Belén Arronte 2020
Belén Arronte
Belén is the pan European regional marketing lead for media solutions at Sony Professional. She is accountable for the regional marketing strategy including, regional A&P BGT and tactical funds. Her team, the regional marketing managers deliver all the in-field marketing activities such as events, co-marketing plans with channel partners and key account marketing. Belén is a passionate marketeer, with over 12 years in different marketing roles in Sony, where she started in product marketing in Spain, moving into Iberia field marketing and then pan-European roles as comms manager or pricing and promotions manager. Despite her career in marketing, Belén loves maths and logic, having studied electronic engineering, which makes her enjoy the current marketing landscape, where digital marketing relies so heavily on data analysis.
Bethan Wilkin 2020
Bethan Wilkin
Bethan has recently been promoted to Head of Content Delivery at ITV. She started her career at ITV as a Content Workflow Co-ordinator and Scheduler within Broadcast Operations. Most of her ITV career has been spent managing content for the broadcaster across several platforms including linear, online and pay and distribution. In 2018 she became Content Delivery Manager, managing a busy operational team who restore, transfer and deliver content both within ITV and externally. The team support other broadcasters, production companies, post houses, public sector organisations, archive researchers and private collectors.
Emily Bergun
Emily has been a broadcast support engineer at Sky since September of last year, prior to this she was a student studying Broadcast Systems Engineering at Southampton Solent University. This is her first role in the industry and is excited to further her professional skills, as well as taking on as much wisdom as possible from others during her time on the mentoring scheme!
Hannah Davy 2020
Hannah Davy
Hannah works as a project engineer specialising in video over IP and networking. She graduated from Southampton Solent University in 2018 with a first class honours degree in (BSc) Broadcast Systems Engineering. She took a placement year during her university course to work in the broadcast industry then worked part time while she finished her degree. She then moved to her current job where she has spent the last 2 years. Outside of work, Hannah enjoys a wide range of activities such as hiking, camping, playing video games and playing piano. She loves spending time with her dog Obi and her husband George and spends a lot of her time out walking in the New Forest National Park.
Hayley Webster 2020
Hayley Webster
Hayley is a freelance multi camera director at Sky News and vision mixer at Sky Sports News. She has been at Sky since graduating from Birmingham City University five and a half years ago. She started in the Ingest department as a media operator, recording and quality checking incoming feeds and has trained in various roles across the company since. Outside of work she is a mentor for ‘The Girls Network’ and is passionate about their goal in helping girls from low income backgrounds to succeed at school and gain better opportunities within the working world. She is also a fundraising ambassador for The British Heart Foundation, trying to find different ways to raise more money for the charity.
Hannah Price 2020
Hannah Price
Hannah started out her career in the broadcast Industry in 2012 at Grass Valley as support coordinator. Through half a dozen years at GV, Hannah has gained experience in account management and project coordinator roles. After working in the service & support sector for several years, Hannah was eager to understand the broadcast Industry from a different perspective, which is when she decided to make the move from working for a manufacturer to an authorised reseller. In 2018, Hannah joined ES Broadcast to embark on a new challenge as business process manager. ES Broadcast specialise in equipment sales and systems integration. Hannah is responsible for documenting standard operating procedures within ES Broadcast, identifying and implementing improvement initiatives, and delivering training required to support the team quickly get up to speed with new processes.
Joanna Taylor
Joanna is a software engineer at Sky, working on their various pay lite propositions, including Now TV and, more recently, the brand new US streaming service Peacock, which is launching in April. Joanna has had an extremely varied career. She studied law at the University of Southampton, but quickly discovered her favourite part of the degree was writing. On graduating, she began a career as a journalist, working as a writer – and later an editor – at various local and national newspapers and magazines, including the Sunday Mirror and Independent. She then completely pivoted into a new career by starting her own business as a self- employed personal trainer. Her unique training style quickly saw her build a loyal group of clients and she even starred in an exercise DVD with fitness model Nell McAndrew. Sadly, a health issue forced Joanna to leave the fitness industry. But taking adaptation in her stride, it wasn’t long before she found a new career – this time in tech. Through her husband, who works in the tech industry, she attended several conferences such as Cisco Live and noticed a strong lack of women working in the field. Never one to shy away from a challenge, Joanna decided this needed to change and what better way than by starting with herself. Shortly after, serendipitously, she saw an advert in a magazine for Sky’s Get Into Tech Scheme, which helps women to transition into tech careers to address imbalance. She applied, and was accepted, for the scheme which, three months later, led to a job offer at Sky. Joanna has now been at Sky for two years and has worked on front end tech such a Now TV’s My Account web applications, a mobile app for Sky’s Tech Conference and is now in a back end team which handles the logic behind all the pay lite products in Sky’s catalogue. Combining her love of the media and technology has really been the best of both worlds for Joanna and she is excited to see where her career in the broadcast industry goes from here.
