Eliza Hobson
​As board member of the Seacoast Jazz Society, Eliza Hobson brings significant credentials and a passion for jazz to her role. Her knowledge of jazz came to her through her father, Manhattan-based jazz critic and trombonist Wilder Hobson, author of the book American Jazz Music, who contributed his jazz column “The Amen Corner” to the Saturday Review magazine.

For the past 18 years, at One Sky Community Services in Portsmouth, Eliza led programs to improve quality in and raise awareness of the long term care needs of persons with developmental disabilities. Her interest in this work was sparked when, as a broadcast journalist, she followed the stories of people confined in New Hampshire's Laconia State School and subsequently released to live productive lives in their local communities. Eliza reported and produced news and documentaries for 20 years in independent and public broadcasting and won national awards for her work. 

With a BA in Communication Arts: Radio-TV-Film from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she got her start as an early jazz disc jockey at independent, listener-sponsored radio station WORT-FM in Madison. For a time, she spun jazz discs from all decades, while developing journalism skills in the station's budding news department. She moved on to report news for WGBH-FM in Boston and worked at Boston University’s WBUR-FM as a Science Reporter for National Public Radio’s Science Unit, where she won an award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science for a story on research in the development of the human brain.

Eliza was part of a three-person team that created the first news department at WEVO-FM, Public Radio for New Hampshire, in Concord, NH. While there, she won the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s Public Radio Program Award for a story on New Hampshire's Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest.

At NH Public Television, she reported and produced news programs and documentaries.

She was employed by the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour as a freelance reporter and contributed documentaries to the Wisconsin Collaborative, which aired on PBS.

​Eliza loves many forms of music, and recently joined the South Berwick Community Chorus where she sings as an alto.