Jeff Greenwald

Jeff Greenwald (born March 6, 1954) is an American author, photographer, and monologist. He now resides in Oakland, California.

Biography

On Greenwald's first trip to Asia in 1979, he designed urban playgrounds for UNICEF and the Nepal Children's Organization. Arriving several months later in Thailand during the Khmer civil war, he served as a volunteer water engineer at Khao-I-Dang—-the largest of the Cambodian refugee camps. These early travel experiences shaped his career and philosophy about travel. In the Spring of 1983, Greenwald was awarded a journalism fellowship by the Rotary International Foundation, and departed for a second trip to Asia. Over the course of 16 months he lived in Kathmandu, Nepal, and made excursions to the Himalaya, India, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, Japan, Java, and Bali. His articles about those trips appeared in the magazines GEO and Islands. It was around this time that he began writing Mr. Raja’s Neighborhood: Letters from Nepal. Four years later, his travels in Nepal and Tibet would inspire Shopping for Buddhas, first published by Harper and Row in 1990. A later edition, published in the Lonely Planet "Journeys" series, won the Lowell Thomas Gold Award for Best Travel Book of 1996. A 25th Anniversary edition, which includes Nepal's political upheavals since 1995, was added. The first was posted on January 6, 1994, from Oaxaca, Mexico. Nineteen more followed. Consequently, Greenwald is hailed as an internet pioneer for creating the first international travel "blog" (five years. before the term was coined) on the World Wide Web. In 2003, Greenwald co-founded the organization Ethical Traveler, of which he serves as the Executive Director. A project of the Earth Island Institute, Ethical Traveler is a global community dedicated to exploring the ambassadorial potential of world travel, as outlined in Greenwald's "Thirteen Tips for the Accidental Ambassador."

Using his many travel adventures as material, Greenwald developed a one-man show in 2003 called "Strange Travel Suggestions." The show, which premiered at The Marsh in San Francisco to critical acclaim, is an improvised monologue. Each performance's stories and arc is determined by an audience volunteer's spin of an on-stage "wheel of fortune". A more recent show, "108 Beloved Objects," based on Greenwald's 2021 book of the same name, premiered in San Leandro in September 2022 as part of Brian Copeland's "Best of SF Solo" performance series.

Thanks to a casting director who was a fan of his writing, Greenwald made a cameo appearance as Security Guard on the "Jail" episode of the NBC sitcom NewsRadio.