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. 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 changes digitization would bring, including online shopping, the computer in your pocket (thirteen years before the iPhone), email - still only insider Microsoft - and even DeepFakes, including their political risks. She also invented a pioneering web site for women at Sony Interactive 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. After the success of 'Mendelssohn, The Nazis and Me' she continued creating films and digital projects around classical music: 'Beethoven's Ninth' super App for TouchPress, 'Page to Stage' with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and 'The Rewrite of Spring' for the London Symphony Orchestra, as well as '100 Million Musicians' for the BBC and 'How to Build an Orchestra' for the Chipping Campden Festival. An invitation to become a Director's Fellow at the MIT Media Lab led her back to our relationship with technology and in particular, the crucial difference between human, embodied intelligence and that of machines - 'AI'. This became 'Senseless', a digital project and feature documentary. In 2020 she was invited to be Artist in Residence at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, where she made 'Complexity', a film about attempts to make computer models of the vast complexity of nature, with music by Cosmo Sheldrake. She then returned to music in 2022 with 'Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn', a feature documentary co-produced with Mercury Studios, about her 3x great grandmother Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, sister of the composer Felix Mendelssohn, which will launch at festivals in 2023.