Joan Bieder
Joan Bieder taught core courses in television reporting and producing during her 26 years at the Graduate School of Journalism. From 2008-2016 she served as the Journalism School’s Associate Dean. After a 2009 trip to the Middle East, she created a one-semester course titled People, Places and Passions of Israel and Palestine and then a two-semester cross-platform travel course on reporting in Israel and Palestine. The latter sent her students to the Middle East to report and produce television, radio, and print stories and a documentary.
Her Berkeley graduate students have traveled widely in pursuit of stories including to Afghanistan, Mexico, France, New Zealand, China, India, Ecuador, Cuba, Bolivia, Guatemala, Burma/Myanmar, Cambodia, Sierre Leone, Italy, Greece, Uganda, Kenya, South Africa, Brazil, Ghana, Israel and the West Bank as well as throughout the Bay Area and the United States.
Before coming to Berkeley, Bieder taught print and broadcast journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in New York City and spent a decade before that as a producer at ABC-TV Network News.
From 1993-2007 Bieder spent several summers working as a consultant to television news companies in Singapore where she trained reporters and producers. In Singapore she began to study a minority community that resulted in her book, The Jews of Singapore, published by Suntree Media in 2007. The book traces the roots of Singapore Jewry from is Biblical, Baghdadi Sephardic origins to its presence in Singapore from 1830 to the present. She has presented papers on the topic at academic conferences and the Jewish Community Center’s Jewish Book Fairs in the United States, Canada, Israel and Singapore, including a presentation entitled “Singapore Jewry Under the Japanese Occupation 1941-1945.” On the Berkeley campus, Bieder sits on the executive committees of the Institute of Jewish Law and Israeli Studies and the Center for Jewish Studies.