Curating

Francesca Panetta is Curator of Sheffield DocFest’s Alternate Realities programme – the festival’s showcase exhibition and programme for immersive documentary and non-fiction forms including virtual (VR), augmented (AR), mixed reality (MR), 360° video, games, web docs, motion comic, moving image/expanded cinema and experiences using artificial intelligence. 

She programmes the public exhibition as well as the day long summit open to public and industry including panels, keynotes and presentations on the state of the immersive and interactive non-fiction industry. 

Experimental Storytelling

Technology opens up new possibilities engaging with audiences. Each new platform has its own specific affordances and Francesca spends time experimenting and finding the new storytelling methodologies for each.

Her virtual reality work has explored embodied and first person storytelling, her augmented reality work challenges our perception of place altering it by layering in media, and her AI work investigates synthetic media and the blurring of reality.

Public Speaking

From Google to MOMA, from the Lincoln Center to Cannes Lions, Francesca delivers keynotes, moderates panels and hosts workshops around the world.

She talks to journalists and editors about innovating in newsrooms, finding new formats for newspapers and broadcasters to find new audiences and experiment in what their output can look like.

At film and documentary festivals, Panetta talks about what the future for these forms can take and the practicalities of making them – from storyboarding, to work flow to fundraising.

For audio makers, Panetta hosts workshops and talks to discuss innovation in sound – from Audio AR, to Voice, to podcasting she has been asked to talk about the Future of Radio for over a decade.

Creative Audio

Francesca Panetta is a multi-award winning radio producer and sound artist. She’s known for her richly layered through -composed sound work and experimental formats.

Francesca started her career as a trainee sound assistant at the BBC. Merging her classical music training with her love for feature making and technology focused her early career in experimental radio.

She moved from radio to podcasting when iPods had just been created in 2006 moving from the BBC to the Guardian to work as an audio producer launching shows on British Islamic Life, Politics and Culture. As Head of Audio she led the podcast team pushing the department to explore what audio could look like as the podcast form developed through the decade.

Alongside her Guardian work, she launched her own podcast the Hackney Podcast, drew a global audience and won awards around the world. Now she runs a production company with Lucy Greenwell focusing on Audio AR and radio art.

Interactive Documentaries

As Special Projects Editor at the Guardian, Francesca was tasked with experimenting in new forms of storytelling.

In 2013 she launched Firestorm, a Guardian interactive magazine piece which explored the onslaught and aftermath of a devastating brush fire in Tasmania. The team took a now-iconic photograph of the Holmes family huddling under a jetty as a starting point. Firestorm follows the Holmeses through their fight to survive, combining video, interactive graphics, ambient sound, and magazine-style copy into an interactive experience unified by downward scrolling.

As special projects editor she continued to direct projects such as the Shirt on Your Back an interactive documentary about the dangers of the global garment industry, Olympic Bodies profiling 31 of Britain’s 2012 Olympians, and an interactive and global guide to the First World War.

In 2014, she partnered the Guardian with the National Film Board of Canada to direct Seven Digital Deadly Sins.

Audio AR

In 2010, Francesca began to experiment with what technology could mean for audio with a series of Audio AR apps which triggered stories dependent on your location using GPS data.

Setting up Hackney Productions, she launched Hackney Hear in 2011which won awards around the world. Commissioned by the Arts Council of England, it portrayed a rapidly changing area of East London through oral history stories, interviews and commissioned poems, short stories and music layered and woven together over a square mile of London Fields and Broadway Market.

She then launched Phantom Production to make a series of Location based audio apps including Soho Stories, for the National Trust, Diamond Street, for writer Rachel Lichenstein set in the historic jewellery quarter of Hatton Gardens and Boardwalk Stories from Sandy, a walking tour ap produced by Panetta and Benjamen Walker and Francesca Panetta telling the stories of people who were affected by Superstorm Sandy.