2023

Natsai Audrey Chieza is founder and CEO at Faber Futures. She is a leading thinker on the transformative role design can play in the equitable development of consumer biotechnology. With over ten years of experience co-developing multi-sector innovation strategies and shaping policy with global institutions, she leads a dynamic team that translates value and transforms systems across education, design, life science and manufacturing industries.

Over a decade of experimentation, Chieza established novel design-driven processes for bacteria textile colouration, which have been exhibited internationally, including at Ars Electronica, Design Museum, Pompidou Centre, Vitra Design Museum and the Science Gallery Dublin. Chieza is a member of the current session of the World Economic Forum's Global Futures Council on Synthetic Biology, contributing to the industry's roadmap for a world changed by COVID-19. A TED speaker, Chieza has given talks on transdisciplinary innovation, including at Design Indaba, SxSW, BoF, and Dezeen Day, and has taught on biodesign programmes at Central Saint Martins in London and the Bartlett School of Architecture. She was awarded the INDEX award in 2019 and is named on ICON Design 100 2019, Evening Standard Progress 1000 2019, It's Nice That Ones to Watch 2019, and OkayAfrica's 100 Women 2018.

Leonie Bell has been Director of V&A Dundee, Scotland’s design museum, since October 2020.
As Director, she is responsible for leading the organisation from its spectacular home in Dundee’s reimagined waterfront, for delivering the museum’s vision to inspire and empower through design, and for championing design and designers and the infinite possibilities they bring as catalysts of creativity and change.

Leonie works closely with the Board, museum team, stakeholders and partners to ensure that V&A Dundee continues to grow as a world-class design museum, is an everyday part of life in Dundee, welcomes visitors from around the world, and runs programmes that reach out across Dundee, Scotland, the UK and the world, generating joy and sparking curiosity in design.

Leonie has had a wide variety of leadership roles from the Future Paisley Partnership at Renfrewshire Council, Scottish Government, Creative Scotland and The Lighthouse, Scotland’s Centre for Architecture, Design and the City.

She is also a trustee of the Edinburgh International Festival, a Design Economy Ambassador for the Design Council, member of the Theophano Foundation’s Prize Advisory Council, and an Honorary Professor of Design at the University of Dundee’s Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design.

Sarah is director of her London-based architectural practice which she founded in 1994.

Her work is acknowledged as a pioneering influence in British Architecture, and specialises in exploring the built environment’s role in addressing the ecological crisis. Winning many awards for its work, her practice has designed buildings for the educational, community, urban design, cultural and housing sectors.

For 20 years, until 2016, Sarah was Professor of Architecture at the University of Sheffield where she led research into environments suited to older people. She writes and speaks about her and the practice’s work and has authored two books and many articles. She was granted the title Royal Designer for Industry in 2012 and was awarded an MBE in 2003.

Of Trinidadian and British parents, Cassa trained at the Royal Academy of Dance, gaining a degree in classical ballet from Durham University. Upon graduating in 2001, she founded Ballet Black to provide role models to young, aspiring black and Asian dancers. A year later, she opened the BB Junior School in Shepherd’s Bush. Cassa is also a graduate of the 2009 National Theatre cultural leadership programme, Step Change. Since starting the Company, she has commissioned work from a wide range of choreographers, including Liam Scarlett, Richard Alston, Sophie Laplane, Javier de Frutos, Annabelle Lopez- Ochoa, Shobana Jeyasingh, Henri Oguike, Arthur Pita and Will Tuckett.

Ballet Black won both the Critics’ Circle National Dance Award for Outstanding Company in 2009, Best Independent Company in 2012 and Best Mid-Scale Company in 2022. Cassa was awarded an MBE in the 2013 New Year Honours' List for Services to Classical Ballet and has served as a judge on the panels of both the Kenneth Macmillan Choreographic and BBC Young Dancer competitions. In 2015, Cassa was appointed a Patron of Central School of Ballet and in May 2016 became a vice president of The London Ballet Circle. In 2017, she joined the Ballet Now consortium in association with Birmingham Royal Ballet.

