Simran Sethi

Simran Preeti Sethi (born October 12, 1970, in Munich, Germany) is an Indian-American journalist. Her career started in the media industry and transitioned to academics where she taught on the subject of journalism and global social justice. Currently, she is a freelance journalist and educator, writing on issues related to social, environmental and sustainability issues. Focused on food sustainability and social change, she is widely lauded for her contributions to the ecological sustainability of the planet. Socially active on a range of communication platforms (@simransethi) and author of articles for publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Smithsonian and The Guardian, Sethi is the creator and host of the award-winning chocolate podcast The Slow Melt and author of award-winning food book Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love.

Sethi graduated cum laude in 1992 from Smith College with a BA in sociology and gender studies. In 2005, she was awarded an MBA in sustainable business by the Presidio Graduate School, San Francisco.

Sethi began her media career in 1993 as a documentary producer for MTV News. In 1994, she became a reporter/producer for MTV Networks Asia News, eventually taking the anchor chair in 1995. She co-created and ran the news department for MTV India in 1996. Sethi anchored and produced their news broadcast until 1997, after which she developed her own production company, SHE TV.

Sethi returned to the United States in 1999 and hosted Daily Remix for Oxygen Media. After working as a consultant for business and activist groups, she became the anchor/writer for the public television series Ethical Markets. Sethi is the contributing author (with Hazel Henderson) to the companion book for that series, Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy which was awarded a 2007 Nautilus Silver Book Award for Business/Conscious Leadership and a 2008 Axiom Bronze Business Book Award for Business Ethics.

Sethi co-created, hosted and oversaw all video and audio content as executive producer for TreeHugger.com, the largest environmental website on the Internet. Under her management, TreeHugger won the 2006 Vloggie for Best Green Vlog.

Sethi was the host/digital contributor to the PBS series "QUEST: The Science of Sustainability." She has appeared as an environmental expert on various TV programs including The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Ellen DeGeneres Show and Martha, and has been featured on American Public Media's Marketplace Weekend, Vatican Radio, and ABC and SBS Punjabi in Australia. She has contributed to NBC Nightly News, MSNBC, CNBC and The Today Show, and wrote/hosted the Powering the Planet series for CNBC. She is the creator of The Sundance Channel web series The Good Fight, highlighting global environmental justice efforts, and, along with Majora Carter, was the founding host of The Sundance Channel's environmental block The Green. Sethi formerly served on the board of advisors for New York City-based NPR station WNYC, and on the board of directors for the National Radio Project. She is the 2009 recipient of the Smith College Medal, awarded to alumnae demonstrating extraordinary professional achievements and outstanding service to their communities, and received the 2010 Champion of Sustainability Award from the American College Personnel Association.

Lauded in Vanity Fair: The Green Issue as the environmental "messenger" and designated one of the top eight women saving the planet by Marie Claire, Sethi hosted a forum on global warming with Nobel Laureate Al Gore and created an audio podcast series called Tune In: Podcasts About How You Can Make a Difference for Gore's non-profit The Alliance for Climate Protection. Sethi has moderated panels for the White House Symposium GreenGov and Clinton Global Initiative, the World Cocoa Conference, Columbia University’s Awakening Our Democracy and the 2016 Food Tank Summit; keynoted the National Council for Science and Environment’s annual conference, the 7th Annual Chefs Collaborative Summit and Opportunity Green with Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin; and organized and spoke at Sowing and Reaping: Christian Perspectives on Food & Agriculture at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas. She has been a featured speaker at Harvard University, Chatham University, the Atlanta Food & Wine Festival, SXSW Eco’s 2011 Conference, TEDx Plaza Cibeles [1], TEDx Manhattan, the James Beard Foundation Food Conference, SALT Istanbul, the Sustainable Foods Summit in Amsterdam, the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney, the University of Southampton’s Interdisciplinary Research Week, the Sustainable Living Festival at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne, and at Sydney Opera House's All About Women Festival 2015. She has been identified in Variety's Women's Impact Report as an environmental woman of impact, alongside Laurie David, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Sheryl Crow. Sethi also was featured on Earth First's 2008 Who's Who in Green List.

Sethi is a fellow at the Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First) in Oakland, USA, a professor of communications at John Cabot University in Rome, Italy, and visiting faculty at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy. She is a former visiting scholar at the Cocoa Research Centre in St. Augustine, Trinidad, that houses the largest and most diverse collection of cocoa in the world, and is an ambassador for the Women in Cocoa and Chocolate network. She served as the Kelly Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at St. Catherine University, the largest women’s college in the United States, and was an associate professor of journalism at the University of Kansas from 2007 to 2012. She is the author of the award-winning book Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love (HarperCollins, 2015), about the stories of change in food and agriculture told through bread, wine, chocolate, coffee and beer. She is also the creator and host of the award-winning podcast, The Slow Melt, the first podcast to cover the continuum of chocolate. Her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Smithsonian and The Guardian.