Jesse Milverton 2020
Jesse Milverton
Jesse is the broadcast media manager working in the broadcast technology team (since September 2019) at Channel 4 Television where she is responsible for the team that delivers programs, access services and edit scheduling for 4Music. Her daily role includes supporting and developing operational workflows within business project development, live programming, post-production and ingest management. She spends a lot of time working on various projects especially focusing on new technology and its implementation. She has a passion for reading including reviewing pre-published books from science to leadership, to technology to fiction books for publishers and authors. She regards her most recent achievement as becoming a guest lecturer for King's University on digital asset management in the modern workplace.
Karishma Bolakee
Karishma has been a vision mixer for over 5 years, starting at the Roundhouse and then working for various established streaming companies. Multi-skilled, she has worked across film and tv in both production and post-production but most enjoys the excitement of directing and live cutting to an online audience. She is keen to channel her experiences of being a BAME and female vision mixer into public/panel speaking to help others.
Katia Florescul
Katia is a graduate from the University of Greenwich with background in events, marketing, digital design and web design. After discovering the ever-changing media world, she decided to join BASE Media Cloud as a sales and marketing coordinator which piqued her interest even more. After less than a year she is now solely responsible for all marketing, press and events coverage for BASE Media Cloud. She also finds the time to assist the sales and operations department of the business. Her experience working with major media industry events such as IBC, as well as bespoke events with their partners at IBM makes her a perfect choice in growing the BASE Media Cloud brand.
Laura Light 2020
Laura Light
Laura has worked in the media and entertainment industry since 2014. Her career began volunteering for a media production charity then in 2015 Laura began her career in broadcast working as a production apprentice at BBC Cymru Wales. In 2017 Laura was recognised in the ‘Apprentice of the Year 2017' awards for her commitment, perseverance and her ability to take the initiative. She was awarded QSA 'Creative Industry Apprentice of the Year (Level 3) and was given the opportunity to become an apprentice ambassador. To broaden her experience, Laura took a new role with media technology vendor Object Matrix , an award winning software company that pioneered object storage and the modernisation of media archives. Since then, Laura has been able to further her knowledge of media technology and grow into her recently appointed role of Marketing Manager. Within this role Laura has had the opportunity to shape the marketing strategy for Object Matrix, travel internationally, build and nurture new relationships and gain new experiences to progress herself further. Laura takes pride in her personal development and is undertaking further marketing professional qualifications whilst working full time. She is very excited to be part of a programme such as Rise, which is helping the industry become more accessible to women like herself. Laura spends her free time playing music, shopping in the city, binge-watching tv shows whilst cwtching her cat, and baking cakes.
Laura McManus
Laura is the programme operations executive within global operations at BBC Studios. Having co-authored the company’s Content Delivery Book, she works with production companies to advise and guide on the distribution deliverables required to take programmes to international audiences, and achieve global moments with key partners such as Amazon or Netflix. Laura believes in building strong ties with post production and facility houses to ensure technical standards are met, and to continue the conversation about new broadcast technologies. When not watching or talking about TV, Laura can be found practising Spanish or reading a book, and runs her work book group (if you’d like any recommendations, let her know). She also volunteers with Doorstep Library, a charity that encourages children to develop a love of reading.
