Joel Engardio - Career

Career

Joel Engardio has won numerous journalism and documentary film awards, for work that appeared on PBS and in USA Today, Washington Post.com and San Francisco Weekly. He was written for the Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor and P.O.V. magazine. In radio, he has written essays broadcast on NPR’s This I Believe series and KQED-San Francisco’s Perspectives. In television, Engardio worked as an associate producer for ABC News at the news magazine 20/20 and the network's documentary unit, Turning Point. Engardio wrote, narrated and directed Knocking, a documentary on Jehovah’s Witnesses that was nationally broadcast in the United States on the PBS series Independent Lens in 2007. It was named Best Documentary at the 2006 USA Film Festival. Knocking was also broadcast in Australia, Canada, Greece and Israel. It was released on DVD in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean and Russian. In public relations, Engardio worked as a senior media strategist for Manning Selvage & Lee in San Francisco. He also organized a national outreach campaign for his PBS documentary and was a media consultant for Stanford University’s Asian Liver Center and Jade Ribbon Campaign. Engardio received a Master in Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in 2011, with classes at Harvard Business and Law Schools. He was a mid-career student on scholarship from the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. After graduating, he was asked to help teach negotiation at Harvard Law School. Engardio currently serves on the board of directors of Plan C, a San Francisco policy group that advocates for moderate solutions, and the Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club.