Isabella Gomez Sarmiento
Isabella Gomez Sarmiento is a reporter with NPR Music.
She covers topics ranging from breaking news to cultural trends and artists she's listening to. Recently, she spent weeks closely covering the criminal trial of hip-hop mogul Sean Combs, reporting from a Lower Manhattan courtroom on a daily basis.
In her stories, she likes to answer questions like: why are musicians joining OnlyFans? How are streaming services responding to the rise of AI-generated content? And what's the definitive song of the summer? She's also profiled musicians including Audrey Hobert, Young Miko, and Durand Jones. Her work can be heard across NPR's radio programs and on podcasts like Alt.Latino, Pop Culture Happy Hour and It's Been A Minute.
Gomez Sarmiento got her start in public radio as a Kroc Fellow in 2019. She's part of the NPR teams that won a 2023 Edward R. Murrow Award for the ongoing coverage of the fall of Roe v. Wade and a 2024 New York Press Club Award for a story about haptic suits transforming the live music experience.
Originally from Venezuela, she learned English with the help of her friends Junie B. Jones and Nancy Drew.
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Spotify, one of the largest streaming companies in the world, says it will soon start labeling AI profiles posing as human artists. -
Jim James of My Morning Jacket and Jeff Tweedy of Wilco are two artists who've dipped their toes into the Grateful Dead extended universe through a singular experience: by sharing the stage with Bob Weir. -
As part of NPR Music's series The Ripple Effect, Isabella Gomez Sarmiento speaks with Deadheads young and old, including famous followers like reality TV host Andy Cohen, who saw his first Grateful Dead show as a teenager in 1986, and young fans just discovering the band -- and passing on their appreciation to others.
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The singer, who had a viral hit last year with "Sally, When the Wine Runs Out," filled his follow-up album, Chuck Timely & The Hourglass, with dive bar jukebox melodies and live instrumentation. -
Over the last decade, reality TV mogul Andy Cohen has been spotted dancing at concerts for Dead & Company. But his ties to the Grateful Dead go much farther than that. -
Even as the band has changed and reinvented itself, the Grateful Dead's fanbase has proven to be uniquely and consistently renewable — a cosmic inheritance passed down from one generation to the next, welcoming younger Deadheads with open arms. -
As soon as the weather warms up, fans of the Grateful Dead partake in an important summer tradition: gathering together to experience the band's music. -
The Grateful Dead endured an original run of 30 years, but its appeal has survived just as long in a world where the band no longer exists. The question now is not whether the music will continue, but how? -
Death never stopped the Grateful Dead before. Since Jerry Garcia's death in 1995, a sprawling collection of musicians and fans across generations have kept the band’s legacy alive in different ways. But without members Phil Lesh and Bob Weir, Deadheads are experiencing their first summer where there’s no clear inheritor of the Grateful Dead’s mantle. Where does the music, and the dedicated community that has grown up around it, go from here? NPR Music's resident Deadheads Felix Contreras and Isabella Gomez Sarmiento took a cue from the Dead itself: They hit the road, interviewing musicians, fans and archivists to learn how the band and its fans built a legacy that has spanned generations, and to find out what's next. For more podcast episodes and stories about the future of the Grateful Dead, check out our series Dead After Death. This episode was produced by Noah Caldwell. It was edited by Jacob Ganz and Hazel Cills. The executive producer of NPR Music is Suraya Mohamed. Our executive director is Sonali Mehta. -
This summer marks a moment of transition in the Grateful Dead's long, strange trip: the first in many years where there is no clear center of the band's universe. Where do Deadheads go from here?
