From working as a weather presenter on a Tasmanian news bulletin, to her current career as a breakfast radio personality on the Gold Coast, Emily Jade O’Keefe has always followed her dream.
“I am living the exact life I wanted! Not everyone can say that.”
Emily graduated from the University of Tasmania with a Bachelor of Performing Arts in 1997 and very soon afterwards was a familiar face on Tasmanian television. But this was only the beginning of her exciting trajectory.
She attended Reece High School and Don College in Devonport and her parents hoped she would be a teacher or a nurse, simply because of the job security. But she always had a different path in mind.
“I always wanted to be either a journalist or an actor. I did drama at school and I ran the little radio station at Don College, called Don FM.
“Dad was an amateur actor and so was his dad, so I did lots of that as a kid, I was in musicals and so on.”
After grade 12, Emily enrolled to study a Bachelor of Performing Arts at the University of Tasmania in Launceston, and said she cherished every single day of her degree.
“The degree was very hard to get into, most drama degrees are,” she said.
“The intake in Launceston was only bout 25 students each year, so a very small group, and I remember one of my lecturers saying only about three of us would actually end up in an acting career. That was a wakeup call.”
Emily was fixated on her goal with a single-minded determination she can only describe as pure blind ambition.
“While I was at uni I was volunteering at the Way FM community station. During O-Week, instead of partying, I was hitting them up asking for on-air shifts.
“When I was finishing my final year at uni, and looking down the barrel of graduating and needing a job, I started hitting up all the local TV and radio stations and hanging around like a bad smell trying to get work.
“The word ‘no’ didn’t register with me.”
After flooding local stations with recorded demos and even offering to work for free, she was eventually hired by local radio station 7LA (now LAFM) as a night-time announcer, before she had even graduated.
Six months later, her on-air exposure led Southern Cross Television to also hire her as their weekend weather presenter.
She kept both jobs.
“It was a busy, stressful year,” she laughed.
And while she said these broadcast media jobs were not “Performing Arts” in the theatrical sense, she said her degree still equipped her with all the essential skills she needed to succeed in the industry.
“I was a presenter. But I was also a trained performer who was able to do my own screenwriting, which helped me write creatively when doing my scripts for the weather.
“And radio is all improv, really. And there’s a lot of training in the degree for that, which helped with radio, which is live and immediate.”
She made the switch to breakfast radio with Sea FM Devonport in 1999 and from that point on it became her primary focus. She moved Around Australia working breakfast shows in Toowoomba, Townsville, and Brisbane.
Breakfast radio shifts also allowed her to start focusing on theatre again, joining local companies in order to “make friends and have something to do in my afternoons.”
Emily describes TV as her “side hustle” but she nonetheless landed some big opportunities on screen along the way as well. She was hired by the Nine Network to host the national children’s show Download, and also spent some time as the Brisbane reporter for Mornings with Kerri-Anne, and filed stories for The Footy Show.
She finally landed in the Gold Coast, Queensland, where she is currently a breakfast announcer for 102.9 Hot Tomato, doing her dream job in a place she used to love going to for family holidays as a child.
She is also returning to her theatrical pursuits with renewed vigour, having recently performed in productions of the musicals Mama Mia and Priscilla.
Emily says she is living her best life right now and credits her Performing Arts degree with teaching her the skills she needed.
“I had the best time at UTAS,” she said. “And my degree helped me in so many ways, from script-writing to performing, and it’s all been so vital for everything I’ve done.”
- If a career in the performing arts is calling you, you can study a Bachelor of Arts with a major in Theatre and Performance. Your dream awaits!