Ambassadors

Siobhan Davies is the founder, previous Artistic Director of Siobhan Davies Dance, and a renowned British choreographer who rose to prominence in the 1970s.

Davies was a founding member of London Contemporary Dance Theatre and in 1982 joined forces with Richard Alston and Ian Spink to create independent dance company Second Stride. Founding Siobhan Davies Dance in 1988, she works closely with collaborating artists to ensure that their own artistic enquiry is part of the creative process.

By 2002 she moved away from the traditional theatre circuit and started making work for gallery spaces. Davies applies choreography across a wide range of creative disciplines including visual arts and film. Recent choreographic works have been presented at some of the most prestigious art institutions in the UK and Europe, including Lenbachhaus (Munich), Whitechapel Gallery (London) and Turner Contemporary (Margate).

Siobhan is a past Trustee of the Arts Foundation.

Image credit: Rachel Cherry, 2011

Richard Eyre has worked in theatre, film and opera for 50 years. He directed in Leicester, Edinburgh and Nottingham before becoming Director of the National Theatre in 1988. For 10 years he directed numerous productions there including Hamlet, Richard III, King Lear, Guys and Dolls, Night of the Iguana, John Gabriel Borkman and new plays by David Hare, Tom Stoppard, Christopher Hampton, Tony Harrison and Nicholas Wright.

Subsequently he has directed many plays in the West End and on Broadway including Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, The Crucible, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, My Name Is Lucy Barton and Mary Poppins.

He was producer of BBC TV’s Play for Today from 1978-81 and on tv his credits include The Insurance Man, Tumbledown, Henry IV, The Dresser and, recently, King Lear with Anthony Hopkins. His feature films include Iris, Notes on a Scandal and The Children Act. He has directed the operas La Traviata at the Royal Opera House and Carmen, Werther, Le Nozze di Figaro and Manon Lescaut at the Metropolitan Opera, New York. He has published two memoirs - Utopia and Other Places and National Service, a collection of interviews with theatre people - Talking Theatre, a collection of essays - What Do I Know? and a collection of poetry – Place to Place. He has received many awards, was knighted in 1997 and became a Companion of Honour in 2017.

Richard is a past Trustee of the Arts Foundation.

Antony Gormley (b. 1950) is widely acclaimed for his sculptures, installations and public artworks that investigate the relationship of the human body to space. His work has developed the potential opened up by sculpture since the 1960s through a critical engagement with both his own body and those of others in a way that confronts fundamental questions of where human beings stand in relation to nature and the cosmos. Gormley continually tries to identify the space of art as a place of becoming in which new behaviours, thoughts and feelings can arise.

Antony Gormley has had a number of solo shows at venues including The Royal Academy of Arts, London (2019); Delos, Greece (2019); Uffizi Gallery, Florence (2019); Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia (2019); Long Museum, Shanghai (2017); Forte di Belvedere, Florence (2015); Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland (2014); Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (2012); Deichtorhallen Hamburg; State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (2011); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2010); Hayward Gallery, London (2007); Kunsthalle zu Kiel; Malmö Konsthall (1993); and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen (1989).
Permanent public works include the Angel of the North (Gateshead, England), Another Place (Crosby Beach, England), Exposure (Lelystad, The Netherlands) Chord (MIT – Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA). He has also participated in major group shows such as the Venice Biennale and Documenta 8, Kassel, Germany. Gormley won the Turner Prize in 1994 and has been a member of the Royal Academy since 2003.

He was made an Officer of the British Empire in 1997 and knighted in 2014.

Antony is a past Trustee of the Arts Foundation.

Born in Hackney, Kapadia studied film-making at the Royal College of Art, where he first gained recognition with the award-winning short The Sheep Thief (1997). His first feature film The Warrior (2001), shot in Rajasthan and the Himalayas, won two BAFTA awards and earned Kapadia the Carl Foreman Award for the Most Promising Newcomer. He has since become a vital name in documentary film, winning BAFTA Awards for his documentary Senna (2010), about the Brazilian Formula One racing driver, Ayrton Senna, and BAFTA and Academy Awards for Amy (2015), a documentary charting the life of British singer Amy Winehouse. His feature Maradona (2019), a documentary about the footballer Diego Maradona, continues his exploration of the lives of ‘child geniuses’.

Asif is a past Fellow of the Arts Foundation and was the recipient of the Film Directing Fellowship in 2001.

Wayne McGregor CBE is a multi-award-winning British choreographer and director. He is Artistic Director of Studio Wayne McGregor, the creative engine of his life-long choreographic enquiry into thinking through and with the body. Studio Wayne McGregor encompasses his extensive creative collaborations across dance, film, music, visual art, technology and science; Company Wayne McGregor, his own touring company of dancers; and highly specialized learning and research programmes. Studio Wayne McGregor opened its own newly created studio spaces at Here East in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in March 2017.

