Rise reveals winners of 2025 awards

The event was designed to promote gender diversity by honouring outstanding women, advocates, and organisations. With attendees from 21 countries worldwide – including Australia, the US, Canada, Australia, France, Norway, Germany and the Netherlands – the winners were celebrated by women, advocates, and companies across the whole spectrum of the non-craft part of the broadcast media technology industry in operations, engineering, sales, marketing and business. 

In partnership with Sky and Gravity Media, the ceremony was also streamed globally on the Rise YouTube channel.

Deborah Cross, Business Manager at Rise, commented: “Now in its seventh year, the Rise Awards continues to go from strength to strength with many more companies bringing clients with them this year to share the Rise message. The 2025 ceremony was the culmination of a challenging task for our judging panel, selecting this year’s winners from an exceptionally high calibre of nominees. Congratulations to all those who took home an award. We feel privileged to champion the talents of these inspirational women and diversity advocates.”

The winners of the 2025 Rise Awards were as follows:

​​Advocate, sponsored by Techex

• Levant Ozparlak – Irdeto
• Scott Kerr – Sky

Business Leader, sponsored by IBC 

• Liz McParland – Globecast

Business Operations, sponsored by Encompass

• Laura Martín-Moralejo – Warner Bros. Discovery

Company Award for Investment in Women, sponsored by Ross Video

• Channel 4

Influencer, sponsored by Disguise 

• Mirusha Jegatheeswaran – ITV

Marketing, sponsored by DCE Agency 

• Margot Ouali, Appear

Product Innovation, sponsored by Clear-Com 

• Regina Poniridis – Caretta Research

Product Support Engineer, sponsored by appear 

• Brittany Shoemake – Warner Bros. Discovery

At the shortlist judging day, the judges decided to split the Project Management/Delivery category into two, End User and Vendor/Service Provider.

Project Management Or Delivery (Vendor/Service Provider), sponsored by Globecast 

• Jane Lavineway – Irdeto

Project Management Or Delivery, End User, sponsored by Warner Bros. Discovery 

• Sarah Thornley – Sky UK

R&D Engineer, sponsored by AWS

• Shufei He – Irdeto

Rising Star, sponsored by RedBee Media 

• Patrycja Foltynowicz – Limitless Broadcast
• Sreekala Kallidil – Irdeto

Sales, sponsored by Mimir Saga (part of the Fonn Group)

• Juliet Bayliss – Globecast

Student/Apprentice, sponsored by SMPTE

• Juliette Maes – Media Distillery

Technical Operations, sponsored by Vizrt

• Jayne Hilton – Globecast

Woman Of The Year, sponsored by Zixi

The winner of the Woman of the Year Award, decided by the Rise Advisory Boards, will be announced at a later date.

• Sue Farrell – Channel 4

Additionally, the Special Recognition Award was presented to Nicki Fisher for her services to the broadcast industry and Rise’s industry-wide diversity and inclusion strategy, which incorporates mentoring programmes, community building, and awards, as well as sector-specific training and development programs across all areas of media technology. According to Rise, this award is reserved for women who surpass expectations for commitment to the industry.

At the IBC2025 conference session “Industries of Tomorrow: How to Embrace Change and Ride the Wave”, Muki Kulhan, UK Ambassador at Women In Immersive Tech IT (WIIT), commented: “We want to burst these doors open and keep the conversation going.” Discover more here.