Farai Chideya

Farai Chideya is CEO and host of “Our Body Politic,” a nationally syndicated public radio show, podcast, and insights brand that centers Black women and women of color. She’s the author of six books, both fiction and nonfiction, most recently "The Episodic Career." A longtime journalist, Chideya has worked for FivethirtyEight, NPR, CNN, and ABC News, and has covered political extremists for a quarter century and every presidential election since 1996.

A public speaker who works on media equity, she is also a program officer focusing on journalism with the Ford Foundation’s Creativity and Free Expression team. From 2012 to 2016, Chideya was a distinguished writer in residence at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Chideya also serves as an advisor to several nonprofits and for-profit startups.

Chideya has honed her powerful speaking skills over the course of her twenty years in journalism. For her, lectures are not just a chance to speak, but also to listen, to engage, share and learn. Her speeches include deep-dives into issues such as generational divides in use of mobile technology, US politics, or African-American history and culture, as well as motivational speeches about finding your right livelihood and living with integrity in a world that often rewards expediency. She can bring up issues that people generally don’t want to talk about in a way that encourages openness and new understandings within communities, campuses and workplaces.