Susan Stellin, MPH is a writer, educator, and public health consultant with 20 years of experience as a reporter, editor, and author, including five years teaching media ethics and the history of journalism.

Since earning a master's in public health at Columbia University in 2019, she has worked on projects about ways to reduce overdose deaths, reform punitive drug policies, and improve access to harm reduction, treatment, and recovery support. She regularly leads training workshops for a wide range of service providers working with people experiencing substance use, mental health, and housing challenges.

Recent clients include:

Susan is the co-author of Chancers, a dual memoir written with her husband Graham MacIndoe about his trajectory through addiction, incarceration, and recovery. Told in chapters alternating between their points of view, it was published by Random House – Ballantine Books in 2016. Susan and Graham have collaborated on many projects combining interviews and photography, including Coming Clean, a series that was first published in New York magazine and The Guardian and later exhibited at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh.

In 2019, they co-curated the exhibition Beyond Addiction: Reframing Recovery, which debuted at the Aronson Galleries in New York City and traveled to RIT’s City Art Space in Rochester in 2020-2021, featuring new work by participants in a storytelling workshop they taught. Some of the artwork from Reframing Recovery was exhibited at the University of Mississippi in 2023.

In 2014, Susan and Graham were awarded a fellowship from the Alicia Patterson Foundation for their project American Exile, photos and interviews documenting the stories of immigrants who have been ordered deported from the United States. That project was exhibited at Photoville in New York City in 2015 and at the Head On photo festival in Sydney, Australia in 2016.

They also facilitate an art and storytelling workshop with participants at VOCAL-NY’s drop-in center in Brooklyn, which serves people navigating substance use, mental health, housing, and other challenges.

As a reporter, Susan was a regular contributor to The New York Times for more than 15 years, primarily covering the travel industry, airport and border security, business, and technology.. Her writing has appeared in New York magazine, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, Travel + Leisure, Nieman Reports, Real Simple, Fast Company, Consumer Reports, and many other publications. Her first book, How to Travel Practically Anywhere, a guide to planning, booking, and troubleshooting travel, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2006.

She has been a guest on radio and television programs including All Things Considered, The Leonard Lopate Show, The Diane Rehm Show, On the Media and the BBC and gave a talk about addiction, incarceration, and recovery at TEDxStanford 2017.

During the late 1990s, Susan was the CyberTimes Deputy Editor for The New York Times, assigning and editing articles about the internet and the impact of new technology on our lives. Previously, she worked as an editor for CNET in San Francisco, helping develop one of the first websites to publish articles about computers and digital life exclusively online.

Susan grew up in Michigan, earned a B.A. in political science from Stanford University, and spent two years after college teaching English and writing in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She currently lives in Brooklyn.

 

Photo: Graham Macindoe