Also that year, Cassa, along with Senior Artist Cira Robinson, collaborated with renowned British ballet shoe manufacturer, Freed of London, to create two brand new pointe shoe colours to enable dancers of Black and Asian descent to buy skin-tone pointe shoes ready-made. In 2018, Cassa was awarded the Freedom of the City of London. To date, she has commissioned 48 choreographers, to create over 60 new ballets for the Company. In both 2017, 2018 & 2019 Cassa was included in The Evening Standards The Progress 1000: London’s most influential people. She also teaches regularly at the BB Junior School in Shepherd’s Bush, West London.

Florence Peake is an artist who has been making solo and group performance works intertwined with an extensive visual art practice since 1995. Presenting work internationally and across the UK in galleries, theatres and the public realm, Peake is known for an approach which is at once sensual and witty, expressive and rigorous, political and intimate.

Peake produces movement, interactive sculpture, paintings that use the whole body’s physicality, text, film and drawings which respond and intercept each other to articulate, extend and push ideas. Peake’s work explores notions of materiality and physicality: the body as site and vehicle of protest; the erotic and sensual as tools for queering materiality; the subjective and imagined body as a force equal to those that move in our objective flesh-bound world.

By encouraging chaotic relationships between the body and material, Peake creates radical and outlandish performances, which in turn generate temporary alliances and micro-communities within the audience. Peake’s painting is as an extension of the body itself: it is produced gesturally and performatively, and is both a manifestation of the external body in motion and the way personal experience and feeling is recorded within the tissue and bones. Their painting practice comes together with sculpture and performance in a reciprocal nature: engaging in a shared dialogue and creating multiple modes of processing performance, and the interrelations between dancers, audiences and sites.

Peake has worked with filmmakers, artists and choreographers including Joe Moran, Gaby Agis, Tai Shani, Jonathan Baldock, Serena Korda, Nicola Conibere, Gary Stevens, Catherine Hoffmann, Eve Stainton, Station House Opera and Theatre of Mistakes.

Peake is part of the Hayward Gallery’s touring British Art Show 9 (2021). Peake’s work has been presented at Arsenic theatre and Sudpol theatre in Switzerland (2020),Venice Biennale 2019; CRAC Occitanie, Sète, France (2018), London Contemporary Music Festival, UK (2018), Bosse & Baum, London, UK (2019); De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, UK (2018); Palais De Tokyo, Paris, France (2018); Hayward Gallery, London UK (2018), Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, UK (2017), Studio Leigh, London UK (2017); Sara Zanin Gallery, Rome, Italy (2017); Serpentine, London UK (2016); Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2016); ICA, London (2016); Modern Art Oxford (2016); BALTIC, Newcastle UK (2013), Frieze, London UK (2013), Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2012).

Toni Racklin was born and educated in London. She began her theatre career working at the celebrated Roundhouse Theatre, as famous for its international theatre productions as for its rock concerts. She then became Press and Marketing Manager for a variety of arts organisations, including the Unicorn Theatre for Children, Lyric Hammersmith, Liverpool Playhouse and West End producers Andrew Treagus Associates.

Later Toni moved into administration and producing, line-managing The Peter Hall Company’s production of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen with Les Arts Florissants at the Aix-en-Provence Opera Festival and the Women’s Playhouse Trust’s production of The Lady from the Sea for the Ibsen Festival in Oslo. She general managed Artistic Director Stephen Daldry’s season of Royal Court Classics in the West End.

Toni joined the Barbican Centre in 1996 as Producer to launch BITE (Barbican International Theatre Events), the yearly programme of distinctive dance, drama and music theatre from around the world. In 2010 she was appointed Head of Theatre and Dance at the Barbican. During her tenure at the Barbican, Toni has produced five major in-house productions – Deborah’s Warner’s Julius Caesar and The Testament of Mary in, Peter Brook’s 11 and 12, Ivo van Hove’s Antigone starring Juliette Binoche and Obsession starring Jude Law, both of which she toured internationally. She presented the RSC’s Richard II starring David Tennant and Sydney Theatre Company’s Big and Small starring Cate Blanchett. She has overseen three centre-wide festivals in tribute to Samuel Beckett and overseen the annual seasons by the London International Mime Festival, LIFT, Dance Umbrella and the SPILL Festival of Performance. She has added a yearly summer commercial musical, created and developed an innovative cabaret strand and introduced the work of many contemporary and diverse artists into the Barbican programme.

