Helena de Groot is an audio creator with deep roots in the worlds of literature, music, and storytelling. Originally from Belgium, she grew up in a family of musicians and went on to work as producer and sound designer at the public radio. She is now based in New York.

Press and praise

Tribeca Festival 2025 ● New York Times (Wild and Precious: An Ode to Mary Oliver) & New York Times (Aria Code) ● New Yorker ● Paris Review

Work
The cult-classic Paris Review Podcast has twice been recognized by the New Yorker, including as ‘Best Podcasts of 2021’ ● The Poetry Foundation’s flagship podcast Poetry Off the Shelf is a bi-weekly interview podcast with debut as well as iconic poets such as Ross Gay and Carolyn Forché ● Her Pushkin original audiobook Wild and Precious: An Ode to Mary Oliver is a 2024 Audie winner, and L.A. Times Book Prize finalist, and was featured by The New York Times ● The critically acclaimed WQXR podcast Aria Code with Rhiannon Giddens was lauded by the New York Times here and here and here) ● Her upcoming CBC show Creation Myth, about her decision not to have children, is an Official Selection for Tribeca Festival 2025. You can listen to the pilot, more later this year ● She guest-teaches at Columbia University, University of Michigan, and Bennington College.

Personal
To nourish her creativity and light her fire, she plays the piano, dances with her eyes closed, cooks without a recipe for her well-willing friends, and reads novels, poems, essays, and altogether too many disturbing tomes on American history, Soviet history, Belgian, French and Dutch colonial history. Her beacon is the Belarusian oral historian Svetlana Alexievich, who understands that history lives in the heart.