Zara Hannaford

Zara Hannaford

Member for 6 months •
"Authentic, friendly and professional sounding young female voice"

I excel as the down-to-earth, friendly and knowledgeable voice, often working for tech companies in commercials and narrating medical and e-learning in a clear and easy-to-believe way.

I have the rare privilege of speaking British RP, Standard Australian, and General American accents as well as native speakers. This is because I am originally from Australia, was educated in Hong Kong and the UK, and lived in Canada before emigrating to the US. I also studied linguistics at university and so have a deep understanding of the mechanisms of accents.

 Training

I have more than 4 years of experience working in the voice over industry, and before that I studied English Language and Literature with a focus on accent acquisition and speech.

I have a Masters in Writing for Performance and Publication from the University of Leeds in the UK, where I practiced writing for radio and voicing the radio drama scripts.

I studied Psychology at the University of Adelaide in Australia, with a focus on Psycholinguistics, and studied speech learning and acquisition, as well as the psychological basis for speech choices, and also some sociolinguistics.

 Experience

I wrote and narrated a successful True Crime podcast which surpassed 200K downloads in 8 months, and was nominated for a Webby award.

I have worked for Apple, as the voice of their Apple Learning Coach instructional videos, and also in a commercial for the Apple watch in early 2021.

I regularly work for IBM, in the B2B web security areas, and have an ongoing relationship with Bristol Myers-Squibb, voicing their internal training videos.

I have provided commercial and B2B spots for Spotify, GoDaddy, Peloton, Summit Credit Union, Autolenders, and Feadship Luxury Yachts, among many others.

 Specials

I am able to provide basic post-production services, as well as copy editing.