Dr Sam Coley

Sam Coley is an Associate Professor (International) for the Faculty of Arts, Design and Media at Birmingham City University. He is also Award Leader for the MA Media Production at Birmingham School of Media, where he teaches a range of undergraduate and postgraduate audio production modules.

Sam is a member of the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research with an interest in the field of radio documentary / podcast production. His practice-based PhD explored freelance music documentary production in the commercial radio industry, and he
has written about fandom and new participatory cultures in radio documentary production.

Sam has a production background in the New Zealand and UK radio industries and worked as a media consultant for CARE International and the Prison Radio Association. His experiences as a radio trainer for the BBC World Service Trust in Ethiopia formed the basis of his Masters dissertation, which explored the use of radio in the delivery of educational
health messages.

He has produced several documentaries and presented conference papers about the musician David Bowie, and in 2013 he was asked to be a keynote speaker at the V&A Museum's ‘David Bowie is Sound and Vision’ study day, part of the record breaking ‘David Bowie Is...’ exhibition.

Sam continues to work as a freelance radio documentary producer and in 2020 was executive producer of ‘Cities of Sound’, a series of Covid-19 related documentaries for the ‘Greatest Hits Radio’ network, supported by the Audio Content Fund.

He has served as a Grand Jury member of the New York Radio Festival since 2012 and is currently a Trustee of the Charles Parker Archive Trust.