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Badass Tours is on a mission to fill in the gaps in popular history. We lead walking tours through Amsterdam telling its incredible women’s, LGBTQ+, Jewish, and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People Of Color) stories. These people were often relegated to archives and footnotes because they weren’t the ones writing the history books. We also bring these inspiring, intriguing, and sometimes infuriating stories to a wider audience through storytelling performances and our columns, Blamsterdam and Ask a Badass. We’ve also recently launched our Badass Amsterdam DIY Tour, which lets users explore Amsterdam according to their interests and at their pace.
Badass Tours was founded in 2017 from a deep love of Amsterdam history and a desire to bring its fascinating women to the English-speaking world. While the initial tour included LGBTQ+, BIPOC and Jewish women, we realized these communities have more stories that need to be told. We added a canal belt tour of stories across LGBTQ+ history and a rijsttafel tour of LGBTQ+, BIPOC, and Jewish people. In 2023, we will launch a BIPOC history tour and a Jewish tour that primarily focuses on pre-20th-century badasses.
In 2022, we received support from the European Union’s COSME program to make these stories more widely available through a self-curated walking tour that officially launched in February of 2023.
Our stories come from a wide variety of sources. You can find them here.
Stortyteller-in-Chief
Elyzabeth is the founder and sole researcher of Badass Tours.
She began writing about the women hidden throughout written history when the Gielgud Fellowship to the Shakespeare Theatre of DC allowed her to research at the Folger Shakespeare Library. What began as research into Shakespeare’s sources became a play that used early modern female writers to tell the stories of the women of the Hundred Years’ War and the War of the Roses.
When she moved to Amsterdam, she discovered that early modern Dutch history was full of the kind of women she’d been researching. She hadn’t found them during her US-based studies because the women are almost entirely written about in Dutch. She made it her mission to translate and tell their stories for an international audience.
Her historical storytelling includes performances at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum, Groningen’s Grand Theater, and Mezrab House of Stories. She also wrote a storytelling tour of De Burcht van Berlage for the International Institute of Social History and the Jewish History Museum, which received over 900 visitors during its run in December of 2019. She has led hundreds of people through Amsterdam on her tours: Women’s History Tour, LGBTQ+ History Tour, Hidden Gems Tour, and the Customized Private Tour.
Executive Director
Shea is a UX designer with a background in VR and interactive performance. He designed Badass Tours’ Badass Amsterdam DIY Tour and website. He built a career in New York as an international producer with Blue Man Group.
When he moved to Amsterdam, he pivoted to user-centered performances and technology. He produces, presents, and designs for The Smartphone Orchestra.
As executive director of Badass Tours, Shea handles administration, partnerships, and company development.
Badass Guide
Having grown up in South Florida with a librarian mother and a theater-actor father, Lauren Maxwell has always been interested in storytelling. Her exploration of story grew as she participated in theatre productions, film school and, later, improvisational comedy. Professionally, that love manifested in branding, copywriting and UX storytelling.
In December 2014, Lauren moved from sunny Florida to the Netherlands. What started as a one-year assignment doing writing and branding for a Dutch company turned into almost a decade of discovery and love for the Lowlands. Since moving to the Netherlands, Lauren has continued to pursue storytelling and is so excited to be part of the Badass Tours team – and to share the hidden stories that shaped Amsterdam!
Social Media Guru
Dana Marin is a digital creator with a passion for people and understanding what drives them to read, watch, create and connect. She loves telling stories through both words and images, and she’s using her varied background in marketing, writing and photography to do that.
After a career in market research, Dana left the corporate world to start her journey in the freelancing world in 2021. She now works as a social media expert, writer and photographer. As the Social Media Guru of Badass Tours, Dana manages Facebook and Instagram and is in charge of creating the strategy and content for these channels.
Badass Tours is a selected SME (small-medium enterprise) of the Tourban Sustainable Urban Tourism Acceleration Programme!
Badass Tours has indirectly received funding from the European Union’s COSME programme, via an Open Call issued and executed under project Tourban (grant agreement No 951089).
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