genius Grant). The MacArthur Foundation website says: “Abumrad is inspiring boundless curiosity within a new generation of listeners and experimenting with sound to find ever more effective and entertaining ways to explain ideas and tell a story.”

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