Our Team

Brian is the host and executive producer of the groundbreaking podcast series S-Town and co-host and executive producer of The Trojan Horse Affair, from Serial Productions and The New York Times. Reed was also a longtime staff member at This American Life, where he oversaw the show as its senior producer and created stories about the Federal Reserve’s failure to prevent the 2008 financial crisis, multiple FBI investigations gone wrong, and atrocities in Egypt and Guatemala. Reed has received the Dart Award for Reporting on Trauma, two Overseas Press Club Awards, multiple Webby Awards, an Education Writers Association Award, as well as two Peabody Awards. One of the Peabodies was for S-Town, of which Rebecca Mead wrote in The New Yorker:“Among the half-million products released in podcasting’s brief history, it is “S-Town”...that seems most likely to endure as a work of art.”

Brian Reed

Photography Credit: Cristian Candamil

Robyn Semien

Robyn is an award winning journalist and audio producer. Before founding Placement Theory, Semien spent 15 years at This American Life, where she created some of the program’s most celebrated and ambitious episodes, including listener favorite 129 Cars, the Harper High School series, which drew the attention of Barack and Michelle Obama, Talking While Black, Before the Next One, and Anatomy  of Doubt, which inspired the Netflix limited series Unbelievable. Semien has produced a live show starring Lin-Manuel Miranda and Anthony Ramos, and directed audio stories with Connie Britton, Zoe Winters and Grace Gummer. She's won two Peabody Awards, two duPont Awards and an Emmy for her work on This American Life’s TV series for Showtime.

Zach St Louis is a producer at Placement Theory, where he works on Question Everything. Previously, Zach reported and produced The Confessions of Anthony Raimondi and Crooked City: Youngstown, OH, which was named one of Vulture’s best podcasts of 2022. He produced and developed multiple shows at CNN, including the EPPY Award-winning Coronavirus: Fact vs. Fiction hosted by Dr. Sanjay Gupta. He has also contributed to podcasts from the Financial Times, Vox Media, NPR, Spotify, and Serial Productions. He is a graduate of the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies.