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About

Storyteller.
Researcher.
Practitioner.

Hendrik Baird is an author, PhD candidate, podcast producer, and creative practitioner with more than thirty years of experience across the performing arts, media, community development, and cultural industries. He works at the intersection of storytelling, media research, and the business of independent media production.

Ethan and Hendrik Baird — Baird Media

Ethan and Hendrik Baird — Baird Media

The Story

Hendrik's career has never followed a straight line — and that is precisely its value. He trained as a drama practitioner at the University of Pretoria in the late 1980s, and spent the years that followed working across community theatre, arts education, and live performance in some of South Africa's most underserved provinces. As Drama Unit Manager at the Mmabana Cultural Centre in Taung, he directed training programmes for youth and adults and produced community theatre at a time when the performing arts were still a tool of social transformation in the North West.

That work led him into arts management. He conceptualised and launched the North West Cultural Calabash — a major developmental arts festival run under the North West Department of Arts and Culture — before taking on the directorship of the BAT Centre Trust in Durban from 1999 to 2001. After a freelancing period in Gauteng, he was invited back to the Calabash, returning to manage the festival from 2005 to 2008. The festival gave thousands of rural young people access to performance opportunities and professional mentorship in the creative industries.

His LGBTQ+ advocacy work runs as a parallel thread. A founding member of the Gay Umbrella in Mafikeng, he later served as Office Manager at OUT LGBT Well-Being and coordinated the community research that produced his first publication — a formal research report on same-sex sexuality in the North West Province, published by UNISA in 2010. This practitioner-researcher combination — embedded in a community, producing evidence-based documentation of its realities — has remained characteristic of how he works.

Between 2016 and 2019 he served as Station Manager of GaySA Radio, Africa's only LGBTQ+ online radio station, producing over a thousand hours of programming, growing listenership across multiple platforms, and winning the Feather Award for Best Media in 2018. It was during this period that he completed his MA in Journalism and Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand — researching online radio from the inside, as a practitioner studying his own field.

In 2021 he co-founded Baird Media with his son Ethan, channelling three decades of storytelling, production, and media experience into podcast production and creator development. The company has since produced multiple award-recognised series, including Stripped — winner of the Muse Award for Best New Media Script — and the Become a Podmaster podcast, which received a Bronze Award at the South African Podcast Awards in 2024. Alongside the production work, Hendrik has written three books on podcasting and contributed to a Routledge academic volume on radio in South Africa.

He is currently registered as a first-year PhD candidate in Digital Culture and Media at the University of Pretoria, researching the political economy of podcast monetisation among South African independent creators — specifically how inclusion within global platform ecosystems produces systematically unequal outcomes for creators in the Global South.

The through-line across all of it — community theatre, arts festivals, radio, hypnotherapy, ghostwriting, podcasting, academic research — is storytelling in its many forms, and a consistent interest in who gets to tell stories, on whose platforms, and on whose terms.

Education

In progress
PhD, Digital Culture and Media
University of Pretoria
2019
MA, Journalism & Media Studies
University of the Witwatersrand
1988
BA (Drama) Honours
University of Pretoria
1987
BA (Drama)
University of Pretoria

Publications

Awards & Recognition

Interested in having Hendrik speak at your event?

He speaks on platformisation, the business of podcasting, storytelling across media forms, and the Global South in the digital economy.

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