Lauren Smithers 2020
Lauren Smithers 2020
Lauren has worked in the post-production world for nearly 6 years now, starting as an office runner who had no clue about the glamorous world of television and after quickly becoming enamoured with it, successfully climbed her way up the ranks. She has been a technician, technical coordinator, MCR manager and is currently now head of post at Argonon. She enjoys all aspects of her role now but can still be found sometimes under desks getting her hands dirty and sorting technical issues. She feels lucky to be part of a team that pushes each other constantly to be the best they can be and is glad they enjoy the work as much as she does. Lauren prides herself on thinking out of the box into new concepts and ways of working that will make everyone’s life more efficient. Lauren enjoys a challenge and feels that this is the key to a happy work life balance. When not at work problem solving and investigating new ways of getting the best out of her staff, she can be found in the gym or signing herself up to charity events such as half marathons and boxing matches! She looks forward to being part of the Rise mentoring programme and hopes to share exciting new ideas and thoughts with the other mentees.
Laurissa Yeung Shea 2020
Laurissa Yeung Shea
Utilising skills ranging from an Editor, to a Transmission Controller, Laurissa transitioned across to a broadcaster where she progressed from a junior Presentation Scheduler to a managing position. This particular role opened up opportunities in leadership and project management where on a day to day she managed her own team who oversaw a portfolio of UK commercial channels, as well as leading technical projects including UK and International Channel Launches, System and Workflow Migrations, and Channel Management system development. After more than a decade, she took the decision to depart the company in order to spend time with her husband and 2 children, as well as taking a moment to reconsider her next steps to shape her career further. During this time, she resumed the busy multi-tasking role as a mother, before re-training and gaining a BCS Foundation as a Business Analyst. In parallel with re-training, she was approached by an Augmented Reality Gaming company and undertook a challenge which required her skills to implement a new department capturing video data for an augmented reality and computer vision research project. The role required her to learn operational techniques of a custom-engineered camera unit, source a team of freelance camera operators, and providing highly customised training to a large team using specific camera techniques to operate the camera unit, before arriving at Discovery Networks Europe, where she recently joined as a Business Analyst. Her role in this fast-paced and exciting department includes problem solving technical and business workflows, while collaborating with people across the different international regions of the company. Laurissa has always had the appetite for knowledge, and to share knowledge whether professionally, or personally. Even with over 20 years’ experience gained in the Media and Broadcast Industry, she would like to be able to show her children that no matter where you are in your life, you can make a positive change for yourself, and learn skills which can in turn help others. The Mentorship Scheme with Rise has come about at a time where we could all use support, Laurissa feels extremely fortunate to be able to join this exciting journey with a like-minded network of people.
Lee Lim 2020
Lee Yee Lim
Lee Yee is currently work as sales administration in Ideal Systems (Singapore) Pte Ltd. Ideal Systems is a System Integrator for Broadcast and Audio Visual Industry. She has been supporting sales team with numerous contracts and projects. She has recently received a certification in Chartered Human Resource Administrator (CHRA) from HRSingapore and started her new role as SEA HR Executive on top of her current roles.
Lula Walmsley 2020
Lula Walmsley
Lula is an account executive at Bubble Agency, she joined the company after completing a degree in Business and Marketing in 2019. Having recently joined the industry, Lula has entered an amazing environment to initiate a career in the broadcasting and technology sector, and is eager to explore the industry further. Lula’s responsibility include working with client’s from across the globe providing PR and communications support across the broadcasting and technology sector. Prior to working at Bubble, having gained experience as Redbull’s student brand manager, Lula brings a passion for culture, creativity and a customer centred mindset, and is seeking further guidance with the Rise mentoring scheme.
Lynn Marcus 2020
Lynn Marcus
Lynn Marcus is employed by M2A Media, a market leader in cloud-based video technology and live-streaming services, as financial controller and head of HR. She has seen the company grow from 9 to 42 staff in less than 3 years. Her role encompasses the business, administrative and human resource aspects of this fast growing company. The challenge she faces is to support the transition of the business from startup to SME, building on its strengths whilst introducing enhanced systems and controls. She worked in accounting and auditing roles early in her career, moving to a variety of financial management positions. As MD of a leisure company she led an £8m management buyout attempt, before taking a career break of sixteen years to bring up her family of three sons. After four years spent living in Toronto, she returned to the UK and commenced at M2A in 2017.
