Laura Sheeter
“Running a female-led podcasting company, it's easy to forget what a minority women are, both in business leadership and in podcasting. We need to lift each other up and champion women - so they can make their voices heard. The women's podcast festival is a brilliant opportunity to make those connections, and forge a network of formidable mutual support.”
Laura Sheeter
Laura is the Co-Founder & Creative Director of Chalk & Blade. She spent more than 10 years working as a news reporter in the UK, USA and former USSR - reporting on everything from the fate of abandoned Soviet military bunkers, to the villages with only grandparents and grandchildren left behind in the exodus of Eastern European workers to the rest of the EU, the disastrous Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and the rebuilding of New Orleans in the years after Hurricane Katrina. After a brief career shift, working as a Russian to English translator, Laura and her business partner, Ruth Barnes, set up Chalk & Blade - one of the first podcast-only production companies in the UK - in 2016, before podcasting appeared to be a business at all.
The company makes premium branded content for brands and organisations including Net a Porter, Adidas and the UN, the hugely popular TV companion series Obsessed With for the BBC (now also a show on BBC3), and award-winning, critically acclaimed narratives including In Search of Black History with Bonnie Greer (Audible), The Messenger (Audible), Hunting Ghislaine (Global) and Taking on Putin - an independent production with John Sweeney. At the festival Laura is excited to be moderating the narrative podcasting panel.