Susan Lewis
Arts & Culture Senior ProducerAs senior producer of arts and culture, Susan writes and produces stories about music and the arts. She’s host and producer of WRTI’s TIME IN online interview series, and producer of The Philadelphia Orchestra in Concert series, to which she also contributes weekly intermission interviews. She’s also been a regular host of WRTI’s Live from the Performance Studio sessions.
In her more than 15 years at WRTI, Susan has interviewed a wide range of leading artists including conductors and composers: Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Simon Rattle, Wynton Marsalis, Marin Alsop, and Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, Christoph Eshenbach, Hannibal Locumbe, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Jennifer Higdon, Donald Nally, John Adams, Valerie Coleman, Mason Bates; instrumentalists and vocalists: Yo-Yo Ma, Lang Lang, Itzak Perlman, Helene Grimaud, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Sharon Isbin, Andre Watts, Mark O’Connor, Angel Blue, Lawrence Brownlee, Jason Vieaux, Sarah Chang, and groundbreaking ensembles, including Imani Winds, PRISM Quartet, LA Guitar Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, and The Crossing, as well as people from the world of literature, theater and fine arts, including architect Frank Gehry, actors Dule Hill, Anna Deveare Smith, and playwrights Terry Teachout and the late Terrence McNally.
Susan came to radio with a background in journalism, speechwriting, and law, which she practiced in New York City; she also taught entertainment law at Rutgers Law School in Camden. A former freelance writer and columnist for Philadelphia Magazine, she’s also the author of Reinventing Ourselves after Motherhood and a book of essays titled, What is a Kiss, Anyway?
She lives in suburban Philadelphia with her husband, goldendoodle, and whichever of her four grown kids pop in to visit.
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Siberia is a vast region known for its wilderness, harsh climate and role in Russian political history. But it’s also home to a large performing arts…
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UPDATE: Yesterday, due to technical difficulties, we were unable to broadcast the Philadelphia Orchestra's live performance from Hamburg as scheduled. The…
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Chichester Psalms was not a typical piece for the Anglican Church or for the 1960s avant-garde music world. But the work for boy soprano, solo quartet,…
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Intrigued by a Pulitzer-winning 1947 poem by W.H. Auden, 30-year-old Leonard Bernstein wrote his second symphony for piano and orchestra based on the…
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The critically acclaimed Dalí Quartet brought the excitement of its signature mix of Latin American and European classical and romantic music to the WRTI…
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Acclaimed as a brilliant and soulful fiddler and composer—combining bluegrass, folk, jazz, and classical—violinist Mark O’Connor played LIVE on WRTI 90.1…
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According to Middle Eastern legend, Scheherazade saved her own life by telling her husband, the Sultan, folk tales for A Thousand and One Nights. Those…
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A small group of musicians from The Philadelphia Orchestra are organizing a chamber music concert to benefit local Syrian refugees on May 7th at 6 pm at…
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The great Ella Fitzgerald was born on April 25th, 1917, and died in 1996. As WRTI’s Susan Lewis reports, "The Queen of Jazz" - also called "The First Lady…
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The second movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7—the Allegretto—has captivated listeners since the symphony’s 1813 premiere, when it was so popular that…