Dante Chinni is the director of the Patchwork Nation project, a Knight Foundation-funded collaboration including the PBS NewsHour, the Christian Science Monitor, WNYC radio and Politico that studies politics, socio-economics and culture in a time of change.

Patchwork Nation won a 2009 Knight Batten Award for journalistic innovation and will be the focus of the upcoming book “Our Patchwork Nation” from Gotham, an imprint of Penguin, to be published this fall.

Based in Washington, D.C., Chinni has been covering politics and the media for more than a dozen years. He has worked as a reporter-researcher at Newsweek and a senior associate at the Project for Excellence in Journalism. He has written for publications including The Economist, Columbia Journalism Review, and The Washington Post Magazine.

A native of Detroit and a graduate of Michigan State University, he lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Christina, and their two children.