Ali Budner

Ali Budner is an award-winning radio journalist and writer with more than a decade and a half of experience. Most recently, she reported for Marketplace - with a focus on the intersection between environment and economics.

She was first inspired by the art of interviews and audio storytelling in 2003 when she joined Inside Out, as a producer on Brown Student Radio.  In following years she went on to intern with The Kitchen Sisters, apprentice with KPFA’s Full Circle, and report for KALW’s Crosscurrents.

From 2010 to 2014 she served as Managing Producer for KALW's daily live public affairs call-in show, Your Call, with Rose Aguilar. She produced more than 500 live shows in just over three years.

While at KALW, Ali also reported and co-produced an hour long documentary, The Race To An Emergency, about the 9-1-1 system in Oakland, California. In 2014, the piece was honored with several awards including the national Edward R. Murrow award for best radio news documentary in a large market.  

In late 2014, Ali traveled to Fukushima, Japan with a group of journalists from San Francisco State University to report on the ongoing aftermath of the tsunami and radiation disaster of 2011.  

In 2015, Ali was a Fellow with Michael Pollan's 11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism Fellowship at UC Berkeley, where she reported about solutions to urban food deserts in California’s Central Valley.  

She spent several years as a freelance journalist. Her stories focused on health, environment, immigration, food and farming, and social justice. Her reporting aired on PRI's The World, NPR's Latino USA, WHYY's The Pulse, KALW's Crosscurrents, KQED News, Capital Public Radio, Valley Public Radio, KPFA, California Healthline, iHealthBeat, and The National Radio Project’s Making Contact. Her print work was published in Bay Nature Magazine.

In 2018, Ali moved to Colorado to be a founding reporter for the CPB-funded regional journalism collaborative, the Mountain West News Bureau, based at KRCC Radio in Colorado Springs. 

While there, Ali reported for public radio stations across Colorado, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Montana, and Nevada. Her stories covered issues of public land and water, urban growth, wildlife, politics, immigration, native issues, climate change, and Western culture and heritage.

During her time with the Bureau, Ali landed several stories on national programs like NPR’s All Things Considered, Weekend Edition, NPR Newscasts, Here and Now, and Marketplace. She was interviewed about her reporting by Joshua Johnson on 1A. Alongside her team, Ali reported a feature story for an in-depth series on private prisons funded by the Pulitzer Center.

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and after becoming a new parent, she took a role as Senior Producer for Colorado Matters, a live statewide public affairs program on Colorado Public Radio.  

Ali lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico now with her partner and young son. She recently developed a curriculum and taught a remote 4-month course in radio features production for KPFA Radio's First Voice Apprenticeship Program in Berkeley, CA.

She is also an experienced journalistic fact-checker.

You can find some of her recent reporting and producing work here and here.