Robyn Ravlich

As a young poet and performance artist Robyn joined the ABC in the '70s as a specialist trainee. She had studied Fine Arts, English and Education at Sydney University, where she had worked as a tutor in Environmental Design and as a part-time lecturer in Post Object Art and Intermedia in the Faculty of Architecture.

Initially, she worked on the legendary Radio National program Lateline and produced John Hinde's weekly film review and two series of the Boyer Lectures with Bernard Smith and Tom Fitzgerald.

She has worked as a radio producer and presenter on a range of innovative and specialist programs for Radio National and ABC Classic FM, such as Broadband, Doubletake, Surface Tension, and The Listening Room.

She was a founding member of The Listening Room team and its Executive Producer from 1995, collaborating with composers, writers, performers and sound artists to produce features and acoustic art works as well as making her own programs.

She is a passionate and skilled feature maker who explores a diversity of rich themes and interweaves the elements of her programs with a distinctive sound signature.

Among her radio features are The Eternity Enigma about Arthur Stace; Chatwinesque, about the cult of Bruce Chatwin; The Raft of the Medusa, a meditation on ethno-nationalism and war in Bosnia and Rwanda; and Unlaced: A Passion for Shoes, which was inspired by dreams and fantasies about footwear (from bespoke creations in the archives of the Louvre in Paris, to shoeless urchins, sad single shoes, and forensic investigations of shoe impressions at crime scenes).

She has produced feature programs for Poetica, including Prévert Performed on the poetry of Jacques Prévert; Xanana Gusmao: President Poet, and Mood Indigo in the Colours series.

Robyn was the Organizer of the 27th International Feature Conference hosted in Sydney by ABC Radio in 2001, and was also President of the Radio Documentary jury of the Prix Italia held in Bologna in 2001.

In 2002 her documentary about asylum seekers: On the Raft, All at Sea, was awarded the Human Rights Radio Award for 2002 and the United Nations Association of Australia Media Peace Prize for Radio 2002.

Robyn delights in reading, yoga, swimming at her favourite Jibbon Beach in Sydney's Royal National Park (and on rare occasions in the glorious Adriatic sea of her father's ancestors); travel, textiles, paintings, shoes, films. She has a strong visual imagination and is drawn to the extremities of landscape for inspiration - from the urban environment and the seaside to the dramatic red geography surrounding Broken Hill, NSW, where she was born and grew up.