Gaby Dunn

Gabrielle Teresa Dunn (born June 1, 1988) is an American writer, actress, journalist, comedian, LGBTQ activist, and podcaster. She was a writer and director for BuzzFeed Video, but has since left to focus on her YouTube comedy show and podcast Just Between Us with her best friend and fellow former Buzzfeed writer Allison Raskin.[1]

Gaby Dunn
Dunn appearing in a 2016 Vlogbrothers video
Born
Gabrielle Teresa Dunn

(1988-06-01) June 1, 1988
Florida, U.S.
Alma materEmerson College
Occupation
  • Actor
  • writer
  • journalist
  • podcaster
Years active2010–present

As a journalist, Dunn's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Playboy, Vice, The Huffington Post, Cosmopolitan, Salon, and Slate. Her and Raskin's joint novel, I Hate Everyone but You, was released on September 5, 2017 through Wednesday Books.[2] It reached the top ten on The New York Times bestsellers list.

Since 2016, she has hosted Bad with Money, a podcast that launched at the Panoply network but is now at Stitcher, which primarily focuses on economy lessons, while also delving into poverty and economic oppression.[3][4] She also lead the Peoples Improv Theater house team BIRDS, and was a producer of the independent community radio station WFMU. Her web project, 100interviews.com, was named "Best Blog" by The Village Voice in 2010.[5]

Early life and education

Dunn was born on June 1, 1988. She attended David Posnack Jewish Day School in Plantation, Florida. She attended Emerson College, where she majored in Multimedia Journalism, graduating in 2009.[6]

Dunn began performing during her first year at Emerson, with the sketch comedy troupe Chocolate Cake City (CCC). Dunn had wanted to audition for CCC, but was too scared to do so until she was urged to take the audition slot of a former boyfriend who had become sick the day before and could not perform. Her audition was successful and she became a member of the troupe. At the time she considered herself a better writer than actor, and working in CCC allowed her to do both, since members were expected to write and perform their own sketches.[6]

During her second year, Dunn began a two-year stint as a crime reporter for The Boston Globe. She worked the 6:30 pm – 2:30 am shift, using a police scanner to monitor potential news items, and then driving to the scene of the crime to write about it. After her junior year, Dunn worked as an intern at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.[7]

Career

100 Interviews

In October 2010, Dunn created 100interviews.com, a Tumblr blog in which she intended to publish transcripts of 100 interviews, given over the course of a single year, with a variety of different people. Interview subjects included a transgender person, a rocket scientist, an Abraham Lincoln expert, and Stephen Colbert.[8] Her initial inspiration for the project stemmed from her own personal desire to meet different people and hear their stories. However, Dunn also wanted to offer readers the opportunity to "vicariously meet people" whose lives were different from their own. "That's something I don't think journalism does anymore." Dunn explained in an interview with Yeshiva University's The Commentator, "If you're liberal, you'll watch certain news channels and if you're conservative you'll watch different channels. Journalism used to present one truth that each side could interpret. Now it panders to one side or the other."[7]

Because 100 Interviews was an independent project, Dunn sometimes solicited interviews with her candidates in non-traditional unexpected ways. Children's horror author R. L. Stine agreed to sit for an interview after Dunn "cold-tweeted" him on Twitter.[9] After trying and failing to interview Colbert by crashing a $2,000 a plate dinner gala,[10] Dunn settled for asking him questions during a pre-show Q&A for The Colbert Report.[11] She also used Help a Reporter Out, an online service that connects journalists with expert sources.

Dunn's attempts to gain wider exposure for what she called her "diary journalism"[12] were initially met with rejection.[13] Dunn has been recognized as a success case of the use of social media for self-promotion,[9] particularly Twitter and Tumblr, the micro-blogging service and web application platform through which she initially self-published her interviews.[14] The success of 100 Interviews caused Dunn's work to be noticed by the Village Voice and New York Times culture editor Adam Sternbergh.[15]

Just Between Us

In 2014, Dunn created a YouTube channel with her best friend Allison Raskin called Just Between Us (JBU). The two play characters based on themselves, which they describe as an odd couple. Dunn plays a sex-positive, bisexual, feminist in contrast to Raskin's uptight, straight, single character. They began with giving love advice, and then added sketches. The advice show sometimes features guest stars, which in the past have included family members and close friends. They temporarily had a series replacing their advice show called "Is This What You Want?" where they tried different types of videos from various areas of YouTube. Just Between Us now has more than 718,000 subscribers and over 160 million views.

Bad with Money with Gaby Dunn

In August 2016, Gaby Dunn began a podcast with the intent of exposing and analyzing money problems that most people face yet no one talks about. The podcast was called Bad with Money with Gaby Dunn and is part of the Panoply podcast network.[16] On her podcast she discusses her financial experiences in regards to her debt,[17] career, and also systematic financial systems in place that make earning money difficult. Her guests have ranged from financial psychologist Dr. Brad Klontz[17] to feminist scholar and writer Roxane Gay.[18]

This podcast stems from a long conversation Dunn has had around money and the internet. After an article she wrote for Fusion went viral in December 2015, Dunn became one of the leading spokespeople for the intersection of being famous online and making a living.[19] Many YouTubers, while "internet famous", cannot profit off of their celebrity for fear of being seen as disingenuous, as Dunn describes in the documentary Vlogumentary (2016), in which she shows one of the jobs as a courier and also the fans she runs into as she's working.[20] During the early weeks of Bad with Money, Dunn also hosted the Finale Rally podcast, which is no longer active.[21]

I Hate Everyone But You

Dunn's debut novel, written with Allison Raskin, was published on September 5, 2017.[22] A follow-up novel was released in July 2019, titled Please Send Help.

