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

New York Times (‘Wild and Precious’ & ‘Aria Code’)
New Yorker
Paris Review
Podcast Review

Work
Her work as senior producer and sound designer on the cult-classic Paris Review Podcast has been recognized by the New Yorker: “The podcast’s beauty comes from its masterly production and sound design, by some of the form’s best practitioners, including John DeLore and Helena de Groot” in 2023, and as one of the magazine’s ‘Best Podcasts of 2021’.

For Pushkin she created the original audiobook, 2024 Audie winner and L.A. Times Book Prize finalist Wild and Precious: An Ode to Mary Oliver, selected as best of by The New York Times and Barnes & Noble.

As narrative editor she worked on the critically acclaimed WQXR podcast Aria Code, produced in collaboration with the Met Opera and Rhiannon Giddens (lauded by the New York Times here and here and here).

She is the host and producer of the Poetry Foundation’s flagship podcast Poetry Off the Shelf, a bi-weekly interview podcast with debut as well as iconic poets such as Jericho Brown, Natasha Tretheway, Carolyn Forché and Ross Gay.

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, plays, 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.