Carmel Travers

Carmel Travers is an award-winning writer, producer, and director across genres from investigative journalism to children's comedy-drama. In 1984 she established the renowned Australian production and distribution company, Beyond International, which Carmel owned and Chaired for the first ten years, taking it from a start-up to a publicly listed $150m company. She then went on to become the Network General Manager of News and Current Affairs in 1993 - the first woman in Australia to run a major news organisation. She then formed Energee Entertainment in 1990, a company that developed digital animated technology which grew to become the biggest animation studio in Australia. After a decade she sold Energee Entertainment to Ravensburger Germany and produced a string of award-winning documentaries for the ABC, SBS and the Nine Network. She was then invited to join a small Australian factual production company, Essential Media, as a Partner, Director and Executive Producer in 2010. As Executive Director Carmel co-managed the eventual sale of a large portion of the company to Fremantle Media, upon which Carmel exited to form Pop Entertainment in 2017, which is now rapidly growing a broad factual, scripted, and digital production slate, and as of 2020, producing shows for Netflix, ABC, Network Ten and Nine Media, amongst others. As of 2021, she is working with major international partners including Entertainment One, Paramount Pictures, Wildbrain and Studio 100. POP is developing its own projects with Australia's best writers and directors, including Justin Monjo, Peter Duncan, Kriv Stenders, Nina Oyama, Corrie Chen, Magda Wozniak, Ian Collie, Michelle Law, Aline Jacques, Harry Cripps, Rick Kowalski, across a range of genres including a 26 x 22 episode comedy series, Weirdo, based on Australia's No.1 Best-selling series of books written by the comedian, Anh Do. Carmel's company has also commenced production on a CGI animated feature film, Being Betty Flood, due for worldwide release by Paramount in Q4 2022.