The independent voice of underground audio drama — since 2014
About the Studio
A small, ten-year-old house of scripted fiction for the ears.
RadioTrama is a listener-funded audio drama studio in Lisbon, producing cinematic, sound-rich fiction from a roster of award-winning playwrights and sound designers. Every episode is built like a short film for the ears — layered soundscapes, ensemble casts, and serialized storytelling that respects the audience's intelligence and time.
Chapter I · The Founding
A closet in Lisbon, a thesis about serialized fiction, and a single founding conviction.
RadioTrama began in November 2014 as a borrowed closet studio on the third floor of a Rua das Janelas Verdes walk-up in Lisbon. There was no business plan, no co-founder — only the conviction, then only half-articulated, that scripted fiction for the ear had been quietly abandoned by mainstream radio and that something deliberate could be built in its place.
The first season was six episodes, recorded on a single matched pair of condenser microphones between two flatmates and a borrowed field recorder. It was distributed as an RSS feed before there was a website, and the first hundred listeners arrived through a single thread on a Portuguese-language audiophile forum. By the end of that year the thesis had hardened into a working method: treat each episode as a short film for headphones, edit it by hand, and refuse the mid-roll.
The studio was incorporated in the United States as an independent production house in 2017, but the Lisbon room has remained the center of gravity ever since. The current production space is a -68 dB treated room built around a curated library of more than 1,200 original field-recorded ambiences — doorways, ferries, hospital corridors at three in the morning — gathered across nineteen countries by the studio's senior sound designer, Inês Faro, and a rotating crew of ensemble members who travel with portable rigs.
What began as a thesis is now an eleven-week production cycle, a published writers' room methodology taught at nine universities, and a body of work that the Peabody Digital Media Showcase, the Ambies, and the Audio Verse Awards have, in different years, chosen to recognize. The founding conviction has not changed. The room is no longer a closet.
Chapter II · How an Episode Is Made
An eleven-week cycle, hand-edited from commissioned page to final master.
Every RadioTrama episode moves through five named chapters of production. Nothing is templated; nothing is generated; nothing ships without a senior sound designer passing a hand over the final mix.
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I
The Commissioned Page
The season's arc is broken into episode briefs and sent to a roster of working playwrights. Drafts arrive in the writers' room, are read aloud cold, and revised across three to four passes before a single actor is booked.
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II
The Casting & Read
Roles are drawn from a forty-strong rotating ensemble of voice actors across eleven countries. Table reads are recorded live, in person where geography allows, with regional directors shaping accent, breath, and pacing.
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III
The Field Layer
Ambiences are pulled from the studio's 1,200+ field-recording library or captured anew. Footsteps, weather, room tone, and the small mechanical facts of a scene are gathered before any dialogue is set.
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IV
The Hand-Edit
Dialogue is comped by hand against the field layer, scene by scene, by senior sound designer Inês Faro. Average production cycle: eleven weeks per episode. Average completion rate: eighty-six percent — nearly double the forty-seven percent industry benchmark for narrative podcasts.
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V
The Final Master
The mix is delivered in lossless for paying members, in standard compressed formats for RSS and the open podcast directories. No exclusive platform deals. No mid-roll interruptions. No programmatic advertising.
Chapter III · The People
Fourteen full-time staff in Lisbon. Forty ensemble members across eleven countries. One documented methodology.
The studio is intentionally small. Fourteen full-time staff work out of the Lisbon production room — writers, sound designers, producers, an archivist, a member-care lead, and a small operations group that handles distribution, accessibility, and member communications. Around them rotates a forty-strong ensemble of contracted voice actors and field sound designers, drawn from eleven countries and working in the studio's six production languages: English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, and Mandarin.
The writers' room is run on a published methodology that has, since 2021, been taught at nine universities as a working case study in serialized audio fiction. It begins with a season thesis, moves through a structured outline of seven to twelve episodes, and ends with a table-read draft that has been heard aloud before it has been edited. Every commissioned script enters the room as a working draft and leaves as a record of how a group of writers listens to one another.
The studio is listener-supported. Ninety-four percent of revenue comes from members; six percent from licensing and grants. There are no mid-roll interruptions. There are no programmatic advertisements. There has never been an exclusive platform deal. The membership base stands at more than 4,800 paying members on Patreon and Memberful combined, with an average tenure of 3.2 years — a figure the studio treats as a working contract rather than a marketing one.
— Browse the seasons and ensemblesChapter IV · The Body of Work
A decade of fiction, set down in numbers.
- 140+ episodes across seven award-eligible seasons since 2014
- 28 industry honors, including four Audio Verse Awards for Best Scripted Drama
- 86% average episode completion rate across the catalogue
- 6 production languages, with native teams for each season
Recognized by the Peabody Digital Media Showcase (2021), the Ambies (Podcast Academy Awards) finalist in 2022 and 2024, and the 2023 Prix Europa nominee distinction for The Cartographer's Daughter. Cited by Atlas Obscura, The Guardian Audio, and BBC Radio 4 Drama as a blueprint for independent scripted audio.
— Manifesto
Scripted fiction is staged for the ears. It is made without interruption. It is made to be heard whole — and once heard, to be remembered.
From the studio notebook, kept open on the control room desk since November 2014.
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