Nicola Parr 2020
Nicola Parr
Nicola has been working as a main station design engineer at Arqiva for 2 years. Currently, she is on her graduate training scheme, which will finish in September 2020. She goes to various main TV masts across the UK and designs, implements and tests the equipment that goes on site. She works with a large team to ensure free-to-air TV and radio is always broadcast and loves being able to get stuck in to a complex project. She has always been very keen to promote women into technical and engineering roles; and volunteers as a STEM Ambassador in her spare time.
Nicola Stansfield 2020
Nicola Stansfield
Nicola Stansfield an experienced and enthusiastic studio director, producer and vision mixer with abilities in many broadcast areas. She is the creator of the short form show Fit Phonics broadcast on Nickelodeon's Nick Jr2 in 2014 and is currently video operations manager at The Financial Times dealing with location, livestream and studio based productions for FT.com.
Peggy Rieckmann 2020
Peggy Rieckmann
Peggy Rieckmann is a client services manager for the continental European region at Vubiquity, which she joined about a year ago as a client services supervisor for the DACH region. She is responsible for managing an team of coordinators delivering VOD content to different platforms across the continent. She got started her career in the sector by taking on organisational roles in small professional and semi-professional productions alongside University where she studied Cultural Studies, Media and the Arts (M.A.) in Germany. After graduating in 2015 Peggy moved to London where, after a period of language-focused roles, she found a role as a TV Listings writer for EPGs at Red Bee Media. After nearly a year in the company she progressed to the role of production manager, managing a team of listings writers delivering to various platforms. From there she moved on to Vubiquity to explore a new area of the sector and is she is currently taking on more responsibilities.
Rosa Monica Cangco
Monica is currently working as Lead Engineer in Benchmark Broadcast Systems, Singapore. She was a software developer before switching her profile to Broadcast Media. She started as Customer Support Engineer at Benchmark Philippines and was part of project installation and onsite support for one of the broadcasting stations in Philippines. In 2015, she moved to Benchmark Singapore and has been part of the Implementation and Support team. She handles technical support for broadcasting stations in Asia and Oceania. In addition to regular support tasks, she travels to customers sites in Asia for Installation and User/Admin Training. She gets involved in pre-sales activities conducting proof of concept and demo for new opportunities.
Rosa Pereiro 2020 mentee
Rosa Pereiro
Rosa Pereiro currently holds the position of Solutions Director for Asia in Brightcove. In her current role, she leverages her experience in large-scale media organisations to build innovative custom solutions that help customers achieve their business goals. Prior joining Brightcove, she was a Space Engineer in Darmstadt (Germany) and a Pre-Sales Engineer Consultant in Paris. She moved to Singapore in 2015, where she worked as and as Project Manager, Solution Architect, Pre-sales Engineer and Sales Leader for big broadcaster and worldwide media companies. Rosa has two masters in Telecommunications Engineering and is passionate about the technology behind transmitting information. Besides streaming video, Rosa loves art, books and sports, and she is currently learning to become a Yoga teacher. She also enjoys discovering new cultures when travelling and getting to learn new languages.
Rosanna Prada 2020
Rosanna Prada
Rosanna graduated in Audio and Music Technology at The University of the West of England (Bristol) in 2013. She then started work as a gallery technical operator and sound operator at SIS in Milton Keynes broadcasting live horse and greyhound racing. Rosanna moved to Leeds in 2017 to join Perform Group (now DAZN Group) specialising in live production operations. In 2018 she moved to their engineering side as a broadcast engineer. This role involves supporting technical aspects of live production and when required mixing sound on the wide range of live sports content being delivered to their OTT platform ‘DAZN.’ Since becoming an engineer, Rosanna has worked on a variety of projects at DAZN across the technical aspects of production workflows. She also provides third line support of key systems within the broadcast environment. In addition to her work as a broadcast engineer, Rosanna is an active member of both the Audio Engineering Society and Association of Motion Picture Sound. She is also a keen musician.
Sarah McLaughlin
Sarah is a Multi Skilled Operator on the Professional Squash Association World Tour. She moved to Leeds to work for the PSA after graduating her masters in Broadcast Production from the National Film School Of Ireland. She travels the world live broadcasting tournaments to BT Sport , Sky Nz, Worldfeed and more. On tour she is a replay operator in various systems creating live replays, packages, highlights and closers for 14+ events since beginning. She is an aspiring sports director and has had the chance to direct some early rounds and quarter final matches on tour with a full broadcast team.
