Sheila Hayman is a British-born, BAFTA-winning producer/director of documentary films and digital media. In 2010, Mendelssohn, The Nazis and Me was nominated for the Grierson Award as Best Arts Documentary, and in 2012 she wrote, produced, and directed a multilingual miniseries about the Enlightenment which reached an audience of 150 million in China, France, Germany, Austria, and other countries.
Her abiding interest is in the relationship between people and technology; she made her first film about robots in 1985, and later "The Electronic Frontier" for the BBC and Nova, which introduced the world to the coming digital revolution and its implications. At the Lab she is returning to this area, looking at embodied human intelligence and the effects of virtualization on our emotional, physical and cultural health.
Music is what gives her hope for the world, so she loves making apps, digital projects, and interactive performances with organizations such as the London Symphony Orchestra, English National Opera and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. At the Lab she has a collaborative project with the latter to develop an AR game to understand classical music by finding it "hidden" in places where they perform.
She was named Young Journalist of the Year in 1990, has written for Britain’s national broadsheet newspapers and published three comic novels about domestic life . Hayman also runs a therapeutic creative writing and performing group through the organization, Freedom from Torture.