Hebah Fisher

Hebah Fisher is the cofounder and CEO of the award-winning Kerning Cultures Network, which produces Arabic and English shows that regularly top the podcast charts across the Middle East, with stories that have appeared on Radiolab, Gimlet Media, PRI The World, and NPR.

How did you get introduced to the audio space?
Radiolab. The love of my life.

Why was it important for you to start the network Kerning Cultures?
We started Kerning Cultures Network 6 years ago to tell better stories from the places we call home. Mainstream media in the Arab world doesn't speak to us youth; it's created for our parents, which is quite alienating. And we're a very young population - 65% of the region is under the age of 35. So we wanted to tell the kinds of stories that we connected with, stories we'd want to turn to friends and have a conversation about, stories that make us laugh, cry, and bring us all a little closer together. 

I like how you often mention on Kerning Cultures how long it takes to make an episode...approximately 50 hours! I agree that probably surprises some people. Can you itemize that time?
Oh dude yea each episode is quite the undertaking. We do a lot of up-front research, pre-interviews, the actual interviews themselves, transcribing the audio, a lot of versions of scripts, and then a lot of versions of the audio draft before it goes out into the world.

Do you have any interesting fan stories you'd like to share with us?
We had one American listener write in to tell us that everything he knew about the Middle East prior to Kerning Cultures was hummus. But after binging several of our episodes, he sold his motorcycle to fund a plane ticket to visit the Middle East for the first time. (He went to Casablanca). That's pretty incredible to us.

What is your goal for Kerning Cultures as a network? In which area(s) would you like to grow?
We're building the premier podcast company for the Middle East. We've really opened the industry in the region (we're the first company to raise venture funding for a podcast company in MENA), and we keep getting more and more ambitious with our storytelling: we just wrapped a first-of-its-kind Arabic fiction thriller series :) I'm so excited for our journey ahead: we're building a media company from the Arab world we can all be proud of.

What shows do you love?
For our English audience, we have 2 shows I love: our flagship Kerning Cultures show where we tell stories like the renegade operation to bring about justice in the aftermath of the Armenian Genocide, to the contested history of the invention of the Arabic typewriter, to the time elephants reigned in the UAE desert; and al empire, where we tell the stories behind the Arab icons like Jad Abumrad (Radiolab), or Nadine Labaki (Oscar-nominated film director). Also Constellation Prize. It’s such an unexpected style of production that translates beautifully.

Thanks, Hebah!