Podcast Press Kit
Contact for press inquiries:
Laura Marie Ruocco | laura@tmiproject.org
TMI Project | 65 Saint James Street, Kingston, NY 12401
The TMI Project Story Hour launched in April of 2020. Since then, the podcast has appeared twice on Apple’s New & Noteworthy and has been featured on Spotify and Pandora. In 2023, The TMI Project Story Hour was given the highest honor at International Women’s Podcast Awards, taking home the award for Changing the World One Moment at a Time; and received recognition at Sonic Bloom Awards for Gender Justice and Voice of the People.
Season 1: Tragedy + Time = Comedy
What’s happening today might not be funny, but if it includes TMI, give it time, and it will surely make you laugh. In Season 1 of The TMI Project Story Hour: Tragedy + Time = Comedy co-hosts Eva Tenuto and Micah profile some of our favorite storytellers from over a decade of live performances as they step on stage and transform the stories their most afraid to tell into powerful, inspiring, and often hilarious monologues of resilience and survival. Join us as we take a deeper dive and share the stories behind the secrets, and what happened next. While you binge listen, don’t forget to ask yourself, “What is my TMI story?” We all have one.
Season 1 Co-hosts:
Eva Tenuto
“One of the most rewarding parts of working at TMI Project is seeing what storytellers look like when they step off stage. It often looks like they’re floating out of the theater. They look taller; lighter. It’s as if something has truly been lifted. To be able to witness that over and over fills my spirit. I can’t think of anything else I’d rather do.”
Eva Tenuto co-founded TMI Project in 2010, spearheading a movement using true storytelling as a liberation practice for social justice. With an unwavering commitment to releasing shame and stigma through true storytelling, Eva has propelled TMI Project from her living room to the United Nations, and many places in between. Since then, she has guided thousands of people to write and share their stories.
In addition to being TMI Project’s executive director, Eva is a multi-disciplinary artist. She is the co-host of the award-winning podcast, The TMI Project Story Hour. She is the editor and director of multiple solo shows, one of which was awarded Best Comedic Script in the United Solo Festival. Her award-winning documentary shorts Vicarious Resilience, Locker Room Talk, and One Story at a Time: Celeste Lecesne have screened around the world, including at esteemed festivals like DC/DOX, Woodstock Film Festival, and GlobeDocs by The Boston Globe. Eva’s personal essays have appeared in assorted anthologies and online publications.
Eva is a sought-after speaker on topics such as storytelling, social justice, women’s leadership, recovery, and shame. She has presented at many institutions, including UN Women, Omega Institute, and A Call to Men, among others. In 2018, she had the privilege of presenting #MeToo founder Tarana Burke with the Eleanor Roosevelt Center’s Medal of Honor.
Micah
“TMI Project allows an exchange to happen. It feeds a deep need to know our own truth, to connect to something real. This is an ancient practice of sharing our stories and it’s perhaps the most revolutionary tool we have at our disposal.”
In addition to leading TMI Project workshops, Micah serves as the manager at GWI’s (Good Works Institute) Greenhouse Kingston, a yoga teacher at Mudita, and creator of DAY 1 (a New Year’s Day community event). He is on the board of Wild Earth (a non-profit Wilderness School), Radio Kingston, The Center for Creative Education, and O+ (a nonprofit health and wellness festival for artists and creators). He also serves as City of Kingston’s Art Commissioner at the Kingston Farmers Market.
In addition to producing The TMI Project Podcast and leading TMI Project workshops, Hayley is a writer, storyteller and documentary filmmaker. She produced the documentary film Hidden Battles directed by Victoria Mills about the psychological effects of killing on soldiers. She also produced and broadcast edited Naturally Obsessed: the Making of a Scientist, a documentary about laboratory research by Richard and Carole Rifkind. Naturally Obsessed premiered on WNYC/Thirteen and is distributed by PBS International. Most recently she produced J.L. Sert: A Nomadic Dream, a Spanish/U.S. co-production directed by Pablo Bujosa. Her installations and experimental films: Move, Coleslaw Wrestling and Boar Hog, exploring multi-generational Florida folk culture, have shown at underground film festivals including NY, Chicago and SF, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Miami and Art Basel. Her angst-filled teen journal was included in Mortified: Real Words, Real People, Real Pathetic, published by Simon Spotlight Entertainment. Hayley moved to upstate New York from Brooklyn four years ago where she’s focused on writing and her work as a TMI Project Workshop Leader.
Season 1 Storytellers:
TMI Project’s co-founder Eva Tenuto met the well-known ethnomusicologist turned comedian and storyteller Verna Gillis ten years ago at TMI Project’s first story slam. Eva was mesmerized by the regal, older woman who stepped up to the mike and brought the house down with a raunchy monologue about sex and aging, but that was only the beginning.
TMI Project storyteller Dusty Lynn Childers grew up in Gaffney, South Carolina. As a kid young Dusty felt pressure to fit in and that meant assuming a masculine persona that didn’t quite ring true. Dusty’s story is about the day his straight-talking mother, who he calls a “rainbow dipped witch,” called him out on it.
Before TMI Project storyteller Sam Osterhout became an award-winning writer and producer in New York, he was a guy from Minnesota, married too young and working as an Assistant Montesorri teacher. Then, like in that great Peggy Lee song, he started to wonder, “Is that all there is, my friend?”
TMI Project storyteller Erin Barreto didn’t believe she was beautiful, or that romantic love was in the cards. She had resigned herself to life as the black, tall, shy sidekick to her shorter, thinner girlfriends at the nightclub when a mysterious Tom Selleck look-alike came along and helped her see things in a different way.
There are many ways to receive a Stage IV breast cancer diagnosis: disbelief, rage, horror are a few words that come to mind. But it’s possible that nobody has ever taken the news quite like TMI Project storyteller, Erica Chase Salerno, who was known to treat the chemo ward like a cocktail party, a place to chat up the other patients, whether they were in the mood or not.
TMI Project storyteller Margarita Meyendorff, known to most as Mourka, was born in a Displaced Persons’ camp in Germany, the daughter of Russian and Estonian aristocrats who fled Communist persecution after WWII. But life really got interesting when she moved to upstate New York and applied for a job with the FBI. Mourka shared her story at the Rosendale Theater in July 2012.
Storyteller Maria Elena De Valle participated in a TMI Project true storytelling workshop in 2015 in partnership with Gender at Work, which gathered gender activists from around the world in New York City where they workshopped their stories and presented them at the United Nations. Maria Elena wrote her story about the first strike she organized to protest the labor inequality between her and her brother.
When TMI Project storyteller Markel Mosley was a kid, he and his older brother were sent to live with their grandparents because his parents could no longer care for them. Markel explores some painful and some joyful memories from his past through a unique lens in his touching and often funny story.
TMI Project storyteller Hayley Downs grew up in Central Florida in a chaotic home where she went to elaborate lengths to dodge the rage of her troubled parents. It all came to a head on the day of her tenth birthday party.
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