Megan Kamerick
News DirectorMegan has been a journalist for 25 years and worked at business weeklies in San Antonio, New Orleans and Albuquerque. She first came to KUNM as a phone volunteer on the pledge drive in 2005. That led to volunteering on Women’s Focus, Weekend Edition and the Global Music Show. She was then hired as Morning Edition host in 2015, then the All Things Considered host in 2018. Megan was hired as News Director in 2021.
Prior to radio, Megan spent many years in print and online journalism and she moved into television with New Mexico PBS in 2012 where she produced “Public Square” and “New Mexico in Focus.” Megan also produced two podcasts with NMPBS, New Mexico Women and the Vote and Growing Forward: Cannabis and New Mexico, which she co-hosts with Andy Lyman of New Mexico Political Report and which is in its third season. Megan has produced stories for National Public Radio, Latino USA, Capital & Main and Marketplace. She’s passionate about getting women’s voices into media and is the former president of the Journalism & Women Symposium. Her TED talk on women and media has more than 350,000 views. She’s the treasurer for the Society of Professional Journalists’ Rio Grande Chapter. In the spare time she manages to scrape together she goes hiking with her husband, seeks out cool cultural happenings, goes to movies and travels.
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The Before I Die New Mexico Festival offers a week of conversations and experiences including mortality movies, games and even comedy mixed with practical advice on planning for your demise.
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For more than two centuries, museums and universities have kept collections of Native American human remains in the name of science. A recent ProPublica report found that despite the promise of the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), institutions have continued to hold and use indigenous remains in research projects aimed at things like dating cultivation of corn and showing when migration routes were active.
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On Wednesday night at 10 p.m. New Mexico PBS will air the documentary “In Search of Resolution.” It’s the third in a series by filmmaker Robert Frye on the threat posed by nuclear weapons. This latest work explores global efforts around nuclear disarmament. He spoke with KUNM about how the Russian invasion of Ukraine has reawakened fears of nuclear war --- something many may have thought was no longer a risk.
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This year, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved a 40-year license for a private company, Holtec International, to build a facility between Hobbs and Carlsbad that would store nuclear waste from decommissioned power plants across the country. It’s a very controversial project. So New Mexico PBS Producer Laura Paskus produced a one-hour Our Land special for New Mexico in Focus airing August 25 that explores what's at stake with this project. She spoke with KUNM ahead of the show.
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On this episode Associate Professor Myrriah Gomez talks about her book “Nuclear Nuevo México: Colonialism and the Effects of the Nuclear Industrial Complex on Nuevomexicanos.”
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Peter Cubra has been advocating for the rights of incarcerated people in New Mexico since the 1980s. Now the retired Albuquerque attorney is sounding a note of optimism as University of New Mexico hospital takes over the medical services contract at the Metropolitan Detention Center.
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The Senate passed its version of the National Defense Authorization Act last week and for the first time, it also approved an amendment that expands the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. This could have a profound impact on people who lived near the site of the 1945 Trinity Test, the first atomic explosion, which took place in southern New Mexico. They have been excluded from compensation, as have uranium miners who did work after 1971. Tina Cordova, co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinder Consortium, spoke with KUNM the day after the Senate vote.
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On this episode we talk with Lucie Genay, author of “Land of Nuclear Enchantment: A New Mexican History of the Nuclear Weapons Industry.”
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Sunday was the 78th anniversary of the Trinity Test, the world’s first nuclear explosion, which took place in southern New Mexico. At a remembrance in Santa Fe, Archbishop John Wester renewed his call to eliminate nuclear weapons. He was joined by anti-nuclear activists and people from a variety of faith traditions in person and online.
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The contemporary art space Container in Santa Fe is hosting the premier of works by the co-founder of Pussy Riot, Nadya Tolokonnikova. It includes the film “Putin’s Ashes”, where women burn an image of the Russian president and collect the ashes, which are now part of several works in the show. At the opening Tolokonnikova sat in a replica of the cell where she was imprisoned for protesting the regime. She spoke with KUNM about why art is one of the best ways to process trauma.