Joan Vester

Joan has spent sixteen years cutting people talking, which is harder than it sounds. She began on strand interview programming and moved into long-conversation formats as they became the backbone of both broadcast and streaming schedules.

She is known for the invisible cut — the ability to remove forty minutes from a conversation without leaving a seam, and without flattening the way a person actually speaks. Her transcripts come back annotated like a script.

Sound comes first in her cuts. Room tone, breath and pause are treated as material rather than problems, and her sessions arrive mixed close enough to final that the dub is a formality.