Your resident girlypop theatre producer.

Rafia finds the value that's been overlooked or miscategorised as niche — and builds a commercial case for it.

As founder of Rafia Hussain Productions Ltd, she produces plays, adaptations and musicals that treat Black, Brown & Female joy not as a diversity mandate, but as an underpriced market.

A decade in the non-profit sector taught her how to make theatre with almost nothing. It also showed her the ceiling — brilliant work, funded in small increments, competing for attention it deserved on a much bigger stage. Commercial producing was the obvious next question. Nobody around her could answer it.

So she found people who could. In 2025, she made the deliberate move into commercial producing — and the following year was selected for Stage One's prestigious and highly competitive '5 at 50' programme, which turned a model she'd only watched from the outside into one she could actually build inside.