Women's history with teeth, wit, and stage lights.
Dead Ladies Show Podcast carries stage-born women's history stories from Berlin and beyond into a warm, quick-witted audio format. Its recent subjects range from F. TENNYSON JESSE and Eileen Agar to Carla Capponi, Betty Mae Tiger Jumper, Flora Tristan, Emily Hahn, and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff.
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Dead Ladies Show Podcast turns women's history into performed biography, then shapes those stage stories for audio. The show comes from Berlin and beyond, with Susan Stone and DLS co-founders including Katie Derbyshire and Florian Dausens appearing in the recent excerpts. Its organizing principle is simple and surprisingly flexible: tell the story of a woman who is dead, and make the life feel active again. Not solemn. Not dusty. The recent episodes move across several kinds of public life, from F. TENNYSON JESSE and early true crime writing to Eileen Agar and surrealist art, Carla Capponi and resistance, Betty Mae Tiger Jumper and Seminole community life, Flora Tristan and feminist socialist thought, Emily Hahn and travel writing, and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff in a poetry-festival crossover setting. That range matters because the show is not just collecting admirable figures. It is interested in how women moved through institutions, households, art worlds, political violence, public scandal, and private constraint. The storytelling often lingers on the concrete: flats, letters, courtrooms, theaters, paintings, postcards, guns, ferried messages, books, and awkward men with too much confidence. Short jokes break the surface. Then the story keeps going. The show can be irreverent, but it is not careless with difficulty. Recent material includes murder, suicide attempts, miscarriages, child sexual abuse, domestic violence, wartime danger, and alcohol use. Those elements are treated as parts of historical lives rather than lurid attractions. The pleasure is in the combination: researched biography, live-room timing, feminist attention, and a taste for the odd detail that makes a person memorable. It suits discovery because each subject opens onto a different corridor of history. A listener may arrive for surrealism and leave with criminology, or come for political resistance and end up with poetry. The show makes that wandering feel deliberate.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants biography with theatrical energy, feminist attention, and enough historical texture to follow a life beyond its headline. It especially fits someone drawn to artists, writers, activists, resistance figures, and overlooked public lives.
What sets it apart: Its edge comes from the live-storytelling frame: researched lives are delivered with stage timing, conversational framing, and a willingness to keep the odd, funny, grim, and politically charged details in the same room.
The Dead Ladies Show presents the stories of amazing women from history told live on stage in Berlin and beyond. Inspiring, irreverent, and entertaining! @deadladiesshow on Instagram and Twitter. Facebook: thedeadladiesshow.
A human skull ricochets through the mail, and your history lesson has a live audience.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A live, humane portrait of F. Tennyson Jesse, where criminology, glamour, grief, and murder fiction converge.
F. Tennyson Jesse comes through as a writer of many selves: journalist, criminologist, novelist, Hollywood traveller, and persistent student of murder's pull on human behaviour.
Carla Capponi's resistance work becomes a vivid portrait of undercover nerve, courier labor, and clandestine discipline.
Carla Capponi comes through as a figure shaped by nerve, discipline, and the daily mechanics of resistance in Rome. Her bid to join the Gapisti leads into a tense undercover operation: posing as Rosario's girlfriend, reciting poetry on a bench as people leave a German night at…
Betty's nursing, alligator wrestling, and public work make a vivid Seminole portrait.
Betty's life comes through as a story of work under pressure: family duty, tourism, and the slow building of Seminole institutions in Florida.
Flora Tristan's domestic ordeal becomes a sharp case for linking women's equality with social equality.
Flora Tristan comes through as a figure who made private danger part of a broader political case. The Dead Lady Show traces the French-Peruvian writer, socialist, activist, and feminist theorist through a dangerous marriage, a custody battle, and a near-fatal shooting by her…
Showmanship, civic pride, and self-made legend.
Franklin, in his own long view.
Survival stories from documentary frontiers.
Compact history with consequences.
From telegraph key to stock ticker: Edison, read aloud
Dead Ladies Show Podcast profiles F.
Dead Ladies Show Podcast closes season eight with a live Berlin talk on Eileen Agar, the Buenos Aires-born surrealist painter whose memoir opens, 'Head first, I tumbled out of my mother in December 1899.' Susan Stone, Katie Derbyshire, and Florian Doussens toast the year with Rotkäppchen before Florian traces Agar from Flores, Buenos Aires, to the Slade School of Fine Art, Normandy, Paris, and London.
["Suzanne Cope, author of Women of War, tells the Dead Ladies Show audience how Carla Capponi moved from a Rome apartment near Trajan's Column into the anti-fascist resistance after the July 19, 1943 bombing of a working-class neighborhood.", "The talk tracks Carla's work as a staffetta, moving guns, messages, food, and blankets through occupied Rome while posing as a girlfriend or ordinary woman so German forces would not suspect her.", "Cope also walks through the Via Rasella attack in March 1944, when Rosario disguised himself as a street cleaner, a bomb-filled bin exploded on a narrow Rome street, and more than 30 German soldiers were killed.", "The episode closes with Carla's postwar life, including her later seat in parliament and her public work for women's and children's rights."]
["Susan Stone profiles Betty Mae Tigerjumper, the first female chief of the Seminole tribe of Florida, in a live Dead Ladies Show talk recorded in Berlin.", "The episode says Betty Mae was born into a Seminole community that rejected mixed-race children, then survived relocation from Indian Town to the Dania Reservation near Fort Lauderdale.", "Stone follows Betty Mae through a Cherokee boarding school in North Carolina, nursing training in Lawton, Oklahoma, alligator wrestling at Jungle Queen Village, and the 1967 Tribal Council election that made her chief.", "Betty Mae later helped build Seminole health care, tribal journalism, and financial strength, while the tribe's turn to gaming and Hard Rock Cafe ownership appears as part of the long arc."]
Dead Ladies Show Podcast profiles Flora Tristan, the French-Peruvian writer, socialist, activist, and feminist theorist born in Paris on April 7, 1802, who linked women's equality to social equality.
The hosts introduce the Dead Lady Show podcast and discuss their return to live shows in Berlin during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This episode of The Dead Lady Show tells the story of Emily Hahn, a prolific writer and world traveler who was the New Yorker's China coast correspondent in 1930s Shanghai.
The Dead Lady Show podcast introduces a live Zoom collaboration with Stanza Poetry Festival, featuring a presentation on Annette von Droste-Hülshoff.
This episode previews an upcoming live show and introduces a talk about overlooked and iconic women, featuring novelist Divya Galani discussing Beryl Gilroy.
The Dead Lady Show podcast introduces the story of Irish pirate queen Grace O'Malley, presented by Laura Radosh in a live history storytelling event.