About the Staff

Joanne Elgart Jennings, Executive Producer

Joanne Elgart Jennings is executive producer for This Week in Northern California and is co-executive producer of Sound Tracks: Music without Borders, a series in development for PBS, which combines thought-provoking journalism and vibrant music from around the world. She also oversees production of television news and current affairs specials, including collaborations with the Center for Investigative Reporting. Much of her 20-year career in public broadcasting was spent at the PBS NewsHour, based in San Francisco, where she produced hundreds of award-winning documentary-style news stories. International coverage spanned the globe, including destinations in the Middle East, the Balkans, Africa and Latin America. She also worked as a producer and reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the British Broadcasting Corporation and The Christian Science Monitor. In addition, she worked on the documentary films Have You Heard From Johannesburg and The Hermitage: A Russian Odyssey, both of which aired on PBS. Her work has been honored with numerous awards including a national Emmy nomination and several Cine Golden Eagle and New York Festivals awards.

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.

Debora Silva, Associate Producer

Debora Silva started her career in broadcast journalism at Canal Universitario de Sao Paulo in Brazil. For four years, she worked as a reporter and producer for Extensao.Doc, a documentary news program about social and political issues, where she interviewed a wide range of people including then president, Lula da Silva. In 2009, Debora moved to California, where she studied broadcast journalism at City College of San Francisco and worked as an intern at KPIX. She joined KQED as an intern in 2010 and in 2011 was hired as associate producer.

Michael Isip, Vice President, Television Content

Michael Isip oversees local and national television production for KQED, 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.