Fanny Mendelssohn’s great, great, great granddaughter Sheila Hayman brings her 2023 BBC film ‘Fanny: The Other Mendelssohn’, a coproduction with Mercury Studios, to Budleigh Music Festival. This will be followed by a Q&A session with the director.

Sheila is a BAFTA Fulbright winning documentary filmmaker, Director’s Fellow at the MIT Media Lab and Advisor to Cambridge University’s Minderoo Centre. In 2012 she wrote, produced and directed a multilingual mini-series about The Enlightenment which was viewed worldwide by 150 million people.

Her 2010 BBC film ‘Mendelssohn, The Nazis and Me’ was nominated for the Grierson Award for Best Arts Documentary.

Sheila makes films and digital projects about music for orchestras including the LSO as well as an augmented reality music app with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. She was Young Journalist of the Year in 2017 and a Hodder Headline Lead Title novelist. She runs the therapeutic creative writing group at Freedom from Torture.