There are journalists who knew that’s what they wanted to do practically from the day they were born. Amy Levine-Kennedy is not one of them. Growing up in Monroe, New York, a small town right next to West Point, Levine-Kennedy didn’t write for her school newspaper or even consider journalism as a career until college.
Levine-Kennedy was an English major at Tufts University, in Boston, where she used to see Tracy Chapman playing guitar in the Tufts cafeteria. A course on politics and the media would change her life’s trajectory. “I was very taken with that,” she says. She then applied for an internship at NBC News, and immediately began taking “whatever communication studies they offered at Tufts, which wasn’t many at the time.” In the 1980s, Tufts was “very liberal arts focused, and they didn’t have journalism really,” she says. She dedicated herself to broadcast journalism.
After nine college internships at various television news outlets, Levine-Kennedy graduated in 1989 and began working at WBUR, the Boston Member Station of NPR. She worked the graveyard shift. “It was great,” she says. She learned how to gather “the essence of a news story,” as she puts it, and “really loved all the texture of the sound that went with radio.”
For the next few years, Levine-Kennedy was a production assistant role at WGBH before becoming an associate producer for science-based documentaries and Nova, and on a show called Scientific American Frontiers.
She eventually decided to get more print experience, and applied to Columbia Journalism School. As a student at Columbia, Levine-Kennedy embedded with Act Up the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. “I spent the year kind of following them and watching their slow difficulties beginning to accrue,” she says.
After graduating from Columbia, she moved back to Boston for an editorial internship at The Atlantic, where she worked with the renowned editor Cullen Murphy. She was soon hired as a staff editor, and held that full-time position for three years before transitioning to a correspondent role for another six.
Levine-Kennedy returned to New York to start a family, raising two daughters and ultimately settling in Westchester County. In 2020, she began teaching journalism at SUNY-Purchase, and then at Fordham University, where she also works as a curator for the school’s art museum.
“I love interviewing artists,” she says, “and all the things that you do for an article you can actually do and apply through the visual and material culture of an art gallery.”
At Hunter, Levine-Kennedy teaches a section of News Literacy in a Digital Age, a course that teaches students to think critically about the news media, combat mis- and disinformation, and become more actively engaged with the information they consume on a daily basis.
Levine-Kennedy’s grandmother graduated from Hunter College, and that was one of the reasons she applied to teach in the Film and Media department. But it’s the students that enthuse her the most. “I really like having them feel excited about journalism,” she says.
