Dead Ladies Show Podcast

Dead Ladies Show Podcast

The Dead Ladies Show presents the stories of amazing women from history told live on stage in Berlin and beyond. Inspiring, irreverent, and entertaining! @deadladiesshow on Instagram and Twitter. Facebook: thedeadladiesshow.

Episodes

April 11, 2024 31 mins
*** 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.
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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,...
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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 women by covering topics including the history of housewo...

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October 21, 2023 25 mins

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 female su...

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September 13, 2023 21 mins

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, while merging European technique and classical I...

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August 17, 2023 28 mins

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 ...

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July 12, 2023 32 mins

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 are stil...

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June 14, 2023 31 mins

 

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 joined by other DLS co-founder Florian Duijsens to intr...

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May 11, 2023 33 mins

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,” Djuna o...

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April 13, 2023 24 mins

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 a time when...

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March 16, 2023 23 mins

Dead Ladies Show Podcast 

Episode 61 - Emmy Noether

 

For this episode, we bring back the presenter who appeared in our very first podcast episode, writer and translator Karen Margolis. Drawing from her own history in higher mathematics, Karen ably tells the tale of Germany’s Emmy Noether, who developed key theorems in theoretical physics and made important contributions to abstract algeb...

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February 14, 2023 32 mins

In this episode, we’re going to hear about woman who is sometimes called a sculptress of sound —  “the unsung heroine of British electronic music” —  Delia Derbyshire, ably presented by our very own DLS co-founder Katy Derbyshire.  

 

A working-class girl from Coventry, England, Delia studied music and ...

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January 20, 2023 44 mins

Dead Ladies Show Podcast - Berenice Abbott

 

Welcome to our first podcast of 2023! In this episode, we zoom in on photographer Berenice Abbott. This American artist has a bit of a six-degrees-of separation going on with a number of our previous Dead Ladies, including Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven and Emma Goldman. As told by DLS co-founder Florian Duijsens, Berenice’s story includes stints in Paris and Berlin, falling in love wi...

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December 14, 2022 39 mins
Episode 58 — Ruth Asawa 

It’s our final podcast of 2022!

DLS co-founders Florian Duijsens and Katy Derbyshire join producer Susan Stone to toast the holiday season, chat about this year’s good news in Dead Ladies, and to introduce our featured Dead Lady, artist Ruth Asawa. 

Born to Japanese parents on a farm in California, Ruth Asawa first developed her artistic tendencies tracing shapes in the dirt. When her famil...

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November 17, 2022 33 mins

To kick off Season 6 of the Dead Ladies Show Podcast, writer Leon Craig brings us the story of award-winning English author Angela Carter. Known for her feminist, gothic and erotic sensibilities and re-inventing folk and fairy tales for her now seminal collection The Bloody Chamber, Carter’s life had quite a few plot twists of its own. In her 51 years she wrote nine novels, five short story collections, several children's books and...

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August 17, 2022 30 mins

Episode 56 - Mae West

 

Courtesy of our pals at DLS NYC, we meet the first meta sex symbol: Mae West. Born and raised in Brooklyn, NY  Mae was brazen, buxom, bawdy, sensational and sexy. She was known for her husky voice, risqué performances, and double entendres that slipped past the film censors. With over 70 years in show business on both the stage and screen, she scandalized the world...

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This episode was recorded at the second-ever PodFest Berlin, a local two-day event full of workshops, networking, free ice cream, and live tapings from podcasts in various languages, including one from us. 

 

Dead Ladies Show co-founder Katy Derbyshire and podcast producer/host Susan Stone were there for a mini DLS, and took turns hosting and presenting bilingually in German and English in...

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June 16, 2022 24 mins
Episode 54 - Memphis Minnie
 
In this episode, we drop in on our New York-based sister spinoff show, DLS NYC, which returned to the KGB Bar’s Red Room after a long hiatus. DLS co-founder Florian Duijsens happened to be visiting from Berlin, and took to the stage to introduce the fabulous Memphis Minnie. 
 
Tobacco-chewing blues singer
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May 12, 2022 25 mins

Episode 53 - Eva Crane

 

In this buzz-worthy episode, DLS co-founder Katy Derbyshire (and translator) brings us the story of leading bee scientist Eva Crane. Born to humble beginnings, Eva obtained a PhD in nuclear physics but quickly shifted her attention from atoms to apiculture. She travelled the world to document all things bees, and was particularly interested in the relationship between bees and humans, including the long his...

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April 14, 2022 25 mins
Episode 52 - Katherine Mansfield

 

In this episode we’ll be hearing from the multi-talented Hinemoana Baker. Hinemoana hails from New Zealand, she is a writer and musician of Māori and Pākehā heritage; she will be presenting her reflections on the life of another New Zealand writer — Katherine Mansfield. Mansfield was a very influential modernist writer, who left New Zealand for Europe at the age of 19, and hung out with Virginia W...

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