Shannon Reichley
Shannon Reichley is a writer and producer who’s lived a life in television despite a secret, fatalistic wish to get closer to the equally strange world of theatre. Face it: she’s been in enough theatre audiences up to now.
Shannon is a 6th-generation North Carolinian who’s been writing something, anything, and everything since her first major work of fiction, “The Clown Family”, for Mrs. Knee’s first grade class at Idlewild Elementary. Armed with a trusty blue Smith-Corona electric typewriter and tons of erase tape, she was a newspaper columnist at alma mater N.C. State, and worked part-time at a television news department across from campus, where she was mentored by people who cared about words. She continued on this perilous turn into the “glamorous” world of local TV news, since Rolling Stone was not hiring any concert reviewers upon her graduation.
She’s spent over 25 years in commercial television, with the longest tours of duty in local news in Raleigh, Norwalk, CT., Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Charlotte, where she became the city’s first female TV news director at WBTV in 1994. In 1996, she went “indie”, and now produces and writes informational and lifestyle programming for networks such as the History Channel, HGTV, Turner South, Fine Living, Discovery Home, DIY, and PBS with her company, Hitwoman Productions.
She’s won regional Emmys, a Telly, and a national Edward R. Murrow Award for news documentary, as well as the National Cable Television Association’s Best Public Affairs program in 2006. She’s also written for Charlotte-area print publications and was the media writer from 1997 to 2005 for Creative Loafing. Off the work grid, Shannon’s proud to be a volunteer for Habitat for Humanity Charlotte.
So with the encouragement of TFC creator Donna Scott, she took the plunge and submitted a piece for The Fairytale Chronicles, got it in barely before the deadline, and was shocked and pleased to make the cut in her first work for theatre. She’s thrilled to be a part of this production.
Shannon and husband Rob have lived in Charlotte since 1992, and share space with their 3 fur-kids, Spencer, Peyton, and Prada.