Brian DeShazor is an award winning public radio broadcaster, researcher and historian. He is the founder of the Queer Radio Research Project and currently is CEO of Overnight Productions, (Inc.), the umbrella organization that produces This Way Out: The International LGBTQ radio magazine. DeShazor produces This Way Out NewsWrap, the weekly news headlines. DeShazor is managing a preservation and access project to bring This Way Out's audio collection (1988-2022) of 1771 programs to researchers under the auspices of Sound Submissions, a digital humanities program in the Recorded Sound Section of the Library’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center (NAVCC).
As former director of the Pacifica Radio Archives, 1999–2016, he initiated the preservation and access project at the advent of the digital age, saving thousands of deteriorating tapes. He acquired and managed several grants from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission at the U.S. National Archives, the National Endowment for the Arts, the GRAMMY Foundation, the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, the Ford Foundation, the California Audio Visual Preservation Project, and UC Berkeley Moffit Library. He has traveled the country speaking about the preservation of, and access to radio history. As a member of the National Radio Preservation Task Force at the Library of Congress, he presented before the gender and sexuality caucus about his Queer Radio Research Project.
He executive produced and hosted over 550 public radio programs including the founding of the series, From the Vault Radio. Award winning programs include, Studs Terkel: The Spoken Century, The Quentin Crisp Memorial Program, John Hersey’s Hiroshima with Ruby Dee, Tyne Daly and Roscoe Lee Brown. In 2010 he received the National Federation of Community Broadcaster’s BADER award for his contributions to public broadcasting.
