About Otherworld Children’s Media aka Otherworld Media
Founded in 1981 and incorporated as a 501c(3) non-profit organization in Washington State by Judith Walcutt, Otherworld Children’s Media was established as an independent media production company for public broadcasting (radio and TV), educational media, digital platforms, and the theatrical arts, with an emphasis on children, youth, and family programming.
Otherworld Media is the production unit of Otherworld Children’s Media and in addition to generating programs and content for children and young people, the company has also presented workshops, special events, and music festivals for live, local, national, and international distribution.
Notable award-winning programs include “The War of the Worlds 50th Anniversary Production,” “Norman Corwin’s We Hold These Truths: A Bicentennial Salute to The Bill of Rights,” and “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: A Centennial Celebration.”
The non-profit corporation has received contributions and support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Pew Charitable Truths, the Seattle Arts Commission, the Fremont Arts Council, the Washington Commission for the Humanities, the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Bicentennial Commission on the US Constitution, Citicorp, Mars Inc., General Motors, Organic Valley, McGavren Guild/Interep Radio, Chihuly Inc., Sno-Boy Inc., Tradewell Stores, Academy Hall, the David Winton Bell and the James F. Bell Foundations, the Louis Foundation, the Barbara Nicholson McFadyen Fund, the Wetherill Foundation, the Sage Foundation, and individual contributors.
Production relationships over three decades of work include WGBH-Boston, WETA-Washington, WNYC-New York, American Public Radio aka Public Radio International aka PRX, National Public Radio, the National Association of Broadcasters, the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, WNIN-Tri-State Public Media, Western Public Radio, the Southern Educational Communications Association, the Children’s Museum of Los Angeles, the Burke Museum (University of Washington), Seattle Children’s Theatre, Very Special Arts Minnesota, the Academy of Media and Theatre Arts, the Young People’s Theatre of San Francisco, the Exploratorium (San Francisco), the Magic Theatre (San Francisco) KRAB-Seattle, KUOW-Seattle, KPLU-Tacoma, KSER-Everett, KCTS-9-Seattle, KCRW-Santa Monica, KBEM-Minnapolis, KKCR-Kauai, the Northwest Folklife Festival, the Choochocum Festival of the Arts, the Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar Festivals (Kauai and Mauai), Whidbey Island Center for the Arts, Whidbey Island Children’s Theatre, RiverPark Center in Owensboro, KY, Intertnational Mystery Writer’s Festival, Broward Center for the Performing Arts (Clearwater, FL), National Audio Theatre Festivals, Kansas City Art Institute, KNKX.org (Public Radio for Western Washington).
The principal creative collaborators of Otherworld Media are the wife and husband team of Judith Walcutt and David Ossman who are internationally known as writer-creators of high-concept audio and theatrical productions.
Photo of Judith Walcutt and David Ossman by Jim Carroll.
Creative Partners
Judith Walcutt is the founder and CEO of Otherworld Media, an internationally acclaimed production company since 1981. As a writer, director, producer, and executive producer she has generated hundreds of hours of programming for public media, stage, schools, libraries, museums, and festivals.
She began her career in theatre with an off-Broadway production of her first play at the La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, shortly after her graduation from Bard College in 1974. She continued working in mixed media in Los Angeles, collaborating with performance artists, musicians, and dancers at The Woman’s Building (Los Angeles), California Institute of the Arts, and at the University of Southern California where she finished her Masters degree in Rhetoric, Linguistics, and Literature in 1976. In 1979, she moved to Seattle and produced her first radio play for children, at KRAB-FM, Seattle, broadcast on Thanksgiving Day, 1979.
After founding Otherworld Children’s Media in 1981, she began producing regularly for KUOW-Seattle, KPLU-Tacoma, KRAB-Seattle, and as an independent producer for National Public Radio and other national broadcast producing entities such as the Southern Educational Communications Association and their Children’s Audio Service.
In 1985, Walcutt took her producing skills to WGBH-Boston for “The Spider’s Web” hosted by Julie Harris and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her first large-scale production for the series was on “The Red Badge of Courage,” in collaboration with her future husband, David Ossman. This series became the pilot for WGBH’s “Radio Movies” in 1986. In production, the team applied the techniques of on-location recording, as well as filmic sound design and musical scoring, to expand the sound and dynamics from the static “radio drama,” to an art form of ambience, movement, and full use of the stereo field.
