Jacqueline Rainers
Jacqueline, known also as Jacqui, grew up in the small coastal town of Port Elizabeth in South Africa. As a little girl, she dreamt of becoming a famous singer and actor. She took part in every school play and sang at every school concert. She entered university the year South Africans voted in its first democratically elected government, intent on spending it in the drama department toward a degree. But she signed up for a Journalism degree instead. While studying Jacqueline still spent many nights singing at the local karaoke bar and though lots of fun it never gave her the worldwide fame she desired.
Armed with a journalism degree, Jacqueline moved to the big city of Johannesburg and started working in a newsroom, but quickly movedinto television production when the opportunity arose.
She worked as an independent producer and director for 10 years and directed documentaries that were about profiling the experiences of the first children to attend school in the new democracy, a grouping of young people who in later years became known as “the born-free generation.” One was the film “Matric Fever” about the matriculation and matric balls (prom-type events) of a group of the first mixed-race high school graduates. She worked in educational television for many years, documenting and commenting on how the educational changes in the new democracy coupled with the new freedoms and engagements one group of people were having with another, were molding and creating a new South African child in school. Jacqueline’s other interest was in the lives of the marginalized, and through television she documented the lives of the one of the only surviving nomadic people in South Africa, a group known as the “cart people,” who travel on donkey carts doing farm work, with no access to education, running water, electricity and other amenities available to most South Africans. She made the jump into producing reality programming after a few years and worked on the localized Big Brother reality series in SA, among other series. Jacqueline is currently a senior commissioning editor within the Entertainment Unit at the South African Broadcasting Association. She develops and commissions inter-genre programming – factual entertainment, reality and gameshow programming, documentary, scripted and unscripted comedy, live special events, and talk shows. She also teaches communications studies part-time at a local college. She attended her first INPUT conference in 2006, found the discussion sessions and forums vibrant and interesting, and enjoyed the sharing of creative ideas that the space allowed, as well the opportunities to talk, discuss, debate and learn.
In 2008 she jumped at the chance to work as INPUT shop steward by formulating and managing discussion forums for the Africa leg of INPUT 2008. She traveled to Uganda and Accra and ran (along with local shop stewards) discussion forums about the creation of innovative programming within a PBS environment. Out of these sessions the first Accra produced drama was chosen as a participating film for the INPUT 2008 Conference.
When Jacqueline became a mom, the opportunities to impress at the karaoke bar dramatically lessened. Now she only sings to her most fervent supporter, her four-year-old son.
