What motivates you to serve on the PANA Board?

Helping people develop has been a recurring theme throughout my professional career: from 15 years as a Management Consultant, Coach and Organisational Psychologist for a Big Four Professional Services firm, through to my more recent career as a voice actor and audio engineer. This passion for development is primarily why I’m running. I love designing courses and resources and adore mentoring and coaching.

Candidate Statement

If I have a professional superpower, it’s taking something complicated, working out how it actually works, and turning it into a course, resource, process or system that others can use, and thus I would work on Programming as one of my two committee responsibilities. My corporate history lends itself well to board responsibility. Before returning to my original training in acting and audio, my work ranged across learning and development, coaching, organisational diagnostics and behavioural science; I led teams, worked with senior leaders, designed large-scale development programmes, and built an international behavioural-science community that grew to 600+ people across 35 countries. I also spent a year on the board of the UK’s Association for Business Psychology. Organisational design, research, needs analysis and asking whether something actually works are familiar territory to me, and so Governance & Nominating will be the second committee I intend to work on.

I also provide a particularly technical perspective. I call myself a voice actor and audio engineer, not a narrator: while much of my performance time is spent narrating, most of my income comes from engineering, and many of my auditions are for neither! I believe engineering knowledge is underrepresented in narrator organisations, and there is room for education that helps people understand what technical requirements actually mean, rather than simply repeating specifications.
As a narrator, I’m a 2026 PANA Rising Voices recipient and the recipient of a diversity scholarship from Source Elements. I mentor on the APA’s DEI programme, and I became an Audible Approved Producer earlier this year. I’m physically disabled and Aspergic; equality of opportunity for everyone is of vital importance to me.

It’s in equality of opportunity that I want to see PANA achieve more. I’d like us to do more for narrators at different stages of their careers; I’m a career changer myself, so I have a particular soft spot for people who are new to narration without being young or new to professional life. I see an opportunity for us to learn from what the APA does well while still being about the narrator first, not the publisher: I would like to create more opportunities around pitching, meeting producers and mentoring. I envisage this being designed from the outset for an international membership rather than starting for the US market and being adapted afterwards. Making PANA genuinely more international is a major priority for me.

So, if I had to summarise everything above?
Mostly, I make useful things and help people learn. That is what I’d hope to do as a board member within PANA.