Phoebe Hartley (she/her) is a Melbourne/Naarm-born writer, journalist and audio producer.

Now working at the foot of a mountain range on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung country in the stunning northwest of Victoria, she is armed with more than two decades of combined creative experience.

<< Here’s a dodgy selfie of Phoebe blissing out in the bush with no makeup on.

She is a regular contributor to regional magazine Bush Journal, and is the writer of the words for their photography book IN LOVE, OUT BUSH.

Her freelance writing appears in print for Australian Women’s Weekly, Country Style, Australian Country and Graziher, and online for ABC, Peppermint Magazine and The Local Rag among others.

She is the founder of Small Town Writing Co., a little copywriting studio with big ideas, crafting clever creative content for non-boring brands.

As an audio producer, she creates occasional documentaries for ABC Radio National’s The History Listen and Earshot.

And as a filmmaker for about 15 years, she worked with big brands and businesses on corporate communications, and on the sets of local and international film and TV productions, while her own short films and documentaries screened at fancy film festivals around the world.

Phoebe is a bit of a bird-watcher, a lazy yogi and a very slow runner.

A bit of background.

Starting out in post production, Phoebe worked for several years as an animation and visual effects producer for high-end television commercials. Moving over to live action, she spent a few years in production roles on local and international film sets, before deciding to focus on writing and directing.

Her short films garnered two international awards and several nominations. She participated in Melbourne International Film Festival’s prestigious Accelerator program in 2012 with her short film SWITCH. She was selected for a Film Victoria-funded directing internship on NEIGHBOURS in 2011, and completed a directing attachment on OFFSPRING in 2012. Her short documentaries were finalists in global competitions, included in school education programs, and selected for development at the 2012 Australian International Documentary Conference.

Over the years Phoebe wrote and directed oodles of corporate, educational and branded campaigns for an array of well-known clients, including NAB and Google. She worked as a full-time director attached to production companies, and also ran her own production business, Paper Plane Films.

There was also a time when she dabbled in theatre, with short plays published and staged in Melbourne, Sydney and Edinburgh.

She has a Graduate Diploma in Journalism and a Bachelor of Arts (Media Studies), both from RMIT.