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Home | Minnesota Public Radio | Icebreaker

Home | Minnesota Public Radio

Home | Minnesota Public Radio

Minnesota Public Radio is one of the nation's premier public radio organizations, operating a regional network of more than three dozen stations in Minnesota and its neighboring communities.

8 members

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mpr.org

Members

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Chris Bannon has worked in audio for more than 25 years, leading the development and production of everything from live comedy to breaking news and long-form documentaries. Most recently, he served as Chief Content Officer at podcast powerhouse Stitcher, where he launched a diverse array of audience favorites, including Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, Office Ladies, The Dream, Heaven’s Gate, Unfinished: Deep South, LeVar Burton Reads, Marvel’s Wolverine, Science Rules! with Bill Nye, Bitch Sesh, and Chris Gethard’s Beautiful Stories from Anonymous People. As Program Director and VP of Content at WNYC, the country’s largest public radio station, he headed show development and launched Freakonomics Radio, Death, Sex & Money, and Here’s the Thing with Alec Baldwin, among other projects. Bannon is a graduate of Brown University, where he serves on the board of WBRU, the student-run media lab. He received an M.A. in English from the University of North Carolina, and has taught creative writing at Columbia’s School of the Arts graduate writing program and courses in podcasting at CUNY’s Newmark School of Journalism.

Sean Gilbertson

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Experienced, creative Software Engineer looking for interesting work that makes life better.

Dawn M. Flinsch

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Experienced fundraiser with demonstrated success in navigating complex projects within multi-layered organizations. Fostered more than $200M in bricks & mortar, and special project capital for our vibrant literary, arts, and independent media in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. Authentic collaborator grounded in mindfulness practices, healthy workplace principles, and strong mentor/mentee relationships.

Daniel X. O'Neil

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Philanthropy, Technology, Product

Jeff Severns Guntzel

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I'm a qualitative researcher and program evaluator based in Minneapolis. My work at TerraLuna draws on the methods of investigative journalism and qualitative research and aims to illuminate systemic patterns that harm or marginalize individuals and groups. The work I do is utilization-focused. How can the products of my work be used? What research methods and narrative forms can I draw from or create to give the stories and information the most power and portability? I've been at TerraLuna since 2013, and have been doing investigative and storytelling work for more than 30 years. Before coming to TerraLuna, I was a journalist, reporting on war, national and international politics, veterans' health, criminal justice, and social justice efforts. Before all of that, in the late '90s and early '00s, I led fact-finding delegations to sanctions-era Iraq, organized volunteers to visit death row prisoners as part of an effort to monitor and improve conditions, and served as an international observer in the West Bank during Israel's military operations there in 2002. In the lead up to the U.S invasion of Iraq in 2003, I co-founded a website focused on the Iraqi experience of war, which is archived at the Library of Congress. Somewhere in there I also had a lovely and restorative stint as a book page, fetching rare books from the closed stacks of Chicago's Newberry Library.

Stephanie Curtis

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Director of Programming at MPR News

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Passionately customer-centered IT manager dedicated to technology education, operational excellence, and employee engagement. Specialization in relatable training, best practices education, and building robust professional relationships.

Nathan Vanderlaan

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I'm a senior engineering leader with executive experience, passionate about building meaningful products and equally passionate about the people who build them. With a background in architecture and a career in software, I bring a strategic, systems-oriented mindset to product development, grounded in craft and care for the user experience. At soona, I’ve grown Engineering from an early-stage team of 3 developers to 5 cross-functional teams while staying hands-on in our Rails, Vue, and Postgres stack. I built the Product org from the ground up, hiring our first PM and designer, and later re-assumed direct leadership of Product in addition to my ongoing Engineering role during a critical growth phase. I’ve led platform-defining initiatives including a pivot to SaaS, a move upmarket to serve enterprise clients, embedded payments infrastructure, and our membership system. I’ve overseen deep integrations of acquired platforms (Trend UGC and Mokker AI), and driven architectural shifts toward more modular, scalable systems. My work has touched nearly every part of the business, from fulfillment and scheduling operations to CS tooling, sales enablement, and financial systems, always anchoring on clarity, adaptability, and outcomes. I thrive in fast-feedback environments where curiosity and execution go hand in hand. I believe great leadership is about clarity, context, and removing friction so people can do their best work.