Martina Castro

Castro was born in 1982 in Maryland to a mother and father from Montevideo, Uruguay.^[1] As a young child, she first spoke Spanish and then learned English,^[2] and then immersed herself in Spanish during a month-long visit to Uruguay when she was 13, after which she has said she began to think in Spanish.^[1] Throughout her childhood, she regularly visited her family in Uruguay.^[3]

Castro attended Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia,^{[citation needed]} and then attended Amherst College. While in college, Castro wrote the first blog for NPR's Next Generation Radio program.^[3] Castro graduated from Amherst in 2004,^[4] majoring in women's and gender studies.

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After graduating college, Castro had an internship at NPR, and then worked at NPR for four and a half years on a variety of NPR's newsprograms.^[3] After NPR, she worked at KALW, an NPR member station in San Francisco, California. At KALW, she was a managing editor of the KALW show Crosscurrents and produced a series titled Audiophiles.^[5]

In 2011, Castro co-founded Radio Ambulante with Daniel Alarcón, Carolina Guerrero, and Annie Correal;^[6][7][8] the show is now distributed by NPR,^[9] and Castro also worked as a sound designer for the project.^[10] Castro has also worked independently on other projects for All Things Considered and Morning Edition.

In 2015, Castro received a Fulbright grant to teach the art of audio storytelling at the University of Montevideo in Uruguay. She then moved to Chile and applied to the incubator program StartUp Chile.^[2] In that program, she started Adonde Media, a global production company focused on podcasts in Spanish.^[3]

Since its founding in 2017, Adonde Media clients have included Duolingo, TED, Spotify, Vice News, and Georgetown University.^[9] In 2017, the Duolingo Spanish Podcast launched, hosted and co-produced by Castro, to support English speakers learning Spanish, using true first-person stories from around the Spanish-speaking world.^[11][12] In 2020, Castro narrated a six-part series titled "El Gran Robo Argentino" ("The Great Argentine Heist") on the Duolingo Spanish Podcast, focused on the true story of a 2006 bank robbery in Argentina,^[13] with interviews of people related to the historical event.^[14][15]

Castro has also focused on data collection about podcast user interests and habits; in 2019, the community of Spanish language podcasters that she co-founded called Podcaster@s, conducted the first collaborative podcast listener survey,^[16] and in 2020, Adonde Media was a funder of the first U.S. Latino Podcast Listener Report by Edison Research.^[9][17]

In 2020, Adonde Media announced it would produce and distribute the fifth season of the Spanish-language podcast, Las Raras, with Castro as the executive producer.^[9] Castro was the executive producer of the Las Raras episode "Cruces en el desierto" (Crosses in the Desert),^[18] which won the 2020 Best Audio Documentary award from the International Documentary Association.^[19] In 2021, Adonde Media and Hrishikesh Hirway announced their partnership with support from PRX's Radiotopia to produce a spinoff of Song Exploder, titled Canción Exploder, for Spanish-speaking audiences.^[20]

• 2010 New Voices Scholar, Association of Independents in Radio^[21]
• 2014 National Edward R. Murrow award for News Documentary^[22] (host, editor, and producer of The Race to an Emergency)^[23]
• 2020 Best Audio Documentary award, International Documentary Association (executive producer of Crosses in the Desert / Cruces en el desierto)^[19][24][25]