About the Staff

Fawn Ring, Executive Producer

Fawn Ring is an award-winning executive producer, producer, host and correspondent. She is executive producer for This Week in Northern California and executive producer of The Bonesetter's Daughter: The Making of an Opera (wt), an HD documentary about the creation of an innovative new opera based on author Amy Tan's most personal novel, The Bonesetter's Daughter, which premiered recently at San Francisco Opera. In addition to her executive producing roles, she also oversees all local television production for KQED San Francisco including Check, Please! Bay Area and Spark. Since coming to KQED in 2007, she has encouraged cooperation among the station's television, interactive, radio and education divisions as content is developed and produced, to further KQED's goal of becoming a fully integrated public media organization.

Robin Epstein, Producer

This Week in Northern California producer Robin Epstein has been co-producer of KQEDs weekly current affairs program since 2007. She has worked on a wide range of productions at KQED since 1991. These include the restaurant review show Check, Please! Bay Area, the Bay Window series, which created local companion programs to air with national PBS shows, three seasons of the environmental series Green Means for national PBS, and the documentary Paul Ehrlich and the Population Bomb, which included travel and production in India and China.

Prior to joining public television, Robin worked at PM Magazine. Her first television job was at KRON-TV, the local NBC affiliate. She also worked at ZDTV on 21st Century Home for the Home and Garden Channel, and on The Next Twenty Years, a national showcase and lecture series on the future of technology, featuring a panel of speakers and corporate sponsors in seven U.S. cities.

Louise Lo, Executive Producer, Art and Culture

Louise Lo has extensive experience in overseeing award-winning productions for local and national distribution. She served as the executive producer of the arts series Spark, which has covered more than 300 artists and arts organizations in the Bay Area. She supervised the 4-part PBS series China from the Inside and the one-hour PBS production Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival. At KQED, she has also served as Director of Cultural Programming and producer of PBS programs about artists, including Julia Morgan: A Life by Design; Frida Kahlo: Portrait of an Artist; and A Piece of Cake about Pop artist Wayne Thiebaud. She worked as Director of Special Projects at Claypoint Productions, New York, in charge of developing television and interactive projects. She co-founded the Center for Asian American Media, which provides Asian American programming to public broadcasting, and has been active in the Bay Area independent film community, serving on the boards of the Bay Area Video Coalition, Film Arts Foundation, and the National Coalition of Independent Public Broadcasting Producers.

Elizabeth Pepin, Associate Producer

Elizabeth Pepin currently works as a producer, and research and development associate at KQED, in addition to producing and directing her own independent films. She has won five regional Emmy Awards, and numerous international film festival awards for her documentary film work. Her many projects include: Coastal Clash; One Winter Story; The War: Bay Area Stories; and Working for Water.

In addition to being a filmmaker, Pepin is a freelance photographer and writer. Her first book as an author, Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era was published by Chronicle Books in 2006 and her photographs have appeared in five books on women's surfing including: Surfing: The New World Order (Duke University Press 2009) and Surfing: Women of the Waves (Gibbs Smith Publishers 2008).

June Mesina Ouellette, Associate Producer

June Ouellette brings over 20 years of television production experience to KQED, working on a wide variety of local and national programs from studio-based programs, live multi-camera performances and informational series to documentaries. Some of her production credits include award-winning programs such as the weekly art series, Spark, the restaurant review series, Check, Please! Bay Area, And Then One Night, a one-hour documentary about the making of the San Francisco Opera's production based on the book Dead Man Walking, Short Stories and Tall Tales, a studio-based program for children between the ages of 6-10, Dancing on the Edge, a showcase of three works by Bay Area choreographers, Corridos! Tales of Passion and Revolution, a dramatic special written and directed by Luis Valdez with Linda Rondstadt and the documentary Frida Kahlo: Portrait of an Artist.

Michael Isip, Vice President, Television Content

Michael Isip oversees local and national television production for NCPB, the most-watched public television station in the country. His production background includes more than a decade of award-winning work on national, statewide, and local programs. Michael is Executive in Charge of the PBS primetime HD series Jean Michel Cousteau: Ocean Adventures. In 2006, Michael's division co-produced the four part primetime series China From the Inside, as well as American Experience: Gold Rush. On the local front, Michael led an initiative to double local production to form a 7:30 weeknight strip which includes The Josh Kornbluth Show, Check, Please Bay Area!, Spark, Quest and This Week in Northern California.