In 2019, Dunn was also a consulting producer on the Netflix animated series, Big Mouth, created by comedian Nick Kroll.

Bury The Lede

In October 2019, Gaby's debut original graphic novel, Bury the Lede[23] was released in partnership with BOOM! Studios. It is a queer crime thriller that was inspired by Dunn’s own experiences working as a young reporter at the Boston Globe. Bury the Lede was illustrated by Claire Roe.

Activism

Dunn often speaks out on and in support of queer visibility and queer youth online. In one of her YouTube videos, "#WHYiVLOG? Bisexual Visibility Matters!", she discusses bisexual visibility online and why this empowers her to keep creating content. She states in response to why she creates videos that it's important to her, "...to show queer youth and queer teens that you can grow up and be successful and be happy and not just the character that I am on JBU which is essentially me. But me in real life, to be an example of somebody who is out, who is happy, who had friends, and relationships, and careers. It was really important for me for kids to go online and see that."[24] She continues to create content on JBU and her personal YouTube channel that openly talks about her sexuality and queer visibility.

Dunn has also used her platform to showcase the exploitation and manipulation of power which male celebrities use against young and/or non-famous women, using her position of power as an online celebrity to call out male celebrities who do this and amplify the voices of young women who have experienced these advances.

Personal life

Dunn is bisexual, and polyamorous.[25] Dunn is currently dating singer/songwriter Mal Blum.[26]

gollark: I think both work because English.
gollark: If you drink enough an integer overflow occurs and you become tired again.
gollark: If anything, the US should kidnap people and force them into it.
gollark: It is also probably not very good for actually rehabilitating anyone.
gollark: I don't really like them.

References
  1. "Home". Allison Raskin. Retrieved November 15, 2017.
  2. "I Hate Everyone But You – Gaby Dunn – Macmillan". Retrieved November 15, 2017.
  3. ""Life was always a financial hellscape": Gaby Dunn's "Bad With Money" wants to break th..." August 30, 2016. Retrieved November 15, 2017.
  4. Hess, Amanda (December 6, 2016). "The Best New Podcasts of 2016". Retrieved November 15, 2017 – via nytimes.com.
  5. "Village Voice Web Awards: The Winners!". Village Voice. Retrieved December 16, 2015.
  6. Goodman, Elyssa (December 4, 2009). "Gaby Dunn and the Pursuit of Comedy: Featured Female Start-Up". Her Campus. Retrieved October 21, 2012.
  7. Botwinick, Simeon (April 1, 2011). "From the Top 5 Cutest Maccabeats to 100 Interviews in 1 Year: 15 Questions with Gaby Dunn". The Commentator. Yeshiva University. Archived from the original on January 19, 2013. Retrieved October 21, 2012.
  8. Dunn, Gabby (September 20, 2010). "The Finished List". 100 Interviews. 100interviews.com. Retrieved October 21, 2012.
  9. Weinmann, Karlee (April 12, 2011). "How Gaby Dunn Self-Promoted Her Way To Internet Fame". Open Forum. openforum.com. Retrieved November 5, 2012.
  10. Dunn, Gaby (April 12, 2011). "I crashed a $2,000/plate gala to find Stephen Colbert". Open Salon. salon.com. Archived from the original on July 27, 2013. Retrieved November 5, 2012.
  11. Tenore, Mallary Jean (August 30, 2011). "'100 Interviews' project puts new twist on old adage: Everybody has a story". Poynter. poynter.org. Retrieved November 5, 2012.
  12. Gordon, Kyana (November 12, 2010). "100 Interviews: Gaby Dunn and the Art of Face-to-Face Meeting". psfk.com. PSFK. Retrieved November 5, 2012.
  13. Binder, Shaun (October 5, 2012). "No Fun, Gaby Dunn! An Interview with a Thought Catalog Editor". Uloop: Huffington Post College. Huffington Post. Retrieved November 5, 2012.
  14. Orsini, Lauren Rae (October 4, 2011). "100 Interviews Get People Talking". The Daily Dot. The Daily Dot, LLC. Retrieved November 5, 2012.
  15. Stoeffel, Kat (February 2, 2012). "New York Times Magazine Hires Thought Catalog Writer". The New York Observer. Retrieved November 5, 2012.
  16. "Panoply Media: A Podcast Network from Slate Magazine". www.panoply.fm. Retrieved December 2, 2016.
  17. "Gaby Gets Her Head Examined (aka Plan Bay) from Bad With Money With Gaby Dunn". www.stitcher.com. Retrieved December 2, 2016.
  18. "Tokens For Your Tokens from Bad With Money With Gaby Dunn". www.stitcher.com. Retrieved December 2, 2016.
  19. "You Can Have Millions of Subscribers on YouTube—And Still Be Flat Broke". Fusion. Retrieved December 2, 2016.
  20. Shaytards (October 26, 2016), Vlogumentary, retrieved December 2, 2016
  21. "Finale Rally", Soundcloud, retrieved June 9, 2017
  22. "New Kids' and YA Books: Week of September 4, 2017". PublishersWeekly.com. August 31, 2017. Retrieved September 11, 2017.
  23. "Here's an Exclusive First Look at Gaby Dunn's New Graphic Novel, "Bury the Lede"". Autostraddle. March 12, 2019. Retrieved January 29, 2020.
  24. Gaby Dunn (October 28, 2016), #WHYiVLOG? Bisexual Visibility Matters!, retrieved December 2, 2016
  25. Dunn, Gaby (January 7, 2016). "Polyamorous, Pansexual, and Proud: Why I'm 'So Out and Outspoken'". Women's Health. Retrieved December 2, 2016.
  26. "🌈 G A B Y D U N N 🌈 on Instagram: "big top energy / 📸 @missmanhattanny"". Instagram. Retrieved November 25, 2019.
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