Speaker
Speaker
Speaker
Speaker
21 November
15.55
BEYOND 2023 Wrap-up
15.15
Build it but will they come? The new business of immersive experiences
11.20
Emerging trends in the creative economy: Perspectives from the Global South
Samira Ahmed
BBC
Broadcaster and Journalist
Speaker Biography
Award winning journalist and broadcaster Samira Ahmed presents the BBC’s flagship arts programme Front Row on Radio 4 and Newswatch on BBC1.
In 2023, she made headlines around the world for uncovering the earliest complete concert recording of the Beatles performing in the UK, at Stowe School in 1963 and helped secure its acquisition by the British Library for the nation. Her acclaimed three-part BBC4 documentary series Art of Persia (2020) was one of the first major Western TV series to be filmed in Iran for 40 years. She was named British Broadcasting Press Guild audio presenter of the year in 2020.
Samira was previously a news anchor and correspondent for Channel 4 News, where she won the Stonewall Broadcast of the Year award for her film about the so-called “corrective” rape of lesbian women in South Africa; and for BBC News, where she covered the OJ Simpson case while LA Correspondent.
Her many documentaries explore the intersection of popular culture, science, politics, and social change. They include I Dressed Ziggy Stardust, Laura Ingalls’ America, John Ruskin’s Eurythmic Girls, HG Wells and the H Bomb, The Fundamentalist Queen about Elizabeth Cromwell (wife of Oliver Cromwell) and Disgusted, Mary Whitehouse, for which she spent months studying the diaries of the famous morality campaigner.
Samira is a trustee of the Centre for Women’s Justice and on the advisory board of the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford and the editorial review board of Doctor Who magazine. She is an honorary fellow of St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford and holds honorary doctorates in law and arts, from UEA University of East Anglia, City – University of London and Kingston University.