Dead Ladies Show Podcast

*** IMPORTANT NOTE: This episode’s Dead Lady had a very challenging existence, particularly when she was younger, and her story is marked by multiple incidents of violence and sexual abuse. Please use caution when listening *** In this episode, we join forces with the Ms Informed podcast to bring you the story of Phoolan Devi. Known as “India’s Bandit Queen,” Phoolan D

Welcome to Season Seven! In this episode, we bring you…the woman known as the “Mother Theresa of Reggae! Sister Mary Ignatius, a white Jamaican Catholic nun dedicated her life to the Alpha Boys’ School in Kingston, where she taught football, cricket, boxing, table tennis and dominoes – but most importantly, music. A lover of jazz and blues, she inspired hundreds of “wa

We're working on our next season, which starts in March! So, in this bonus show, we're sharing a guest episode from the podcast Her Half of History. Her Half of History covers women’s history in short episodes that fit into a series, like Women Who Seized Power, Women Who Escaped Slavery, and Women in Espionage. Host Lori Davis also likes to delve into the lives of ordinary wome

In this episode, the last of Season Six, we bring you a show live from PodFest Berlin! DLS-ers Susan Stone and Katy Derbyshire joined the city’s fine and friendly podcasters at the yearly event in front of a small but perfectly formed audience. From that event, producer Susan brings us the fascinating story of June Tarpé Mills, a comics pioneer and the first woman to create a

In this episode, we hear once again from our friends at Dead Ladies NYC. Nafisa Ferdous presents Amrita Sher-Gil, a queer, feminist, Hungarian-Indian artist, writer, and art critic who left a profound impact on art despite her untimely death. Sher-Gil was an incredibly charismatic non-conformist whose work reframed discussions on art and feminism, orientalism, and colonialism, whil

In this episode, we encounter the show’s very first featured geographer. UK-born Doreen Massey was a pioneer in her field. She challenged existing ideas about space, place and power, was compassionate, politically active, and hopeful. She worked in academia and as a public intellectual, including at British early-morning TV fans’ beloved Open University – teaching students

In this episode, we bring you the story of an actress whose off-screen life was as dramatic and tragic as many of the characters she portrayed. Born in Vienna in 1938, Romy Schneider was said to have the star power of Greta Garbo or Marilyn Monroe. She is perhaps best known for her portrayal of Sissi, aka Empress Elisabeth of Austria, who she embodied in four films (some of which

In this episode, DLS co-founder Katy Derbyshire has the story of a deutsche Diva — an iconic German actress and singer and best-selling author known for her glamour and scandal, her smoky voice and sweeping false eyelashes. Hildegard Knef was also an unreliable narrator and a serial fabulator who was alternately loved and hated in her homeland. Producer/host Susan Stone is jo

In this episode, translator Laura Radosh introduces us to the fascinating and troubled writer Djuna Barnes. The journalist, novelist, and artist mixed with everyone from James Joyce to Peggy Guggenheim, and was at the center of Bohemian life in 1920s New York and Paris, though perhaps not quite as much as she would like. Best known (if at all) for her modernist novel “Nightwood,

Our story for this episode comes from our friends at the Dead Ladies Show NYC, which is organized and hosted by Molly O’Laughlin Kemper with Sheila Enright. Photographer, professional eccentric and guinea pig lover JR Pepper tells the tale of artist Leonor Fini, a glamorous, passionate iconoclast (and cat lover) with a brilliant creative mind who was fiercely independent — at