Sherre DeLys has created over 60 radio essays, stories, and soundscapes commissioned or broadcast by BBC, Radio France, WDR, YLE, Radio New Zealand, ABC, Atlantic Public Media, The Barbican Centre, Italy’s Muserole Festival, and other independent foundations and artist-run networks. Her pieces have earned some of the world’s most respected radio awards for storytelling and sound design.
Whether making music from shipping containers, listening in to what a cowgirl hears, spinning tales of wrecked adventurers, or chronicling the moment-to-moment experience of changing desert light, Sherre starts from deep listening. She cherishes a description of her work as ‘an improvised open-ended dialogue with her subjects’ as it was expressed in Reality Radio by the book’s co-editor, John Biewen who hosts the acclaimed podcast series Scene on Radio.
Her piece IF is taught in media courses in USA, UK and Australia and shows up regularly on lists of all-time best radio and podcasts. (Scroll down to hear IF.)
— Jad Abumrad, Host Radiolab
“I listened to IF, and I think a lot of people of my generation who were there at the beginning and heard this piece probably had the same reaction. We all sat there spellbound. There was something about the story that just flipped a switch for so many people. And I come back to it again and again. This was an entirely new voice on the radio. I’d never heard anything like this.”
— Prix Italia Jury 2015, on What a Cowboy Hears
“Symphonic soundscape that shows without telling”
— Julie Shapiro, Executive Producer Radiotopia
“I point to Sherre’s piece, Containers, as a milestone, I think it taught me to start listening in a different way.”
— John Biewen, Editor Reality Radio
“You never know what approach she’ll take, but the result is often breathtaking.”
Winner, Silver Award Best Documentary, Third Coast International Audio Festival, 2002.
By Sherre DeLys with studio engineering and co-sound design by John Jacobs. Performers – Andrew Salter, Ion Pearce (voice and cello) and Hannah Peters.
What if? A young patient reinvents his hospital stay––calling up the healing powers of empathy and imagination.
Winner, Grand Prix Sound Design,
Phonurgia Nova (FR)
by Sherre DeLys and Russell Stapleton.
A soundscape composed from sounds on working sites around Port Botany on a single day.
Special Mention, Prix Italia 2015
by Sherre DeLys and Hal Cannon, with sound engineering by Timothy Nicastri
A road trip across Texas to understand the relationship between the cultural and natural landscape through sound.
