Lisa Ventura-Whiting – Biography & Photos
Lisa Ventura-Whiting is the Festival Director & Founder of the Worcestershire Literary Festival and has spent over 15 years working within the arts in Worcestershire, as wel as running her own successful PR agency and also running IT security software development company Titania Ltd. She started off her career working at Chris Tarrant’s management company in 1995 where she spent seven years, and she oversaw the hugely successful “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire” TV quiz series go from a format on paper called “Cash Mountain” to the global phemomenon it became in the late 1990′s. It was also during this time that she was the Festival Fringe Administrator for the first ever Worcester Three Choirs Festival Fringe, which took place in August 1999, and where she caught the “Festival bug”.
In 2002 Lisa became a freelance journalist and PR Consultant and she had numerous articles published in The Times, The Guardian and many leading women’s interest publications including She, Cosmopolitan, Women’s Health, Shape and more. She also wrote poetry and short stories in her spare time and wrote her first full length novel “Turning My Back On Thindarella”, which was her own personal account of how she lost over 5 stone in weight and successfully kept it off.
Over the last few years Lisa has undertaken PR work for many leading organisations including Worcestershire County Council, Tax Assist Accountants, Npower, Vennards of London, Xscape Marketing and more, and in 2007 she was approached by Chris Bennion of Not Just Sauce and together they co-founded the Worcester Music Festival. Lisa was the Chairman in 2009 and in the same year she became the Business Development Director for Titania Ltd, an IT security software development company with clients and customers all over the world. She created Titania PR, Marketing & Design as an off-shoot of Titania Ltd with her business partner Martin Driscoll and works with a range of different clients to provide first-class PR, Marketing and social media campaigns, along with everything else a business could need such as graphic design, printing and web design.
Lisa is also a poet and performs her work under the stage name of “Lady Titania”. She writes two regular blogs – Ms Mass Media: Hold The Front Page! and Lady Titania.
In 2010 Lisa started a Facebook group to ascertain the interest in running a literature festival in Worcster. Support for the idea was immense and Lisa decided to run the Festival for the first time from June 17th to June 27th in 2011, along with other events leading up to the Festival itself. Very quickly due to organisations and individuals coming forward from outside Worcester who wanted to take part in the Festival the event was re-named and re-branded to be the Worcestershire Literary Festival. The second Worcestershire Literary Festival will take place from 15th to 24th June 2012.
For more information about Lisa, or for press enquiries or to interview her please contact the Festival Office on 01905 24435 or email info@worcslitfest.com.
