Shima Oliaee is a Peabody, Overseas Press Club, and duPont Award-winning journalist and the founder of Shirazad Productions. Her work focuses on the stories of the marginalized, voices forced into silence, ignored or maligned by the media. 

Shirazad’s first independent series Pink Card premiered at ESPN’s 30 for 30 in 2022. The four-part audio doc tells the story of three generations of Iranian women fighting to overthrow a dictatorship through soccer. The series received honors from the Overseas Press Club, a Murrow Award for Excellence in Writing, two Gracie Awards, an International Sports Press Award, two NY Festival of the Arts Awards, and a National Headliner Award. The series is currently featured at the National Center for Civic and Human Rights.

The Competition, released in 2024, follows seven diverse teenagers competing for America's largest cash scholarship (a pageant) for high school girls. The competition descends into chaos when news of the overturn of Roe v Wade leaks on finals night. The show was honored at the Future of Media Awards, won a Signal Award, and The Guardian, Audible, and Mashable named it the podcast of the year.

Oliaee created the Peabody Award-winning Dolly Parton’s America, a 9-part series she conceived of as a journey into American, immigrant, and feminist history through the prism of Parton’s life. Her follow-up doc, the duPont Award-winning Flag and the Fury, investigated the fall of the Mississippi flag after George Floyd’s murder.

For Radiolab, she created, produced, and reported The Vanishing of Harry Pace about the color line in America, and her series on conversion therapy, UnErased, was named the podcast of the year by KQED News. In 2023 Adweek named Oliaee the producer of the year.

Oliaee studied music production and cinema-television at USC, before receiving a graduate degree in psychology. She worked as a teacher, a translator, and in comedy television, including on the Golden Globe-winning Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Her writing appears in Racquet Magazine and is forthcoming at Time.