Her designated projects have required her to work closely with numerous leading international directors, choreographers and companies. These include Robert Wilson, the late Merce Cunningham, Robert Lepage, Boy Blue, Simon McBurney, the late Yukio Ninagawa, Thomas Ostermeier, Katie Mitchell, Ivo van Hove, the National Theatre of Scotland and Ballet Black. Several of her projects have subsequently been nominated and won coveted Olivier, Critics Circle, Evening Standard, Time Out and the late Peter Brook’s Empty Space Awards.

Stephanie Hankey is a designer, technologist, curator and social entrepreneur with over 20 years experience exploring the social and political impact of technology on society. She co-founded Tactical Tech in 2003, now the largest international NGO working at the forefront of arts, culture and public education on technology and civil society. Stephanie writes about, consults on and teaches digital design strategy, ethics and sustainability.

She co-curated the ground breaking exhibition 'Everything Will Be Fine' and the award winning touring exhibition, 'The Glass Room', enabling over 250,000 people in over 55 countries to reflect on their relationship with technology and its impact on their environment.

Stephanie was a Loeb fellow at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design and a visiting Industry Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University; she was awarded an Ashoka fellowship for her work as a social entrepreneur. Stephanie has a degree in History of Design from Manchester Metropolitan University and a Masters degree in Computer Related Design from the Royal College of Art, London.

Born in Birkenhead, Mark Leckey is one of the UK’s most influential artists working in Britain.

Mark Leckey’s first major video work, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999), was informed by the artist’s working class upbringing. Foregrounding Leckey’s use of collage, music, and film, the work featured cut-up footage of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s UK dance-music scenes. His more recent work combines ancient and digital items to examine the way objects—artistic, primitive, and quotidian—“speak” to each other.

GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction (2010) features a Samsung smart refrigerator “acting” against the background of a green screen, while The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things explores the Internet of Things, the science fiction–like scenario of digitally embedded sensors that allow humans and machines to remotely interact. In 2008, Leckey won the Turner Prize for his exhibition “Industrial Lights and Image”.

Antonio Roberts is an artist and curator based in Birmingham, UK, working primarily with video, code, and sound. He is critically engaged with the themes surrounding network culture and in his practice explores how technology continues to shape ideas of creation, ownership, and authorship. As a performing visual artist and musician he utilises live coding techniques to demystify technology and reveal its design decisions, limitations, and creative potential.

His work has been featured at galleries and festivals including, Furtherfield (2013, 2019), Tate Britain (2014, 2015, 2020), Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in Chicago (2014), Birmingham Open Media (2015-2016), Jerwood Arts (2016), Whitney Museum of American Art (2017), Green Man Festival (2017), Barbican (2018), Victoria and Albert Museum (2019), Czurles Nelson Gallery (2019), and New Art Exchange (2021).

He has curated exhibitions and projects including GLI.TC/H Birmingham (2011), Bring Your Own Beamer (2012, 2013), Stealth (2015), No Copyright Infringement Intended (2017), Copy Paste (2020), and Rules of Engagement (2020). He is part of a-n's Artist Council, is an Artist Advisor for Jerwood Arts and from 2014 - 2019 he was Curator at Vivid Projects where he produced the Black Hole Club artist development programme. In 2021 he co-founded the (Algo|Afro) Futures programme for early career Black artists to learn about live coding and creative coding.

Born out of his travels through the many global currents of contemporary London, GAIKA’s music is dark yet melodic, experimental yet catchy. While drawing strongly from his Brixton upbringing and his Jamaican and Grenadian heritage, GAIKA’s sound is ultimately expansive, seamlessly weaving musical motifs, vocal flows and slangs of UK, US and Caribbean music.

As both a vocalist and producer, GAIKA is as uncompromising in his politics as his sonics, intent on expanding and exploding the ideas of what contemporary black british music is. From his debut mixtape Machine in 2015 all the way to his debut LP on Warp Records Basic Volume, GAIKA is channeling the unique synthesis of the UK’s musical make-up, firmly at the forefront of a new London.

