Katie Halper


Katherine Rose Halper is an American comedian, writer, filmmaker, podcaster, and political commentator. She is the host of The Katie Halper Show on WBAI and co-host of the Useful Idiots podcast with Matt Taibbi.

Early life and education

Halper was born and raised in New York City's Upper West Side, on Riverside Drive. She graduated from the Dalton School, and from Wesleyan University in 2003. She is Jewish, but considers herself a secular Jew. Her father is a psychiatrist and her mother is an English professor and a novelist.

Career

After graduating from Wesleyan, Halper worked as development director for the Downtown Community Television Center, a non-profit media education center and documentary production house. She also coordinated living wage and labor campaigns in New York City and Florida. Halper has also taught history at her alma mater, the Dalton School.

Comedy

She began her career performing as a stand-up comedian. She has performed comedy at venues including Symphony Space, The Culture Project in New York, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the D.C. Comedy Festival, and at Netroots Nation. She also performed on the annual Seminar Cruise of The Nation magazine. She has performed with Lizz Winstead, Markos Moulitsas, The Yes Men, Cynthia Nixon, and Jim Hightower.

Film

Her first film as director was entitled La Memoria es Vaga, a documentary about the Valle de los Caídos and historical memory in post-Franco Spain. It was screened in the United States and Spain. Halper was co-producer of Tim Robbins and DCTV's film Embedded Live, based on Robbins' play of the same name. Embedded Live was shown at the Venice Film Festival and Sundance Channel. She was associate producer of Estela Bravo's Free to Fly: The US-Cuba Link, about restrictions on travel between Cuba and the United States. Free to Fly was shown at the Havana Film Festival and Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival. Halper directed and produced the film Commie Camp. Commie Camp, originally titled Another Camp Is Possible, is a documentary about the Jewish summer camp Camp Kinderland, where Halper went and her mother and grandmother worked. She also co-directed Facing Fascism: New Yorkers Remember the Spanish Civil War, a video for an exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York.
She was outreach director for Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein's documentary The Take. The documentary is about a workers' movement in Buenos Aires, Argentina and was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival, Venice Film Festival, and Film Forum.

Journalism

Articles by Halper have been published in The New York Times, Comedy Central, The Nation, Gawker, The Huffington Post, Alternet, Daily Kos, OpenLeft, The Raw Story, Jacobin, Salon, Vice, The Guardian, and Feministing, where she was a guest columnist.
She has been interviewed on and featured in MSNBC, The Young Turks, RT, Fox News Channel's The Ingraham Angle, The Hills Rising, The New York Times, New York Magazine, Los Angeles Times, In These Times, Jezebel, Gawker, MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann, The Sam Seder Show, The Marc Maron Show, Sirius Radio, WBAI, XM Radio's P.O.T.U.S. and The Alan Colmes Show.

Political activism

Halper is a national director of Living Liberally and the co-founder of Laughing Liberally, both of which promote political action through social interaction.

Podcasting

Halper previously co-hosted the podcast Morning Jew with Heather Gold. She currently hosts The Katie Halper Show, a weekly WBAI radio show and podcast. The show received attention when, during an interview with Halper which was released as a podcast on March 25, 2020, Tara Reade, a former Senate staff assistant of Joe Biden, alleged that Biden sexually assaulted her in a Capitol Hill office building in 1993. Reade alleged that Biden had pushed her against a wall and penetrated her with his fingers. A Biden spokesperson has said that the allegation was false.
In 2019, she launched the podcast Useful Idiots, co-hosted by Matt Taibbi and distributed by Rolling Stone. The podcast has since featured interviews with Tulsi Gabbard, Jimmy Dore, Andrew Yang, Bernie Sanders, Chris Hedges, Krystal Ball, Nadya Tolokonnikova, Michael Moore, Tim Robbins, Glenn Greenwald, Dennis Kucinich, Ro Khanna, Noam Chomsky, Adam McKay, and Rashida Tlaib.

Filmography