Wayne McGregor is also Resident Choreographer at The Royal Ballet, where his productions are acclaimed for their daring reconfiguring of classical language. He is Professor of Choreography at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance and has an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Plymouth University and an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from University of Leeds. He is part of the Circle of Cultural Fellows at King’s College London.

McGregor is regularly commissioned by and has works in the repertories of the most important ballet companies around the world, including Paris Opera Ballet, ABT, New York City Ballet, Bolshoi Ballet, Munich Ballet, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Royal Danish Ballet and San Francisco Ballet. He has choreographed for theatre, opera, film (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Fantastic Beasts, Sing, Mary Queen of Scots), music videos (Radiohead, The Chemical Brothers), fashion (Gareth Pugh at London Fashion Week, 2017), campaigns (Selfridges), TV (Brit Awards, 2015 & 16), and site specific performances (Big Dance Trafalgar Square, 2012).

McGregor's work has earned him four Critics' Circle National Dance Awards, two Time Out Awards, two South Bank Show Awards, two Olivier Awards, a prix Benois de la Danse and two Golden Mask Awards. In 2011 McGregor was awarded a CBE for Services to Dance.

Wayne is a past Fellow of the Arts Foundation and was the recipient of the Choreography Fellowship in 1994.

Rufus Norris is Director of the National Theatre, where he recently directed Macbeth, Mosquitoes, My Country; a work in Progress, The Threepenny Opera, wonder.land and Everyman. He was previously an Associate Director at the National, directing Behind the Beautiful Forevers, The Amen Corner, Table, London Road, Death and the King’s Horseman and Market Boy. Productions elsewhere include Feast, Vernon God Little, Peribanez, Tintin, Afore Night Come and Sleeping Beauty for the Young Vic; Festen and Blood Wedding for the Almeida; Under the Blue Sky and About the Boy for the Royal Court, and many others. His productions of Cabaret, Festen, Tintin and The Country Girl have all played in the West End and toured nationally, and he directed Les Liaisons Dangereuses on Broadway. Opera work includes Dr Dee with Damon Albarn for MIF and ENO, and Don Giovanni at ENO. His debut feature film Broken had its premiere at Cannes in 2012; his film of London Road was released in June 2015. In 2016, Rufus collaborated with Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller on we’re here because we’re here – a modern memorial to mark the centenary of the Battle of the Somme. It was a UK-wide event, commissioned by 14-18 NOW, produced by the National Theatre and Birmingham Repertory Theatre, in collaboration with 26 organisations, and with over 1400 volunteers involved.

Rufus is a past Fellow of the Arts Foundation and was the recipient of the Theatre Directing Fellowship in 2002.

Since 2014 Jonathan has been Director of Somerset House Trust.

He began his career at Glyndebourne Opera and then went to be General Manager at the Almeida Theatre, founding Almeida Opera. In 1997 he took over as Chief Executive of Aldeburgh Music where he remained until 2014, a transformational period for the organization culminating in the Britten Centenary celebrations.

He has an Honorary Doctorate in Music from the University of East Anglia, is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music and in 2013 was awarded a CBE for services to music.

Jonathan was a long-standing trustee of the Arts Foundation serving until 2024.

Alexandra Shulman was Editor-in-Chief of British Vogue from 1992-2017. Previous to that she edited British GQ and worked on The Sunday Telegraph and Tatler. She has written two novels and a non-fiction book about masterminding the centenary of British Vogue and is a weekly columnist for The Mail on Sunday. She is known as a commentator and consultant on fashion, lifestyle, female leadership and the media.

She was a Trustee of The National Portrait Gallery from 1999-2007 and of The Royal Marsden Cancer Charity from 2009-2014. She was a director ofThe Conde Nast International board and is currently Vice President of The London Library.

Alexandra is a past Trustee of the Arts Foundation.

Matthew Slotover co-founded the art magazine Frieze in 1991 and launched Frieze Art Fair in London in 2003, which was later joined yy fairs in New York, Los Angeles and Seoul. In 2021 he opened Toklas, a Mediterranean restaurant in London, and in 2022, he launched Fort Road Hotel in Margate. Matthew is currently chair of Turner Contemporary, Margate, and a board member of Sadlers Wells and the Walpole Group. He is a founding member of the Gallery Climate Coalition, and a founding board member of Murmur, an environmental charity dedicated to using the Arts to combat climate change.

Matthew served as a trustee of the Arts Foundation until 2024.

Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge.

Her books have won and been shortlisted for many awards. Her publications include How To Be Both (2014), winner of the Goldsmiths and Baileys Prize and the Costa Book Award for Best Novel; a collection of short stories, Public Library (2015), and the novels Autumn (2016) and Winter (2017), the first two novels in a "seasonal quartet". Like Smith's earlier novels Hotel World (2001), The Accidental (2005) and How to Be Both, Autumn was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Ali is a past Fellow of the Arts Foundation and was the recipient of the Short Story Writing Fellowship in 2001.