The Obamas’ Higher Ground Bolsters Audio Team With Hires & Promotions

Peter White
·2 min read
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EXCLUSIVE: Higher Ground, the production company founded by President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama, has made a number of hires and promotions in its audio team.

This comes after it signed a first-look deal with Amazon’s Audible following its exit from Spotify.

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Mukta Mohan, who was previously a VP at the company, has been promoted to Head of Audio Content.

Spotify’s Corinne Gilliard joins Higher Ground as SVP, Documentaries, Pushkin Industries’ Nick White joins Higher Ground as SVP, Original Audio and Andrew Eapen has joined as Director of Audio Production.

This team reports to Higher Ground’s Head of Audio Dan Fierman.

Gilliard was previously Senior Executive, Studios & Partnerships at Spotify, where she oversaw the music and audio streaming company’s partnerships including Higher Ground and Bad Robot.

She was a producer on Oprah with Meghan and Harry: A CBS Primetime Special, having worked on the final seasons of The Oprah Winfrey Show and was Crooked Media’s first head of development where she helped pioneer the Pod Save America live show format and launched the company’s first original slate of podcasts including Keep It, Hysteria, America Dissected, Stuck with Damon Young, and This Land.

She was an exec producer on series such as The RapCaviar Podcast, Sound Barrier: Sylvester, Dope Labs, and Abolition X.

White joins Higher Ground from Malcolm Gladwell’s Pushkin Industries where he served as an Executive Producer and worked on several projects including Miracle & Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon.

He was the creator and executive producer of KCRW’s Lost Notes, a music documentary podcast and also developed and produced podcasts such as Welcome to LA, Bodies, and UnFictional.

Eapen is a sound designer, engineer, and composer who has worked in podcasting, TV, and film with Higher Ground, HBO, Pineapple Street, NBC and LA Times. He worked on Higher Ground’s Renegades: Born in the USA as well as Dateline’s The Thing about Pam.

Higher Ground’s audio slate includes The Big Hit Show, a series of audio documentaries hosted by Alex Pappademas, Tell Them, I Am, a podcast collection of universal stories from Muslim voices, Renegades: Born in the USA, The Michelle Obama Podcast and The Sum of Us podcast series.

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