Saskia Hook
Saskia is in her last rotation on the BT graduate scheme as a Product Manager in the BT Media and Broadcast division. She is hoping to start her permanent role as Product Manager of TV Outside Broadcast at the end of the summer. The BT Grad Scheme has seen Saskia complete rotations as a SME Commercial Trading Manager and a Product Manager of Mobile Indoor Small Cells and Virtualisation, enabling her to gain a range of skills to hit the ground running in BT M&B. Growing up as a competitive cyclist and having completed a BSc in Sports Science and Management at Loughborough University, Saskia has always loved not only playing sport, but watching it too. This is where her interest in media and technology was born and understanding how small changes can enable us to go the extra mile for our customers and ourselves. Saskia is excited to be part of the Rise mentoring scheme to champion women in technology and expand her knowledge and network of media and broadcast from some of the industry’s very best. She hopes this will help her to keep her products current and innovative whilst striving towards the future, but also supporting her personally as she enters the next exciting stage of her career.
Sneha 2020
Sneha Gopee
Sneha came to the UK in 2011 from Mauritius to study MEng Communication Engineering. That is where she discovered her passion for networking. In her third year, she interned during the summer at Arqiva. This was her first introduction to the world of Broadcasting. After graduating in 2015, Sneha has joined BT Media and Broadcast on a graduate scheme that lasted for 2 years, after which she progressed within the same team. Her day to day job resolves around designing networks for customers such as BBC, ITV, Arqiva, Premiere League Productions. Sneha is trilingual, she enjoys cooking and trying new cuisines and in her spare time she keeps fit either by regularly attending the gym or practising yoga at home.
Sophia Hazari 2020
Sophia Hazari
Sophia is a Transmission Lead at Discovery Inc. and is in her third role since 2017. Starting as a transmission operator for fully automated channels, she quickly moved onto the excitement of live sports television for Eurosport and Nordic entertainment channels. A recent promotion means she is now responsible for maintaining the scheduled playout of these channels in the London Technology Hub, as well as the execution of live sports events. She’s enthusiastic about the operational nature of her job and is enjoying her first step into leadership. Before starting her career, Sophia studied Biology at the University of Nottingham. She decided to go into broadcasting after spending much of her time taking part in the university’s live events and television societies and trying all they had to offer. Through this she gained valuable experience with placements at Sky and volunteered at the Edinburgh TV Festival for several years. Outside of work, Sophia is a mentor to a young child, an avid reader, gym-goer and language learner, all of which satisfy her thirst for knowledge
Sophie Finlay 2020
Sophie Finlay
Sophie is currently a lead bookings coordinator for Timeline Television based at BT Sport where she has been for almost 5 years. Starting her career in Soho post houses, she then moved on to the broadcasting side of production. Sophie is a well driven individual who enjoys building relationships with new clients or staff while providing a professional and high standard of work.
Urszula Czarnota
Urszula started in broadcast and post-production 5 years ago after completing her Masters in Producing Film and Television at Royal Holloway, University of London. Throughout those 5 years she has enjoyed coordinating a wide array of workflows that touched upon various parts of the broadcast and post-production chain including localisation of content, DCPs, and media access services. She is now focusing on steering her professional development in a more technical direction. After completing an Agile Project Management certification, Urszula recently started her first official project management role at ABS Broadcast. She is responsible for the management and delivery of the bulk of projects that come to ABS Broadcast from complex channel migrations to new graphics creation and implementation.
Victoria Jameson
Victoria graduated from Newcastle University in 2018 with a first class degree in film and media. She started her career in inside sales at Avid; an industry leading technology company specialising in video editing, audio editing and music notation software. Working with enterprise customers in the UK, Ireland and India, Victoria ensures every aspect of the sale runs smoothly from quote creation to delivery. Her responsibilities have grown to include organising and running marketing events across the country. Prior to this role, Victoria volunteered as production assistant for various companies and events and undertook an internship as a videographer for an education company. She has always been passionate about the creative industries and their accessibility to women; therefore, she is excited to be a part of the Rise mentoring programme and further her career.