After returning to the Pacific Northwest in 1988 to start a family and resume management of Otherworld Media, Walcutt acted as Executive Producer and Line Producer of Otherworld’s groundbreaking all-digital production of “The War of the Worlds” (a Grammy nominee in 1988) and the historic reimagining of “Norman Corwin’s We Hold These Truths” (1991), which honored the 200th anniversary of the US Bill of Rights. Both were broadcast by thousands of stations worldwide. “Truths” received multiple Gold and Silver awards at the New York International Radio Festivals and a Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association.
Other award-winning programs of the period included “The Door in the Wall” starring Colleen Dewhurst (co-produced with National Public Radio) and “Empire of the Air,” a co-production with WETA-DC, the 1992 epic, which authentically recreated the sounds, voice, and programs of the first fifty years of US broadcasting. This production was celebrated by the New York International Radio Festivals with another Gold Medal.
In 2000, Walcutt produced the only complete audio adaptation of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” in an all-star production celebrating the book’s centennial and introduced by Ray Bradbury. It won a Parent’s Choice Gold Medal Award.
Other production honors include an Armstrong Award for Creative use of the Medium, a Golden Reel from the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, and both Gold and Silver awards from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Judith has been a guest speaker at the School of Sound Colloquium in London and the recipient of a Hedgebrook Writer’s Residency She received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Mystery Writer’s Festival and a Norman Corwin Award for Excellence in Audio Theatre, from the National Audio Theatre Festivals.
As a line-producer-director of the Live Radio Theatre productions for the 2007 and 2008 International Mystery Writers Festivals in Owensboro, Kentucky, she staged 16 original plays based on stories by Ray Bradbury and Mary Higgins Clark, Rupert Holmes’ “Remember WENN” television series, Stuart Kaminsky, Sam Bobrick, as well as stage adaptations of full-length plays and motion pictures.
In 2009, Judith produced and co-adapted alongside David Ossman an entirely new production of four unknown BBC radio mysteries by Agatha Christie, which were written for the BBC between 1936 and 1954. The final performance in Owensboro was broadcast live as part of the series “Discovering New Mysteries,” hosted by Angela Lansbury, produced by Otherworld Media. Her Long-time search for a theatrical expression of the audio medium led her to use stage techniques from broadway and sound design from Hollywood, along with glamorous costuming and original period music to take Christie’s melodramas into the realm of Hitchcock’s thrillers. The plays went on to be produced for pre-Broadway try-out by the Broward Center fir Performing ARts, under the management of Zev Buffman.
New Technology
Walcutt has always enjoyed pushing the envelope of applications of new technology. The 1988 production of “The War of the Worlds” was the first all-digital broadcast of a radio play from field to transmission, with beta-tested, portable and multi-track digital recorders provided by Sony and digital transmission by WGBG Boston.
In the early nineties, she created a prototype specialized “narrowcast” audio program content service of six different channels of spoken word materials. This gathering of content was called “Otherworld Air” and was a proof of the concept for all spoken-word content, provided through cable FM drop.
In the early 2000s, Walcutt experimented with state-of-the-art, portable broadcast equipment to bring live music festivals to both local broadcasters, internet listeners, and national audiences in producing the first Border-to-Border Community Radio Broadcast of the Northwest Folklife Festival. During that time, she was part of the founding team for a low-power FM radio station on Whidbey Island, where she lives.
Recently she began working with cutting-edge, surround-sound technology to create a unique, audio-driven theatrical experience, blending techniques of voice work, screen acting, sound design, and 21st century stagecraft.
David Ossman’s radio career stretches from the infancy of FM in the late 1950s through free-form radio in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 70s to a fifty-year career in writing and production for audio media, stage, and film.
As a pioneer public broadcaster in New York and Los Angeles, Ossman chronicled the poetry scene with a radio series called “The Sullen Art,” which was later published as a book (Corinth 1963), and dozens of literature, music, and drama programs. Some of these include biographical portraits of Bertold Brecht, e. e. cummings, and Jean Cocteau.
