Selina Mills
Writer and Journalist
Digital, Media and Publishing
Selina Mills is a legally blind writer, journalist, and activist, giving voice to the lives of blind people both past and present, and creating a new platform for our historical understandings of blindness.
Selina has worked as a senior reporter and broadcast journalist for Reuters (Rome), The Daily Telegraph (London), and the BBC. As part of her time at the BBC, Selina was a contributor to the ground-breaking BBC/Loftus series Disability: A New History (2013) which has been rebroadcast around the world. She is currently a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4’s In Touch programme discussing everything from blind history to audio description. She regularly gives lectures and comments on the history of blindness and publishes articles and essays on the importance and impact of audio description, including the challenges faced by audio describers in action films, such as Raiders of the Lost Ark.
In 2018 she devised and co-wrote, with Nicola Werenowska, what is believed to be the first accessible opera libretto, The Paradis Files (with integrated audio description) directed by Jenny Sealey OBE at Graeae Theatre company, and music composed by Errollyn Wallen OBE. The opera focused on the life of the blind 18th century composer and musician, Theresia von Paradis, and was premiered at London’s South Bank, and then went on tour around the UK.
In 2023, Bloomsbury will be publishing her book Life Unseen: A story of blindness which examines the shifting constructions of blindness over the centuries, and the impact of these ideas on her own notions of blindness.
“Blindness is part of all our lives and has been throughout history. My task, as a woman with sight loss, and a historian, is to help find these blind stories left on the hillside of history and give them new life.”