Editorial Team
Phoebe Adler-Ryan
Executive Producer
Phoebe Adler-Ryan is an audio producer and Production Manager for All the Best. A blue sky thinker, Phoebe has spent several years helping creative organisations to grow their content, partnerships and audience. She has a special interest in incubating the next wave of audio drama, having completed a thesis on the topic at Goldsmiths University.
Melanie Bakewell
Editorial Producer
Melanie fell in love with audio after spending a week at a Transom workshop in 2019. Since, she’s participated in the National Features and Documentary Series (RIP!) and the Wheeler Centre’s audio mentorship Signal Boost. She loves weird audio adventures and has a background in community legal education and visual art.
Mell Chun
Supervising Producer
Mell is a freelance journalist and media tutor. Mell is passionate about audio journalism, media ethics and the importance of public radio in strengthening communities. She is currently working on a radio documentary about early Chinese immigration with a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute and Walkley Fund.
Dan Semo
Supervising Producer
After years of teaching English and playing in bands, Daniel decided to combine his love of language and his love of music by telling audio stories. He started producing stories and composing sound design for All The Best in 2017. Daniel was born in a country that no longer exists, calls Australia home, but currently lives in Japan.
Evana Ho
Supervising Producer
Evana Ho has been a supervising producer with All the Best since 2018. She is the creator and producer of the podcast Love, Canberra, which focuses on intimate conversations about love, sex and relationships. She runs the Canberra Podcasting group and the Broken Hearts Club.
Mark Yin
Supervising Producer
Mark is a writer and researcher from Naarm, currently moonlighting as a PhD student in the UK. He co-hosted/produced Chinese-ish with SBS in 2022, and was previously station manager at the University of Melbourne student radio station Radio Fodder. Making a story with All the Best was one of his first ‘real’ experiences with audio storytelling and he has loved the medium since.
Lawrence Bull
Supervising Producer
Lawrence is an audio journalist in Sydney who likes making longform audio narratives about people who transgress social norms. In 2023 his work represented Australia at the 49th International Features Conference, IFC AudioDocs, in Iceland. He’s made docos for Earshot and Snap Judgment. You can hear his demo reel here.
Felicity Weaver
Editorial Team
Felicity Weaver began creating audio works in 2023 while upskilling at TAFE, studying Social Media, Podcasting, and Radio. To her surprise, audio storytelling captivated her the most. Drawing from her Film & TV background, she seamlessly transitioned into podcasting and radio. Passionate about documentary storytelling, she is drawn to its rawness and how truth is often stranger than fiction.
Catarina Fraga Matos
Editorial Team
On the hunt for a creative challenge, Catarina proudly shared a collection of her non-fiction writing with a local writers’ group. The feedback was brutal—but one person suggested it could make a fabulous podcast. She’s been producing and studying audio storytelling ever since.
Sarah Mashman
Supervising Producer
Sarah Mashman is a producer at ABC’s Audio Studios where she currently produces Stop Everything! with Beverley Wang. She’s previously EP’d the award winning series From the Embers for CBAA and produced stories for ABC History Listen and Earshot. In 2020 she was awarded the Create- provoke award for the Hearsay Audio Festival in Ireland. Sarah loves working on narrative driven, sound rich audio that allows guests to share their stories in their own voice
Thomas Phillips
Supervising Producer
Thomas Phillips is a New Zealand-born audio producer who lives in Naarm. After working as a journalist for several years in Wellington, he moved to Australia to study audio journalism at the University of Melbourne. Since then, he has worked on podcasts and radio shows for the BBC, the Guardian, the Centre for Advancing Journalism, and All the Best. He loves producing and listening to sound-rich audio documentaries.
Shelby Traynor
Supervising Producer
Shelby Traynor is a producer with the Science unit at Radio National. She has worked on The Science Show, The Health Report, Coronacast and Dr Karl’s Great Moments in Science. She has also produced eps for All in the Mind and FBi’s All The Best.
Kwame Slusher
Host
Kwame is an audio storyteller and radio student. His first love was short fiction, and before moving from Barbados to Australia, he won two literary awards. In Australia, he discovered the wonderful world of audio when his then-employers asked him to make a podcast. In 2024, he studied radio and podcasting at TAFE and joined the Audio Club at All the Best. Kwame is currently completing an Advanced Diploma and starting a Graduate Diploma in Radio and Podcasting at AFTRS.
