Acclaimed journalist and broadcaster Samira Ahmed hosts BBC Radio 4’s leading arts programme Front Row, conducting interviews with prominent authors, performers, and filmmakers. She also examines the BBC’s journalistic and editorial practices for audiences through her Newswatch programme on BBC One.

In 2023, she gained international attention for discovering the earliest complete recording of a Beatles concert in Britain, captured at Stowe School in 1963, and facilitated its transferral to the British Library for public preservation.

She received the British Broadcasting Press Guild audio presenter award in 2020, the same year she triumphed in a groundbreaking sex discrimination employment tribunal against the BBC regarding fair and equal pay for Newswatch. Her celebrated three-part BBC4 documentary series Art of Persia (2020) became one of the first significant Western television productions filmed in Iran for four decades.

Previously, Samira Ahmed worked as a news presenter and reporter for Channel 4 News, earning the Stonewall Broadcast of the Year award for her investigation into the so-called “corrective” rape of lesbian women in South Africa, and for BBC News, where she reported on the OJ Simpson trial as the Correspondent for Los Angeles.

Her extensive documentary portfolio examines connections between popular culture, science, politics, and social transformation. These include I Dressed Ziggy Stardust, Laura Ingalls’ America, John Ruskin’s Eurythmic Girls, HG Wells and the H Bomb, The Fundamentalist Queen about Elizabeth Cromwell (Oliver Cromwell’s wife), and Disgusted, Mary Whitehouse, for which she dedicated months to studying the renowned morality campaigner’s personal diaries.

At Chelsea Arts Festival she will be in conversation with Darren Henley on the importance of cultural funding.