Bob Ostertag’s work cannot easily be summarized or pigeonholed. He has published more than twenty albums of music, seven books, two podcasts, and a feature film.

His writings on contemporary politics have been published on every continent and in many languages, beginning with his work as a journalist covering the civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s. His books cover a wide range of topics, from labor unions to the history of journalism to estrogen and testosterone. His writing has won the “Most Censored Story of the Year” award from Project Censored and the “Most Important Book of the Year’’ designation from The Nation.

He has performed at many of the world’s great concert halls and museums: Lincoln Center (New York), Teatro Colón (Buenos Aires), Strozzi Palace (Firenze), Hiroshima Museum of Art (Japan), Institute for Contemporary Art (London), the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, and more. His radically diverse musical collaborators include the Kronos Quartet, John Zorn, Mike Patton, transgender cabaret icon Justin Vivian Bond, British guitar innovator Fred Frith, EDM DJ Rose, and many others.

He was an original member of the media guerrilla group The Yes Men. He directed, edited and produced Thanks to Hank, a feature documentary on the unsung hero of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco. He produces podcasts, one on poverty in the US and another of queer oral history, and works with Manos Amigues, an LGBT-run soup kitchen in Mexico City, and Kebaya, a shelter for victims of sexual violence in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.