Sarah Ventre

Audio Journalist | Producer | Reporter | Writer | Editor

Sarah Ventre is an award-winning audio journalist best known for her work as host of Unfinished: Short Creek, a podcast about a fundamentalist Mormon community on the Utah-Arizona border. It was named the #3 best podcast of 2020 by The New Yorker, one of the best podcasts of 2020 by The Atlantic, and made the Bello Collective’s year-end list as well. Her reporting in this community has won an Edward R. Murrow Award, a Wilbur Award, multiple Religion News Association Awards, and nominations from the Association of Mormon Letters and the Ambie Awards. As part of her reporting for Unfinished, Sarah embedded in Short Creek and lived in former FLDS prophet Rulon Jeffs’ house.

Sarah’s was the reporter, writer, and managing producer for the show Witnessed: Mystic Mother, a series about a tantric temple that was considered a spiritual home by some, and an illegal brothel by others. She was also the senior producer for the Peabody Award-nominated second season of This Land (an investigation into the concerted effort to dismantle the Indian Child Welfare Act), and Damages (a series about legal battles at the heart of the climate crisis). She's produced for NPR, PBS, Gimlet, Critical Frequency, Campside Media, Center for Science and the Imagination, Jewish Women’s Archive, and others. She is one of the founders of Girls Rock! Phoenix, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering girls, trans, and gender nonconforming youth through music, and is a regional producer for The Moth. She is also a journalism fellow with the Recovering Truth project from the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at Arizona State University, and was formerly a fellow with the Religion and Environment Story Project at Boston University and a resident at UnionDocs’ audio and podcasting residency, Pod-Pod. She was once told by an artist with synesthesia that her voice is mauve.