Our Team
Louise Bannister brings over 20 years of experience in storytelling, strategic communications and community building to her role as Director of Living Lab Northern Rivers. She is a listener and question asker at heart, and her work has always been about bringing people along on the same journey, wherever they sit. She is drawn to complexity, and to the practical work of figuring out how we can all make sense of it together.
She began in independent publishing, founding frankie magazine at 25-years-old and going on to build Frankie Press, a publishing house with a ten-year run, followed by Lunch Lady, which built a community of more than 150,000 parents. Across hundreds of magazines and hundreds of interviews, she learned to listen deeply and ask difficult questions, the same skills she now brings to imagining how we can build healthy, thriving, resilient places.
Most recently, as Chief Creative Officer at Fireside Agency, Lou led strategy and narrative work for many different organisations, translating technical work into stories that funders, government, researchers and communities could engage with.