Sarah's an Australian media personality, journalist and blogger with an integrated voice across television, radio, magazines, newspapers and online. She's the former editor of Cosmopolitan magazine and was the host of the first series of MasterChef Australia, the highest rating show in Australian TV history. She's now the host and program developer for the country's newest channel Lifestyle YOU, writes a weekly column for Sunday Life magazine about how to have a better life and is a regular guest on Channel 7's Sunrise.
Sarah is an adept social commentator, following a career that's spanned politics, health advocacy, restaurant reviewing, opinion writing and trend forecasting. She's also qualified as a Health Coach with the Institute of Integrative Nutrition in New York and is currently writing a book for Pan Macmillan.
Sarah advises and presents to corporations on social movements, media, wellness and how to make life better. She's consulted to thecoolhunter.net, LVMH Australia, HSBC Vietnam, Revlon and Hearst Magazines New York. She's also a sought-after MC and presenter.
Additional factoids:
- Sarah was appointed editor of ACP/Hearst's Cosmopolitan at the age of 29, becoming the fourth editor in the magazine's 34-year history.
- During her tenure as editor of Cosmopolitan, the magazine experienced its highest recorded circulation and readership figures and increased its lead in the category. The magazine also experienced its largest book sizes in more than a decade.
- Australian Cosmo entered the Guinness World Book of Records when Sarah staged the largest swimsuit shoot on Sydney's Bondi Beach. Images of 1010 women in pink bikinis, spelling out 'Cosmo' beamed around the world.
- That month, Sarah also became the first women's magazine editor to interview the then Prime Ministers of Australia Mr John Howard and Mr Kevin Rudd, in the lead-up to the election.
- The year she finished her News Ltd cadetship, she came runner up in the Australian Young Journalist of the Year Awards. Sarah also contributed a weekly column for the Herald Sun and Sunday Herald Sun's opinion pages and was the youngest person in Australia to have such a column.
- She was also the Sunday Magazine's restaurant critic for two years.
- Sarah has a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and a Graduate Diploma in Professional Writing. She's worked for ABC radio and in the Press Gallery in Canberra for the Australian Financial Review.
- Sarah grew up on a subsistence-living farm, had her first business at 12 and rode a mountain bike 3000km around the south island of New Zealand one summer. Just for fun.
Keynote Topics:
1. Food + nutrition + wellness: I'm a qualified health coach with New York's Institute of Integrative Nutrition and I've healed my own crippling illness through food and exercise. I'm also about to publish my first ebook 'How to Quit Sugar' and my new TV show Eat Yourself Sexy screens on Lifestyle in August. My theories are very fresh (many are only just starting to be understood in Australia) and all about streamlining; I'm anti-diet and anti-extreme exercise: "The top 20 tips and tricks to live well now"; "I ate myself better: what I learned on my journey back from collapse" and "How to quit sugar".
2. How we want to live now: the best wellness, productivity and simple living advice from more than 100 Sunday Life column explorations and hundreds of blog experiments, including the personal lessons learned from meeting the Dalai Lama, Edward de Bono, Sir Richard Branson and many more.
3. Media + writing: I've worked for every media outlet - TV, newspapers and magazines - in Australia. I know traditional and new media intimately and have perspectives on the new landscape - because I'm straddling it! "Why we all have to be 'media whores'"
