This American Life Hires Ike Sriskandarajah and Chris Benderev as Producers

This American Life is thrilled to announce that Ike Sriskandarajah and Chris Benderev will be joining our staff as producers.

Ike Sriskandarajah was most recently a senior reporter, producer, and fill-in host for Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. He worked on stories that helped change laws and won many of the top awards in journalism: exposing rehabs that force patients into unpaid work; tracing the origins of the microchip vaccine conspiracy theory; and following asylum seekers across the northern border into Canada. His last investigation for Reveal pressed federal prosecutors to account for their lack of charges on more than 1,700 alleged human rights violators inside the U.S. Afterwards, members of Congress invited Ike to present his findings at a briefing, and human rights prosecutors at The Hague submitted the story as evidence during a case hearing. In lighter news, he also once tracked down the kids from the skits on "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill." 

Ike is from Wisconsin, where he got his start in radio as a high school intern at WORT. He's been making audio ever since, at local newsrooms like WRNI and KFSK, as well as national outlets like Radiolab, Living on Earth, Youth Radio, and The Daily. Ike will start with This American Life in March.   

Chris Benderev came to This American Life in 2022, after more than a decade at NPR. He began as a producer for Weekend Edition while also reporting stories for the News and Science desks. He later became a producer for the documentary podcast Embedded, where he reported the series “Capital Gazette," which followed the surviving staff of a local newspaper in Maryland after it was the target of a 2018 mass shooting. The series received an Edward R. Murrow award and an honorable mention from the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma. Chris has produced a handful of stories for This American Life, including one featuring arguably the most stressful reading of New Hampshire town hall protocol to be broadcast on a national radio program.