Jill Jordan Sieder

Jill Jordan Sieder has lived in Atlanta for most of her life, with colorful chapters in Louisiana, Connecticut, and Paris, France.   

As a freelance journalist over three decades, she has produced news, investigative and feature stories for a variety of local, regional and national publications, including Atlanta Magazine, U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek, The New York Times, People Magazine, and The Dallas Morning News.  Her audio and digital work includes news and feature stories for WABE-Atlanta, Georgia Public Radio, National Public Radio, Fast Company, and Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

In Louisiana, Sieder chronicled the Gulf seafood industry, the struggling state charity hospital system, the New Orleans music scene, and ex-Klansman David Duke’s campaign for the U.S. Senate.  As an Atlanta-based reporter, she has covered Bill Clinton’s presidential campaigns, women entrepreneurs, visionary folk artists, and myriad health care-related issues, including an investigative series on the dangers of poorly regulated office surgery, and the pandemic-induced socioeconomic struggles of low wage workers and people of color.  

Memorable encounters include covering the bombing at Centennial Park in Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics, moments after the explosion; reporting on efforts to save struggling infants at a neonatal ICU in Savannah; accompanying Mormon missionaries as they knocked on doors in Albany; meeting the late James Brown at his 60th birthday party in Augusta; and spending an afternoon talking with the late musician Vic Chesnutt at his home in Athens. 

Sieder also founded and led the East Atlanta Kids Club, a nonprofit providing educational enrichment, mentoring and healthy activities for under-resourced youth in southeast Atlanta.   She continues to volunteer with the club, and especially enjoys the days when they crack out the bikes for a neighborhood ride.