I am always looking to collaborate with other like-minded people and organisations and, in turn, offer our unique Funny Women platform to any woman who wants to explore comedy or the use of humour in business. We are looking for female performers, writers, film makers and creators to enter the Funny Women Awards run between April and September annually, and to grow our community both in the UK and around the world.
I am looking for opportunities to take Funny Women and our HERlarious brand into workplace environments, and we book speakers, comedians, and facilitators for corporate events and training programmes.
On a personal level I am looking for speaking opportunities and to run my workshop ‘Stand Up to Stand Out’, which as its name suggests is based on comedy techniques to improve confidence, create material and find your voice, both personally and professionally.
I am often called upon to speak in public about my work – although I’m not a comedian myself I have collected many stories and anecdotes over the last 20 years and my previous life in journalism, public relations and marketing. If it promotes our business I am happy to show up!
Funny Women is an open, inclusive not for profit community offering opportunities to women, and those identifying as women, to try stand up, comedy writing and creation in a safe space. We now run regular online ‘demystifying’ events and open mic events for those new to comedy and will be relaunching our live events programme in 2022 – all scheduled gigs and detaisl of our booking team can be found at http://www.funnywomen.com.
I am an award-winning producer best known as the founder of Funny Women. Set up in 2002, Funny Women is now a leading comedy community empowering women to find their voice through performing, writing and creating narratives with humour. It is my life’s work and I am proud that our core activity, the Funny Women Awards, has changed the face of comedy.
I have run the Funny Women Awards since 2003 and the competition went ahead in 2020 and 2021 despite COVID restrictions and the cancellation of all live events. This is because we took everything online from submissions and registrations via the website, to digitized presentations for the heats and semi-final stages of our prestigious Stage Award. The final of took place ‘behind closed doors’ at the world-famous Comedy Store London to industry acclaim in 2020 and was back on stage to a sold out audience at the Bloomsbury Theatre in 2021.
In addition to producing comedy shows all over the UK, including the Edinburgh Fringe, I am a renowned performance coach, trainer and public speaker using my knowledge and experience from working in comedy to encourage people in business and public life to ‘Stand Up to Stand Out’. Using techniques based on comedy I have built a team of experts to deliver workshops and events under the HERlarious brand to improve self-confidence, develop presentation skills and build teams.
Producing comedy is my third and ‘accidental’ career having trained and worked as a journalist and then going into public relations and marketing. I created Funny Women as a result of getting angry with a misogynist comedy promoter who told me that ‘women aren’t funny’ and that there are ‘no funny women’. Almost 20 years on and he’s been proved wrong and I am proud that my work has empowered many women both professionally and personally. It’s through them I have found my own true voice.