Who we are
Our Story
We love podcasts. Our morning coffee is accompanied by Michael Barbaro’s “hmms.” Sarah Koenig is our favorite celebrity.
It takes a huge amount of time, effort and expertise to build long-form podcasts, but highly produced, investigative audio stories don’t have to come from a major studio in New York or L.A.
Something amazing and unique is happening on the University of Texas campus. Students and recent alums are reinventing what it means to create the most popular podcasts. The next big audio story won’t be coming from a national podcasting powerhouse. It will come from The Drag.
We’re an audio production house built by students and recent Moody College alums. We love audio storytelling, and we especially love long-form journalistic podcasts that guide listeners through a complex story. And we want to help the media world figure this out, so we partner with media organizations to help them tell fascinating stories. The next generation of podcasters will come from the Moody College. Where did we get our name? Guadalupe Street, famously called The Drag, runs alongside our home on campus.
Our Team
We aren’t a typical team of audio storytellers. We’re professors, students and people who just walked the graduation stage. Some of us didn’t know how to hold a shotgun mic when we started, while others edited audio in their closets all night. All of us love a good story and are passionate about podcasts.
Robert Quigley
Executive Producer
Robert Quigley loves storytelling in all its forms. He started The Drag in the spring of 2019 because he especially loves podcasts. He’s also a journalism professor at UT.
Haley Butler
Senior Producer for The Drag
Director and Host of The Orange Tree
Journo grad. Greeting card collector. Public radio advocate and closed-toed shoe enthusiast.
Tinu Thomas
Director and Host of The Orange Tree
Tinu is a recent UT grad whose love for audio is trumped by only a few other passions, which are the following: coffee, the crackling sound before the start of an old movie & dogs with human names.
Saba Rahimian
Director & Host of American Bloodline
Saba Rahimian is a native Californian who moved to Austin with her food truck back in late 2015. Her passion for journalism and storytelling has inherently been a part of her since childhood.
Sara Schleede
Director & Host of American Bloodline
Sara first decided to give journalism a try after watching Gilmore Girls in middle school. Now she is a journalism student at UT Austin, making podcasts, eating everything bagels and embroidering.
Christian McDonald
Technical Director
Christian McDonald teaches data and coding courses in UT’s School of Journalism. He joined full-time in 2018 after 28 years working for publications in Austin, Atlanta, Phoenix and Longview, Texas.
Madi Thomason
Web Developer & Graphic Designer
Madi is an Austin native who orders queso every chance she gets. She is currently studying Journalism and Political Communication at the University of Texas.
Kelsey Whipple
Podcast Advisor
Kelsey Whipple is a doctoral candidate at UT’s School of Journalism, where she studies identity and public discourse and teaches Audio Storytelling, a class in which students create podcasts and radio segments.
Sabrina LeBoeuf
Content Director for The Drag
Associate Producer for The Orange Tree
Sabrina LeBouef is a journalism and RTF junior at UT Austin who directs content for The Drag. In her spare time, she watches movies, dances and plays music. Her favorite podcasts are Dr. Death and Blackout.
Doing this for a grade
Moody College students get a chance to produce professional-quality podcasts as part of a capstone class at the School of Journalism. Working on teams with our paid staff members, the students are getting an experiential learning lesson of a lifetime. Each semester, a fresh group of students will help shape our stories and get credit for their work when our podcasts hit the top charts.
