Michael Garofalo produces both narrative and abstract works of audio documentary and musical composition.
Michael began his career creating award-winning public media content for StoryCorps. Over 15 years, he developed and refined StoryCorps’ signature style and sound while producing and editing hundreds of weekly broadcasts for NPR’s Morning Edition, one of the longest running series on any NPR news magazine. He also launched the StoryCorps podcast and hosted more than 500 episodes (featured in Apple Podcasts top 5). His work on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks was honored with both a Peabody Award and a Columbia-DuPont award. In 2012, Michael was a finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists.
In 2018, he became the first Editorial Audio Fellow at Kickstarter, helping to develop and produce Just the Beginning, a narrative podcast about how creative ideas become real. Since 2020, Michael has served as Story Editor for narrative audio at Religion of Sports, where he edited the long-form series "Crushed" "False Idol," "Man in the Arena," as well as two new shows forthcoming in 2023.
Michael has developed and edited podcasts for iHeart Media, Transmitter Media, and The Moth, in addition to his own podcast about human and animal relationships. Additional freelance clients include This American Life, Gimlet, NPR, KPCC, Unfurl, Reverse Shot, and Film Comment.
As a musician and composer, Michael uses analog synthesizers, lamellophones, guitars, field recordings, and found sounds to create music that resides in a sonic territory between incidental music and eccentric synthpop. In 2017, he was awarded a New York State Council for the Arts grant to release his animal-inspired concept record, Bestiary, as a limited edition 10" vinyl record. Michael has collaborated with filmmakers Farihah Zaman and Jeff Reichert to compose original scores for their films, Nobody Loves Me (2017) and To Be Queen (2019), the latter of which was featured in The New York Times OpDocs series. He was a founding member of the improvising trio Latitude/Longitude (active 2004-2010).