“Hear about London right now, and it probably sounds a bit bleak; the mass closure of much-loved venues, house prices that only the rich can afford, rising racial tensions and increasingly no help for the down-trodden. However, scratch away its surface, and the deep, dark, anonymous city remains brimming with fearless art, just as it always has done – a testament to what can bleed from a gaping wound.

Enter GAIKA: the underground artist making music fresh from Brixton, where he was born and raised. With a warped, electronic blend of grime, dance hall, garage, hip hop and R&B, GAIKA takes the sonic textures of the streets and crafts them into brand new, glistening shapes. “I like the idea of putting these organic sounds into a weird, mechanical space,” he tells me, and in his debut mixtapeMachine you can feel it – the hyper-real sound of South London being transformed into something alien-like and digital, and in turn, utterly unique.”

Fin Greenall aka Fink started as a DJ/Producer before making guitar-based folk/blues/indie music. Growing up in Bristol’s blossoming 90’s scene, Greenall signed to legendary label Kickin’ Records in 1994 and subsequently signed with Ninja Tune in 1997, releasing the critically acclaimed Fresh Produce in 2000 and DJ’ing worldwide. 7 critically acclaimed studio albums later Fink has worked with many established artists including Amy Winehouse and John Legend and has toured the world. This year saw the release of his ‘Signatures’ pack for Spitfire Audio, their first acoustic guitar pack which encompasses that signature Fink sound. Currently he is producing a major gaming soundtrack.

Nemone has been at the forefront of UK national broadcasting for 25 years, with the last twenty two at the BBC. She is a familiar daytime voice on BBC 6 Music but her passion for dance music led to curating a specialist show (Nemone’s Electric Ladyland) for the last decade.

Before her career in broadcasting, Nemone completed a Psychology BSc at Manchester University. A lifetime spent listening and talking to people in the interests of hearing and communicating their story compelled her to return to study Psychotherapy later in life. She now sees clients on a weekly basis for a range of issues.

As a fully qualified psychotherapist, Nemone is an insightful interviewer and vocal champion of mental health issues. During the pandemic, she was the first to bring breathing and grounding exercises to a broader audience via 6 Music. Building on her psychotherapeutic background, she now hosts her award winning Journeys in Sound series: taking a deeper dive into our relationship with music, interviewing musicians about the experiences that have shaped who they are.

Nemone has more recently combined her knowledge of both psychotherapy and music to tour with Scottish Ensemble, DJing and speaking at How the Light Gets In Festival, contributing to Mixcloud’s educational campaign GROW - exploring the creator journey - and was creative consultant on The Box in Plymouth’s “Because The Night Belongs To Us” exhibition.

Nemone is hosting Help Musicians mental health summit at Abbey Road on World Mental Health Day in October 2022 and is keynote speaker at this year’s Resonate Music conference in Glasgow in November 2022.

Claire Armitstead is Associate Editor (Culture) for the Guardian, writing across the Guardian and the Observer. She was previously literary editor and arts editor, and presenter of the Guardian books podcast. She was deputy chair of English Pen for eight years and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Eric Ngalle Charles is a Cameroonian writer, poet and playwright, and human rights activist based in Wales. A Ph.D. researcher at King’s College London, he was awarded a Creative Wales Award Fellowship in 2017 for his work on the topics of migration, trauma, and memory. His autobiography I, Eric Ngalle: One Man's Journey Crossing Continents from Africa to Europe (2019) was published by Parthian Books, and recounts his journey to Europe, spending several years in Russia and elsewhere seeking refuge. He was selected as one of Jackie Kay’s best British BAME writers with a unique theatrical voice. He sits on boards at Literature Wales and Aberystwyth Arts Centre and edited Hiraeth Erzolirzoli: A Wales-Cameroon Anthology (2018). The 3 Molas (2020), an anthology about Cameroon and Wales. His poetry Collection Homelands Seren Books (2022) was published in April.

Anita Sethi is an award-winning nature and travel writer born in Manchester, UK. She is author of I Belong Here: a Journey Along the Backbone of Britain and is also published in several anthologies including Women on Nature, The Wild Isles and Seaside Special: Postcards From the Edge. She has written for the Guardian, Observer, Sunday Times, BBC Wildlife, and Vogue among others and loves walking.