Michelle Macklem

sound designer & mixer

Podcasts & radio

Film

Sound Art

Producer work

About

Photo by Leah Jing McIntosh

Michelle Macklem is a sound designer, mixer and artist working across film, podcasts and radio. She lives and works in Naarm (Melbourne, Australia) as an uninvited settler on the land of the Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung people, to whom she pays her respect, and pays the rent. Sovereignty was never ceded.

Her work explores how sound is used to create social and political meaning. Using audio as an interlocutor, her work is concerned with the politics of land, voice and atmosphere.

She’s sound designed and mixed for Apple, Audible, ESPN, the Guardian, Radiotopia, TED and Wondery, among others. She worked as a foley editor on the film The Roses. She was the executive producer and co-creator of SBS’s Bad Taste, a podcast series about who we are through the foods we eat. She worked as a producer on Australia’s top daily podcast 7AM from 2019 to 2021. Before moving to Australia in 2018, she worked as a producer at the Canadian Broadcasting Corp (CBC) at CBC podcasts where she produced the Webby award-winning podcast The Fridge Light, and Sleepover with Sook-Yin Lee.

Her awards include:

Ambie award for Best Sound Design and Production (Girl V. Horse)
Edward R. Murrow award for Excellence in Sound (Girl V. Horse)
Webby award nomination (Girl V. Horse)
Silver, Australian Podcast Awards (Bad Taste)
Gold medal, Signal Awards (Bad Taste)
duPont-Columbia Journalism Award (Finding Tamika)
Audible’s ‘Best of the Year’ (Finding Tamika)
Vulture’s Best True Crime podcasts (Finding Tamika)
Best Documentary podcast (Finding Tamika)
NPR 1 One Editors’ Pick (The Acorn)
Stereogum’s Best Music Podcasts of 2019 (Sonic Sculptor)
Vulture’s Best Podcasts of 2019 (Sonic Sculptor)

Michelle holds a Master’s of Media Studies from Concordia University. She currently teaches at Melbourne Polytechnic in the Bachelor of Songwriting and Music Production program.

She’s co-founder and artistic director of the sound art project and community Constellations.
Constellations has been written up in the New York Times’ “A Beginner’s Guide to Getting Into Podcasts”. She has been interviewed by the BBC, and profiled on the Hot Pod newsletter. In 2018 she presented “The Art of Noise: A history of experimental radio” at the Third Coast International Audio Festival.

In her non-working hours Michelle enjoys banging on the drums and spending time with her dog, Leya.