Emma Rose Higgins
Episode Mixer
Emma is an Audio Creative and Station Sound Producer at the ABC, creating radio promos and audio branding for the triple j network. Since her early teens, Emma has adored radio and audio in all its forms. She’s studied Sound and Music Design at UTS, conducted a Small-Scale Social Research Project in Bordeaux, France, worked on the sound for independent short films, produced audio for Junkee Media, Spineless Wonders Audio and fbi.radio, and loves putting together the final mix of the All The Best episodes each week.
Maddy Macquine
Supervising Producer
Maddy Macquine is the Wheeler Centre’s Senior Audio Producer and a supervising producer for All The Best. Maddy fell in love with community radio and audio storytelling while studying sound design at university. Since then, they’ve worked at and run training programmes for various community media organisations in Sydney and Melbourne. Maddy was the host of All The Best from 2019 to early 2021.
Jasmine Alavuk
Supervising Producer
Jasmine Alavuk (she/her) is the Social Enterprise Manager at Student Youth Network (SYN) based in Naarm/Melbourne. Jasmine is an experienced audio producer and media trainer, having delivered radio and podcasting programs to students of varied ages and abilities across Victoria. She has coordinated audio programs with CMS Radio in Canberra, RMIT University, Gippsland LLEN and Collarts. Her role at SYN combines her passion for youth empowerment and quality audio storytelling.
Persephone Waxman
Supervising Producer
Persephone (Perse) is a radio presenter, podcast creator, writer, audio mentor and meme queen from Naarm. She has worked previously with the Arts Centre, Script Roulette, the CMTO, SYN, 3RRR and 3ZZZ.
Ramon Briant
Editorial Team
Ramon is a musician, composer and storyteller based on gadagil country. He works primarily in the field of Audio as both a producer and engineer, creating and bringing stories to life through soundtrack composition and sound design.
Sue Hong
Social Media Manager
Sue is a media graduate who discovered audio storytelling in the final year of her studies and never looked back. She works as a marketing specialist and volunteers as a content creator with All The Best. She is drawn to quiet human moments and the ways we connect with each other and with nature, always chasing stories that linger long after they’re told.
Thomas Lu
Supervising Producer
Thomas Lu is an audio producer and story editor based in Washington, DC. He got his start in this weird world of audio storytelling in 2016 at StoryCorps. Since, he’s produced and edited for NPR, Hidden Brain, and HBO. Thomas is particularly interested in stories that explore the messiness of being human — our behaviors, our thoughts, our relationships
Alyssa Partington
Supervising Producer
Alyssa Partington is a podcast producer with ARN’s iHeart Australia and a creative writing tutor for the Writer’s Studio in Sydney. She was awarded a bronze Rising Star of the Year in New Zealand’s Podcast awards in 2022, and a series she wrote and produced, Our Forgotten Epidemic, documenting the HIV and AIDS crisis in Aotearoa New Zealand, was nominated for multiple awards. She’s passionate about storytelling in all forms but is particularly interested in narrative nonfiction and fiction. She currently produces weekly shows for Yumi Stynes and Amanda Keller.
Gemma Purves
Supervising Producer
Gemma Purves has been involved with community radio for almost 10 years, starting off as a volunteer at Eastside Radio. Since then she has worked across community, commercial and public broadcasters as a journalist, station manager, and board member. Gemma co-ordinated the brilliant program Audio Ability through CMTO.
Harrie Hastings
Editorial Team
Harrie (Huck) Hastings is an Eora based creative passionate about narrative as a vehicle for personal and social change. Intensely passionate about human connection and communication, Hastings follows their creative whim where it feels expansive – be that in collaborative work, visual medium, creating radio or their first love – songwriting. Their debut album ‘cheers to progress’ was released in 2021 and they are currently at work on the follow up.
Lindsey Vassalo
Content Creator
Lindsey’s journey to becoming an All the Best volunteer is as quirky as she is. What began as a mere purchase of a mysterious VHS tape led to a media preservation story being featured on the show and great visual designs for each episode soon followed. With years of artistic experience, Lindsey creates covers and social media posts that connect with advent listeners. When she’s not designing, she seeks creative research stories uncovering the insane in the mundane.