Krista Tippett

Study and work abroad

After graduating from Brown University in 1983, Tippett was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study at the University of Bonn in West Germany. There she worked at the Bonn bureau of The New York Times. She wrote about her experiences in Rostock in "They Just Say 'Over There'", which was published by Die Zeit in 1984. That year, she became a stringer for The New York Times in divided Berlin, establishing herself as a freelance foreign correspondent. She reported and wrote for The Times, Newsweek, the BBC, the International Herald Tribune, and Die Zeit.

In 1986, Tippett became a special political assistant to the then-senior United States diplomat in West Berlin, John C. Kornblum. The next year she became chief aide in Berlin to the U.S. ambassador to West Germany, Richard Burt. She has written that moral questions arising from that experience of seeing "high power, up close" eventually led to the spiritual, philosophical, and theological curiosities that have defined her work since.

Radio and non-profit media

Tippett received a Master of Divinity degree from Yale University in 1994. While conducting a global oral-history project for the Collegeville Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research at St. John's Abbey of Collegeville, Minnesota, she developed the idea for her radio show.

Tippett proposed a show about religion to Minnesota Public Radio in the late 1990s. The radio program became a monthly series in 2001 and, in 2003, a weekly national program distributed by American Public Media. In 2013, Tippett left American Public Media to co-found a non-profit production company, Krista Tippett Public Productions, which she described as "a social enterprise with a radio show at its heart". Tippett is also the co-creator and convener of the Civil Conversations Project, which she has described as "an emergent approach to healing our fractured civic spaces".

Tippett grew up in Shawnee, Oklahoma. She has two children and is divorced.