Celebrity MC: Faith Salie

Faith Salie is an Emmy-winning contributor to CBS News Sunday Morning and a regular panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!

As a commentator on politics and culture, she’s been interviewed by the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Gayle King, and Anderson Cooper. As a television and public radio and podcast host, she’s interviewed thousands of newsmakers, from Lin Manuel Miranda to President Carter to Lorne Michaels, who once sent her a wedding present with the wrong date engraved on it. During their interview, Robert Redford insisted Faith call him “Bob.” She got Tom Hanks to use the F word with a smile.

Faith hosted five seasons of the PBS show Science Goes To The Movies and co-created and hosted one of the first ever podcasts waaaay back in 2006: Fair Game with Faith Salie, which was a national nightly public radio show. Since then, she’s hosted over a dozen podcasts, including NPR’s Wait Wait Naked and Ashamed and Audible’s Authorized, in which she interviews authors like Julia Quinn and André Aciman about sex and love in literature. Faith’s a sought-after moderator for organizations including the Paley Center for Media, Tribeca Film Festival, 92nd Street Y, the American Museum of Natural History, the Sundance Film Festival, the World Science Festival, and Comic-Con.

Faith is the author of Approval Junkie, My Heartfelt (and Occasionally Inappropriate) Quest to Please Just About Everyone, and Ultimately Myself, which has been called “a magic mix of vulnerability and jest” (Elle). Her one-woman show based on the memoir had its world premiere at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta in 2019, and will debut Off-Broadway this fall. She’s written for the New York Times, Time, McSweeney’s, USA Today, and O, The Oprah Magazine.

Faith graduated from Harvard, where she performed her first college musical with a guy named Matt Damon. She won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University, where she received an M.Phil in Literature. Her fellow Rhodes scholars went on to become governors and Pulitzer Prize winners, while she famously got beamed up on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and landed on a collectible trading card worth hundreds of cents.

She’s performed at Carnegie Hall, sung with the Boston Pops, been levitated on national television, and swum with the Weeki Wachi mermaids.

Faith has lots of jobs, two kids, and one husband. She lives in New York City.

She can name all of Shakespeare’s plays in under thirty seconds. Just ask her.