Draft:Sue Schardt

Sue Schardt is an American filmmaker, DJ, and musician with an extensive career in public broadcasting. She heads Margin Media, LLC, and produces a weekly radio program, In The Margin of the Other on MIT’s radio station WMBR. In 2018, In The Margin of the Other was featured in One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art, an exhibition curated by Helen Molesworth, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Schardt's first film, Nothing in the Way of Beauty, is slated for release in 2024. A private premiere screening in Philadelphia featured a musical set with Marshall Allen and Kash Killion of the Sun Ra Arkestra.

Early life and education

Schardt was born and raised in Syracuse, NY, the third youngest of eight children born to Donald Schardt, sales manager at WYSR, a commercial radio/ television station, and Eleanor Sawmiller Schardt, who worked in public health as a registered nurse before settling into raising her family.

Schardt's undergraduate years were spent at SUNY Potsdam’s Crane School of Music. There, she played principal clarinet with the orchestra and reeds in the school’s jazz ensembles under the direction of Ray Shiner. Among the guest artists she worked with or played for were Aaron Copland, Robert Shaw, Sarah Caldwell, Gunther Schuller, Illinois Jacquet, Marian McPartland, and Frank Foster. Soprano Renée Fleming, who also performed in the program, was one of Schardt’s roommates at Potsdam. Schardt went on to enroll in the masters program at the New England Conservatory for clarinet performance, and attended Bard College's Summer Conductors' Institute under the leadership of Harold Faberman.

Career in radio

Schardt began her radio career as the morning show director and music librarian at WBUR, one of Boston’s flagship public radio stations, before going on to work under the mentorship of philanthropist Norman Knight at Knight Quality Stations. Schardt went on to work at the Christian Science Monitor, overseeing an effort to grow Monitor Radio's public distribution; over her tenure, Monitor Radio expanded to include more than 200 stations nationwide, reaching the largest audience ever achieved by the Christian Science Monitor.

In 1998, Schardt launched her first independent organization, SchardtMEDIA, to focus on international broadcasting and select public radio projects. With London-based World Radio Network, she provided the strategic design and worked to launch NPR’s first overnight service, WRN from NPR. In 2004, Schardt worked with major market station partners with funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to conduct a new benchmark study, Mapping Public Radio’s Independent Landscape. Schardt also worked with Koahnic Broadcast Corporation to design and launch Native Voice One, an interconnected network joining reservation stations across the US and Alaska. She was a long-time strategist for From the Top and public radio stations across the United States. In 2017, the National Federation of Community Broadcasters recognized Schardt with the Michael Bader Lifetime Achievement Award for her contributions to public radio.

In 2007, Schardt assumed leadership of AIR, the Association of Independents in Radio, an organization whose efforts were at the time aimed at instigating innovation and expansion of talent-led, mission-focused media across the U.S. Schardt went on to serve as the founding executive producer and creator of Localore, a national initiative directing multimedia talent to explore new approaches to make stories ‘with and for the people,” with an overarching goal of enhancing the experience and understanding of diversity in America today. AIR published three reports from the field to review the impact and extent of the three rounds of these national productions: Spreading the Zing: Reimagining Public Media through Makers’ Quest 2.0, What’s Outside? Public Media 2014, and Break Form: Making Stories With and for the People.

Schardt has written and presented frequently on media-technology in the U.S and abroad, including at the 2017 3D Journalism Conference in Moscow, the Australian Centre for Moving Image’s Co-Creative Communities forum, NEA’s National Council meeting, the European Radio Features “think tank” in Leipzig, and the FCC’s Future of Media in the Digital Age. In 2015, Schardt served as a delegate to the National Public Broadcasting Corporation of Ukraine. Schardt has served on the NPR Board’s Distribution and Interconnect Committee, and as an advisor to Native Voice One.

Personal life

Schardt is an accomplished swimmer.