About Fathom Sirens
A studio for the stories that need more than a soundbite.
Fathom Sirens is an independent podcast and editorial studio, established in East Africa and the UK. We work with organisations whose ideas are important, complicated or politically delicate, and help them become stories people can understand, trust and remember.
Maeve Frances
Co-founder, Nairobi
Aida Holly-Nambi
Co-founder
Our story
Fathom Sirens started with two producers, Aida Holly-Nambi and Maeve Frances, who'd spent years making documentary and journalism work across Africa and beyond, and who both love the same thing: audio that's been reported properly, edited carefully, and built to carry real emotional weight.
What our early clients taught us is that the hardest part of the work almost never happens at the microphone.
It happens before it: finding the right audience, sharpening the editorial idea, choosing a format the organisation can keep up with, and knowing how to move through the people and politics that surround any story worth telling.
The founders
Aida Holly-Nambi
Co-founder, story editor and producer
Aida is a story editor and producer working across audio, film, text and immersive media. Before co-founding Fathom Sirens, she led arts and culture work at None on Record and produced the award-winning podcast AfroQueer. She holds a dual PhD in Drama and Humanities from Stanford University, and has developed work through Venice Biennale College Cinema and in VR. She brings research depth and a sharp instinct for finding the human stakes buried inside an institutional brief.
Selected credits
AfroQueer None on Record Venice Biennale College Cinema PhD, Stanford University
Maeve Frances
Co-founder, podcast producer, editor and audio journalist
Maeve is a podcast producer, editor and audio journalist based in Nairobi. Her reporting spans conflict, migration, development and culture, including work for international broadcasters and senior production on AfroQueer. At Fathom Sirens, she's shaped long-running institutional shows including The Horn, bringing the instincts of a journalist to work that has to hold up under scrutiny.
Selected credits
How the team scales
We stay deliberately small and hands-on.
Aida and Maeve lead every editorial relationship personally and build the right team around each brief: whoever the story actually needs.
You get one accountable partner who knows your project inside out, not an account manager standing between you and the people doing the work.
Your project
Aida & Maeve
Lead every project
- Reporters
- Field producers
- Camera crews
- Sound designers
- Composers
- Translators
- Designers
- Audience specialists
Bring us the story that matters most to you.
If the subject matters, the stakeholders are demanding, and the story still needs a human centre, we'd like to hear about it.