It's Been So Long

Join hosts Alex Thebez and Elizabeth Renstrom as they navigate the joys and challenges of a creative life in their new podcast "It's Been So Long." Listen in as they catch up and invite other creatives into honest dialogues about artistic pursuits, professional challenges, and the ever-evolving journey of making a living through creative work. Each episode features candid conversations that explore what it truly means to grow, build and sustain a creative life.

In this episode, recorded in March 2025 we are joined by esteemed editor, curator and producer Elizabeth Krist.

Elizabeth Krist was a Senior Photo Editor with National Geographic magazine for over 20 years, and is a founding member of the Visual Thinking Collective. She is on the boards of Women Photograph and the W. Eugene Smith Fund, advises the Eddie Adams Workshop and Apple, and is a contributing editor for Virginia Quarterly Review. 

Elizabeth has collaborated on five Photoville installations--In This Together, from the 2025 festival, featured the work of 50 alumni of the Eddie Adams Workshop. National Geographic‘s Women of Vision, 100 images by 11 photographers, traveled to 10 museums and several festivals. She also curated exhibitions on China and ancient Greece for National Geographic, as well as an online auction for Christie‘s. 

She helps program speakers for the Eddie Adams Workshop, a role she performed for National Geographic’s Photography Seminar for over a dozen years. She also co-curated CatchLight’s 2023 Visual Storytelling Summit. She has been grateful to interview speakers and moderate panels for the International Center of Photography, Leica, National Geographic, and The Griffin Museum of Photography.

Elizabeth has freelanced for The New Yorker, the travel quarterly Smithsonian Journeys, and Magnum Photos, and has produced stories for Literary Hub. Before joining National Geographic, she worked at Fortune and at Asia. She edited the books Women of Vision, Pope Francis and the Vatican, and works with individual photographers on their book edits--most recently with Lynn Johnson, and also with Michael Yamashita for books on China and Japan. She has edited visuals for Magnum Foundation and CatchLight publications, and wrote the text for a National Geographic special issue.

For more of Elizabeth Krist's work please visit https://visura.co/elizabethkrist/about

Audio by Audio UX NYC

Cover art by David Preli

Theme music by Robert Karpay