Davar Ardalan
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Davar Ardalan is a Senior Producer at NPR News in Washington D.C. With over sixteen years experience in public broadcasting, Ardalan has produced hundreds of stories from profiles of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and actor and philanthropist Paul Newman to music features on legend Herbie Hancock and guitarmaker Paul Reed Smith to a cooking segment with culinary wizard Alton Brown.
For two years, as Morning Edition’s overnight Supervisory Producer, Ardalan helped make many of the creative decisions that shaped the daily broadcast, one of the most widely heard radio news magazines in the United States. Some of those decisions were made in an instant, during a live broadcast while other decisions required elaborate coordination and planning – such as shaping Morning Edition broadcasts from Baghdad, Kabul and New Orleans.
In the Spring of 1995 and again in 1997 with NPR's Jacki Lyden in Tehran and Ardalan in Washington, the two produced indepth reports on Iran - examining the re-emergence of criticism and self-expression, Iranian women's struggle to gain rights and the perils facing intellectuals. In April of 2002, Ardalan and NPR's Jacki Lyden received a Gracie award from the American Women in Radio and Television for the NPR documentary "Loss and Its Aftermath," the story of Israeli and Palestinian parents speaking about the deaths of their children in the conflict.
Ardalan began as a temporary production assistant in July 1993 and a year later moved to a full-time production assistant position at Weekend Edition Sunday. After spending many years as a field producer, teaming with NPR hosts and correspondents to report on topics including girls in New York gangs, gambling in Atlantic City casinos, and Islam in cyberspace, Ardalan transitioned to Morning Edition in January 2005.
Her full name, Iran Davar Ardalan, inspired the 2004 NPR/American Radioworks series, "My Name is Iran." In the stories she and co-producer Rasool Nafisi explored the country for which she was named, tracing her Iranian heritage and her own experiences after the 1979 Islamic revolution. The struggle of a nation as reflected in her family's story led to her memoir published by Henry Holt in January 2007.
Ardalan's career in the American media began in 1991 at KOAT-TV in Albuquerque, N.M., A year later, she made the switch to radio as a reporter at KUNM-FM in Albuquerque. She produced award-winning cultural and news stories on health and environmental concerns in Los Alamos for which she won first place in documentaries from the Associated Press in New Mexico.
Ardalan earned a B.A. in communications and journalism from the University of New Mexico. She was born in San Francisco and has also lived and worked in Iran as a television newscaster for IRIB English News. Ardalan attended elementary and middle school at Iranzamin International School in Tehran and graduated from Brookline High School in Brookline, M.A. Away from NPR, she is the mother of four, Saied, Samira, Aman and Amir.