With four-man comedy group known as The Firesign Theatre, David created a string of improvised live comedy broadcasts in Los Angeles (1969-1972), satiric pieces for NPR’s news programs, including “Campaign Chronicle” (1980) and “All Things Firesign” (2002-2003). He produced “Fools in Space” for XM Satellite Radio, which won the Gold Medal for comedy programs at the New York Festivals in 2002.
Ossman’s fifty-year collaboration with the Firesign Theatre, a quarter of comic writer/performers for radio, audio, stage, and film, resulted in a unique catalogue of more than 20 albums on LP and CD. Firesign’s innovative use of recording technology inspired a generation of audio producers and has garnered three Grammy nominations. In 2017, the archive of the Firesign Theatre’s life’s work was accessioned by the Library of Congress.
In the early 1980s, Ossman created and hosted the Peabody-award winning series “The Sunday Show,” a five hour arts magazine for National Public Radio. He went to WGBH Boston in 1985 to teach radio skills to science journalists in the Macy Science Fellowship, while also working on the final season of The Spider’s Web, the NEH-funded radio theatre series of American classics.
He stayed on at WGBH to produce an NEA-funded series of major plays in collaboration with the American Repertory Theatre (Boston), which included “Orchids in the Moonlight” by Carlos Fuentes and “Jacques and His Master” by Milan Kundera. He went on to produce “Radio Movies,” a long-form radio theatre program series for national release with his then co-producer and future wife, Judith Walcutt.
Otherworld Media
David has collaborated with Judith for a quarter-century since then. He was writer-director of most of Otherworld’s celebrated all-star audio productions: “The War of the Worlds 50th Anniversary” (Grammy Nominee, 1988), Raymond Chandler’s “Goldfish,” the epic history of FM radio, “Empire of the Air",” and a four-hour adaptation of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: A Centennial Celebration” (Parent’s Gold Medal 2000).
In recent years, he has adapted some 20 different new mysteries written for various media—print, stage, film, and television—into a live radio theatre as staged performance for the annual International Mystery Writer’s Festival: Discovering New Mysteries in Owensboro, KY. There, he was given a Lifetime Achievement Award for his contribution to the audio medium.
Audio productions completed in 2008, include “Remember WENN,” a collaboration with Rupert Holmes and a Ray Bradbury/Mary Higgins Clark double-bill broadcast as part of a public radio series, “Discovering New Mysteries,” hosted by Angela Lansbury. In 2009, the team presented their version of “Agatha Christie’s BBC Murders” as Live Radio Theater at the festival and went on to produce it for a limited national tour.
Some of the talents engaged in Otherworld Media productions over the years include: Angela Lansbury, Steven Allen, Jason Robards, Colleen Dewhurst, Phyllis Diller, Annette Bening, John Goodman, Mark Hamill, Robert Guillaume, Ed Asner, Harris Yulin, Bonnie Bedelia, Harry Anderson, Hector Elizondo, Rene Auberjonois, James Earl Jones, June Foray, Stan Freberg, authors Ray Bradbury, Mary Higgins Clark, Tony-winning writer/composer Rupert Holmes, Oscar-winning sound designer Randy Thom, among others.
The Otherworld Media Board is made up of specialists and consultants in children’s media, theatre, educational media, technology, recording arts, philanthropy, and non-profit management.
Otherworld Media Board 2023:
Tina Bennett-Kastor, Ph.D.
Professor Emerita of English and Linguistics, Wichita State University
Mary Fallon
Multimedia Storyteller and Communications Strategist
Penelope Bell Hatten
Otherworld Media Board President
Founding Board Member, Otherworld Children’s Media
Trustee, Louis Foundation
Diane Kaufman
Education Consultant
Small Business Owner
Supporter of the Arts
Nancy Keith
Journalist and Documentarian
Former Executive Director of Mountain to Sound Greenway
NGO Consultant
Heidi Molbak
M.S., NCC, Educational Consultant and Certified Educational Planner
Judith A. Walcutt
Founder, C.E.O., Artistic and Executive Director, Otherworld Media, Inc.