2020

Based in Letchworth Garden City, John Allison is the creator of the comic series Giant Days, By Night and Steeple, and of the ongoing all-ages book series Bad Machinery. In addition, he created the webcomics Bobbins and Scary Go Round, with his work appearing online since 1998. He was one of the first comic artists to build a daily following exclusively on the internet.

John's various comics have been nominated for Eisner Awards every year from 2016-2019, and in 2018 he won the Best Long-Form Online Comic award from the US National Cartoonists’ Society. Giant Days is currently being published in seven foreign language editions.

Hannah Berry is an award winning graphic novelist and comics creator, author of LIVESTOCK, ADAMTINE and BRITTEN & BRÜLIGHTLY, all published by Jonathan Cape. She is a regular contributor to various comics projects all around the world, and in 2018 was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and named UK Comics Laureate 2019-21.

Woodrow Phoenix is very interested in using comics to extend the possibilities for narratives, both factual and fictional. His varied output has regularly appeared in national newspapers including The Guardian and The Independent, in comics and magazines across Europe, the USA and Japan, and in television projects for Walt Disney and Cartoon Network.
His book 'Rumble Strip' (Myriad Editions, 2008), exploring the problematic relationship of people to their cars, was called "an utterly original work of genius" by The Times. He designed and co-edited the collective graphic novel 'Nelson' (Blank Slate Books, 2011) which won awards and much acclaim for its presentation of the life of a young woman, one year at a time. His recent experiments include a wordless graphic novel, 'She Lives' (2014), presented in a hand-bound giant hardcover book where each page measures one square metre. All the images are drawn directly into the book, making it a unique work of art exploring scale and timing in narrative, that can only be experienced in person. She Lives has been exhibited in galleries and museums around the UK, with extended residencies at the British Museum and The London Cartoon Gallery.

Woodrow is currently working on an updated/revised version of 'Rumble Strip', called 'Crash Course'. He lives and works in London and Cambridge.

Rebecca Earley is Professor of Sustainable Fashion Textile Design and co-founder of Centre for Circular Design at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London. Previously she was Director of the Textile Futures Research Centre (2010 – 2017) and worked in the Textiles Environment Design (TED) unit developing sustainable fashion textile design strategies, curating exhibitions, facilitating workshops and creating original materials, models and prototypes. In 2007 she was nominated as a Morgan Stanley Great Briton for her contribution to sustainable fashion textiles in the UK. Becky now works with organisations to embed sustainable design research within corporate culture; clients include H&M, Filippa K, and VF Corporation. She recently completed two Swedish-based projects with Research Institutes of Sweden (RISE) – Mistra Future Fashion and Trash-2-Cash.

Dr Carmen Hijosa, Founder and Chief Creative and Innovation Officer of Ananas Anam Ltd, developed Piñatex® - a natural plant-based material made from pineapple leaf fibre. She is an ethical entrepreneur with a vision for a more sustainable future, connecting people, ecology and economics.

Originally from Spain, Carmen’s career has taken her around the world. The journey of Piñatex® began when she realized the toxic impact of mass leather production while consulting in the Philippines. Driven to find an alternative solution, Carmen undertook a PhD at the Royal College of Art (UK) in her 50s, and has developed a vibrant new industry that is both socially and environmentally responsible.

Born in the Cotswolds and from a long family line of Clothworkers and Mercers, Scarlet trained in textile design at Central St Martins developing her degree show into Paul Smith’s first upholstery fabric collection which was nominated for ‘Fabric of the Year’ by Elle Decoration. She is a strong supporter of British-based textile manufacturing, using British weavers in her practice which involves designing her own individual fabrics for couture fashion, bespoke interiors and architectural projects. She recently launched her own interior collection also has embarked on art direction for films, her first project being nominated for best short film at Rain Dance Film Festival in 2018. Scarlet has been involved for many years in Fine Cell, a charity which makes handmade products in British prisons by teaching high-quality needlework skills to prisoners. The products sold worldwide and have been bought by museums and galleries in the UK.

Carol Morley was the recipient of an Arts Foundation Fellowship in Documentary Filmmaking in 2003. She was born in Manchester, England. She attended Central St Martins College of Art, where she graduated with a first class degree in fine art film and video. Her films include The Alcohol Years, a BAFTA nominated film about her scurrilous teenage past; Dreams of a Life, which went behind the anonymous newspaper headline about Joyce Vincent who lay dead in her flat for three years; The Falling, A BBC/ BFI film, set in a girls’ school in England in 1969, which revolved around an outbreak of mass psychogenic illness, featuring Maisie Williams, Florence Pugh and Maxine Peake and the recently released Out of Blue, a neo-noir mystery set in New Orleans and starring Patricia Clarkson, Toby Jones, James Caan and Jacki Weaver.

