PODCAST SERIES SHOWCASING A NEW ORAL HISTORY ARCHIVE
This 8-part series launches in July 2026. Rosie was commissioned to make it for the Feminist Art Making Histories project – a new oral history archive supported the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Irish Research Council. The project team had conducted and recorded interviews with 60 artists, curators and writers who were active across Britain and Ireland in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. The idea behind the podcast was to make those interviews accessible to a wider audience, and provide a jumping off point for researchers to explore the full archive.
Rosie worked with each team member to pick out moments from interviews where women talked on different themes. This involved a huge amount of work reviewing transcripts and listening to long-form interviews to find the most compelling audio. She then crafted each episode from edited clips threaded together with a script commenting on the interviews, that she developed in collaboration with the team. She engaged a sound engineer to clean up the interview recordings which were understandably of variable quality.
It has been a joy working with Rosie. She immediately understood our vision for Feminist Art Lives and found some of the most compelling and rare insights within a vast archive of 50 interviews. Along with her enthusiasm, she has brought a clear-sighted and systematic approach that has made the production enjoyable and stress-free. I wholeheartedly recommend her work.
—Ana Baeza Ruiz, Lecturer and Programme Director for Art Gallery and Museum Studies, University of Manchester
We wanted to share the voice of the women artists we had interviewed beyond an academic audience, making the stories we gathered accessible, while building a narrative about art in Britain and Ireland that goes well beyond what is in museums. We were intimidated by the scale of the task, as well as the practical skills required. Rosie worked collaboratively with each team member to produce a series of eight episodes, helping to shape narratives and to get the tone right for a broad audience. She also managed all aspects of production, postproduction and delivery to a high standard, and most impressively, kept us on track. We couldn’t be happier with the result, which far exceeds our expectations from the quality of the sound to the emotional effects of sharing these stories.
—Amy Tobin,
Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art in the Department of History of Art
University of Cambridge
Podcast series for Tate
Rosie was commissioned by Tate to produce this 6-part mini series to complement the Women In Revolt! exhibition on between November 2023 and August 2025 at Tate Britain, National Galleries of Scotland (Modern) and the Whitworth. The podcast tells the story of art, activism and the women’s movement in the UK in the 1970s and 80s.
Rosie worked closely with the exhibition’s curator Linsey Young to plan the series so that it would cover key themes and stories from the show. She then recorded and conducted interviews with 21 of the featured artists and activists; and crafted each episode from edited excerpts that she threaded together with a script read by Linsey. The podcast was shortlisted for a prestigious International Women’s Podcast Award 2024.
Podcast about Rebel Dykes film and exhibition
This podcast tells the remarkable story of groups of outsider lesbians living in London in the 80s; of the project to present their history to the world in an award-winning unfunded feature documentary and groundbreaking art and archive show; and why this matters to much. It was commissioned by Bijou Stories and Rebel Dykes.
Podcast about lewisham's lost gay pubs
This 2-part podcast tells the story of Lewisham’s lost gay pubs in the 1980s and 90s. It’s a story about finding community; supporting each other through tough times; pubs as safe spaces away from prejudice and hate; and what we lost when those – and so many other – pubs closed. It was commissioned by Bijou Stories and made as part of In Living Memory: A People’s History of Post-War Lewisham.
Podcast about a newly commissioned Children's Opera
We made a series of ten mini-podcasts documenting the production of Paws & Padlocks, a newly commissioned children’s opera by composer Kate Whitley and writer Sabrina Mahfouz. The series follows the process from writing and fundraising through to rehearsals and the final performance.
Paws & Padlocks was commissioned by Blackheath Halls with support from the Arts Council England and a number of other charitable trusts. It premiered at the Blackheath Halls in April 2017. You’ll find more information on the Blackheath Halls website.
Story about a telephone operator
I produced this 4 minute piece a couple of weeks into lockdown, when we were all picking up our phones to communicate with each other. It’s based on a recorded landline conversation with one of my favourite raconteurs, remembering calls through a telephone operator in the Midlands in the 1950s.
Musical credits: My Lady of the Telephone by Sam Ash and Mixed Quintette (1915); Gossip by Devil Music (2017).
Image c1955, from Nick Dewolf Photo archive.
Podcasts for LUSH cosmetics
From the beautiful evocation of a fisherman’s life on the water to the fascinating insights into LUSH’s work reducing packaging waste, the podcasts were a pleasure to listen to.
— Andrew Paine, podcast commissioner for LUSH cosmetics
Here are three podcasts from the Meet the Maker series of mini-documentaries that we produced for LUSH cosmetics, in collaboration with Cathy Haynes. Each one is an audio portrait of a person or team going about their specialist process, giving us a sensory-rich insight into what they’re thinking, doing and sensing as they work.
In Meet the forager, we went out in a boat across Poole harbour with Peter Miles, to forage for the seaweed that LUSH use in their facemasks.
In Meet the innovators we visited the Green Hub at the LUSH factory in Poole to find out how their black pots get recycled. We followed the pots down the production line with machine operators Marc Jordan and Scott Riggs. And we talked to engineer Giles Verdon (pictured), the driving force behind Lush’s recycling vision, to discover why LUSH processes plastic waste differently from other companies.
Portrait of a park
This 6 minute feature tells the story of Burgess Park, South East London, based on recordings made on a Saturday in April 2025. Best listened to with headphones, as I recorded this in stereo with binaural microphones.
© Rosie Oliver 2025. Words, recordings, music and image all my own.