About
About Kate Whelan
I've spent most of my life following two things. Expression and animals.
I trained as an actor, moved into broadcasting and presenting, and eventually found myself behind a microphone as a voice actor, where I've spent more than 25 years lending my voice to everything from global advertising campaigns to documentaries, films and work for organisations including Google, Emirates and the United Nations.
Voice taught me things I didn't necessarily know I was learning at the time.
When you've spent thousands of hours interpreting words rather than simply reading them, you develop an instinct for what makes something land. You hear what happens when somebody is technically saying all the right things but you don't quite believe them. You discover how much can change through a breath, a pause, an intention or the slightest shift in tone. Long before I started talking about resonance, I was working with it every day.
But there was another thread running through my life that had nothing to do with a recording studio.
Animals.
I was fascinated by them as a child and, as soon as I had the freedom to travel, I wanted to be where they were. That has taken me into wild places and into the rather harder realities of rescue and conservation, spending time with bears in China and Vietnam, elephants and sloth bears in India, orphaned rhinos in South Africa and many other animals I've been lucky enough simply to encounter in their own world.
I went because I loved them. There was no business plan hiding behind an elephant.
What I didn't realise was that, encounter by encounter, they were changing me.
The performer began to notice what happened when she stopped performing.
That's really where these two parts of my life began to meet.
I had spent years learning how to use my voice, express an idea, interpret somebody else's words and understand what makes something resonate. I had also spent rather too much of my life learning how to adapt myself, read the room, get things right and perform versions of myself beyond the microphone too.
Around animals, that seemed to fall away.
I became fascinated by how present I felt, how alive, and by the fact that some of the most profound experiences of connection I'd ever had required no human language whatsoever.
Eventually I couldn't stop wondering about it.
That curiosity became Animal Frequency.
Today it brings together the worlds that once seemed completely separate: voice, performance and expression; my own experience of presence over performance; a lifelong relationship with animals; and a growing fascination with how other species communicate, resonate and experience a world we share but don't necessarily perceive in the same way.
Through The Maiden Flight, my speaking and the wider Animal Frequency work, I'm exploring what animals might show us about presence, instinct, aliveness and connection, while also asking something that matters enormously to me: whether becoming more curious about other lives might ultimately change the way we value and protect them.
Because underneath all the ideas, the speaking and the questions, the motivation is much simpler.
I love animals. I think we've underestimated them enormously. And I want more of us to care what happens to them.