Philip Ilson is the Artistic Director of the London Short Film Festival, which he co-founded in 2004. He is also the short film programmer for the BFI London Film Festival, and has worked as a freelance programmer, including at the East End Film Festival (London), Cork Film Festival (Ireland), and the Branchage Festival (Jersey), Latitude music festival, and at Curzon Soho Cinema.

Topher is a multi-disciplinary artsist working in film and performance. He is Black queer pioneer committed to exploring notions of masculinity, sexuality, race desire and the environment. He is former artistic director of The Red Room and Chair of the Independent Theatre Council and current board member of the British American Drama Academy and parton of Switchboard. He is currently embarking on a number of projects including a performance response to James Baldwin's Another Country and an essay film about HIV, race, desire and stigma. His latest experimental film FETISH was a collaboration with Mercury Prize and Scottish Album of the Year Award winners Young Fathers. time actor. He is a former artistic director of The Red Room Theatre Company and past chair of the Independent Theatre Council UK.

Sarah McCrory is currently the Director of Goldsmiths CCA. She is a co-founder of Open School East and presently is a Trustee.
Prior to this she was Director of Glasgow International (2012 - 2016), Curator of Frieze Projects and Film (2009 - 2012), and curated a program of major public commissions as part of the London 2012 Olympic Festival. McCrory was previously co-curator of the not-for-profit organisation Studio Voltaire, London, and the curator of project spaces Arts & Jobs and Swallow Street, London. For three years McCrory was curator of self-publishing fair Publish and Be Damned and was a Director of Vilma Gold, London.

Artist Gavin Turk has pioneered many forms of contemporary British sculpture now taken for granted, including the painted bronze, the waxwork, the recycled art-historical icon and the use of rubbish in art.

Turk’s installations and sculptures deal with issues of authorship, authenticity and identity. Concerned with the ‘myth’ of the artist and the ‘authorship’ of a work, Turk’s engagement with this modernist, avant-garde debate stretches back to the ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp. His work has since been collected and exhibited by many major museums and galleries throughout the world.

Dr. Zoé Whitley is Senior Curator at the Hayward Gallery in London, prior to which she was Curator, International Art, at Tate Modern. In 2019, she curated the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, presenting the work of Cathy Wilkes. She co-curated the acclaimed exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power and is author of The Graphic World of Paul Peter Piech (2014). Zoé was named one of Apollo Magazine’s 40 Under 40 Thinkers in Europe, and one of ArtLyst’s 2017 100 Alternative Powerhouses in the not-for-profit contemporary art world.

Max has been a regular presenter of BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction and over the last two decades he has also presented various programmes for BBC World Service, Radio 4 & 3. He was co-founder and long time musical director of the renowned Oily Cart Theatre Company and his compositions have graced BBC Children’s TV, Spitalfields Music Festival and of course other theatre productions. He’s spent many nights club DJing and, with Rita Ray, toured across the world in their electro acoustic Shrine Synchro System. He’s an associate artist with Oxford Contemporary Music, where he is the leader of the Instant Orchestra and also the lead artist on a Free Music initiative for schools, Playing the Curriculum. He’s also a contributing lecturer on the actor/musician BA and MA courses at Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance and has curated events for the Barbican, the Tate, the South Bank, Latitude Festival and other mighty gigs.

Robin Rimbaud, aka Scanner, is an artist and composer working in the UK, whose works traverse the experimental terrain between sound, space, and form, connecting a bewilderingly diverse array of genres – a partial list would include sound design, film scores, computer music, contemporary composition, large-scale multimedia performances, product design, architecture, fashion design, rock music and jazz.

Since 1991 he has been intensely active in sonic art, producing concerts, installations and recordings, the albums Mass Observation (1994), Delivery (1997), and The Garden is Full of Metal (1998) hailed by critics as innovative and inspirational works of contemporary electronic music. He scored the hit musical comedy Kirikou & Karaba (2007), and campaigns for Nike, Chanel, Mercedes, Versace, Sprint FCUK, and in 2018 CISCO telephones the world over feature his sound design.

To date he has scored 65 contemporary dance productions, including works for the London Royal Ballet and Merce Cunningham in NYC. In 2016 he installed his Water Drops sound work in Rijeka Airport in Croatia, Ghosts at Cliveden National Trust UK, and scored the world’s first ever Virtual Reality ballet, Nightfall.

Salomé is an artist and writer engaged in listening as a socio-political practice of sound. Her work and writing deal with sound, the world sound makes: its aesthetic, social and political realities that are hidden by the persuasiveness of a visual point of view. Her most recent book The Political Possibility of Sound: Fragments of Listening, 2018, articulates a politics that includes creativity and invention and imagines transformation and collaboration as the basis of our living together.
The focus of her work is on the collective and on the feminine, and brings the philosophy of sound to a participatory engagement: she co-convenes Points of Listening, a regular event for sound and listening, with Mark Peter Wright, and her phonography blogwww.soundwords.tumblr.com is the template for a public listening, writing and score making.