Sheila Hayman

Sheila Hayman started her career in the Science department of the BBC, where within a few years she directed the QED documentaries, 'Stammering: Cured!' and 'Robots, Taking the Biscuit' about what it would take to build a domestic robot that could bring you a biscuit with your tea. This fascination for the meeting place of tech and popular culture led to 'Horizon: Finding a Voice' about talking computers for the speechless, '40 Minutes: Killer Bimboes on Fleet St' about women editors of tabloid newspapers, and then the two-part 'A Short History of the Future' for Channel 4, a visionary look at images of the future in the city and in space (both studied at Cambridge University'). She was then hired as Senior Director on 'Network 7' which won a BAFTA for 'most original series'. Shortly after, she was awarded the BAFTA Fulbright Fellowship which took her to California just as the digital revolution began. Introduced to the Internet by Joichi Ito, now Director of MIT's Media Lab, she grasped its implications and depicted them in 'Horizon: The Electronic Frontier', the first network documentary about the change digitization would bring, including the disappearance of high streets, the rise of online communities, hand held computers, mobile computing and data sharing (and an early interview with Bill Gates). She also worked with Peter Gabriel on musical computer interfaces, invented a pioneering web site for women at Sony Interactive (including a clothes search engine, before search engines existed) and directed a segment of the 1996 Academy Awards. Back in London she had two children with Patrick Uden, published three novels (one a lead title with Hodder Headline), and then returned to television with 'Mendelssohn, The Nazis and Me' in 2010, nominated for the Grierson Award for Best Arts Documentary. In 2011 she wrote, produced and directed 'Heroes of the Enlightenment' for an audience of 150m with ARTE, BBC Worldwide and Beijing TV, and in 2014 she produced, co-scripted, interviewed and archive researched the drama documentary 'A Sicilian Dream', starring Alain de Cadenet and Francesco Da Mosto. She also began creating digital projects around classical music, directing 'Beethoven's Ninth' for TouchPress, creating and directing 'Page to Stage' with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and co-creating, directing and writing 'The Rewrite of Spring' for the London Symphony Orchestra. Her most recent production is 'How to Build an Orchestra' for the Chipping Campden Festival.