Artists and Collaborators

Kuang-Yi Ku lives and works both in Taiwan and the Netherlands. He is doing his Ph.D. research at Sheffield Hallam University, UK and the research topic is the interdisciplinary practice between art, design, and bioscience. He has graduated with triple master degrees with social design from Design Academy Eindhoven, dentistry from National Yang-Ming University, and communication design from Shih Chien University. He is a former dentist, bio-artist, and speculative designer. He also co-founded TW BioArt (Taiwan bioart community) to stimulate the fields of BioArt and Science+Art in Taiwan. His works often deal with human body, sexuality, interspecies interaction, and medical technology, aiming to investigate the relationships among technology, individual and environment.

Kuang-Yi Ku won Bio Art & Design Award in 2022 for the project “Atlas of Queer Anatomy”. His “Tiger Penis Project” has been awarded Gijs Bakker Award 2018, the annual prize for the best project by a graduating master’s student in Design Academy Eindhoven. He has also won the 1st prize of Taipei Digital Art Awards in 2015 with “The Fellatio Modification Project”, where he involves body modification, gender studies, queer theories, and dentistry all together. His works were featured in international medias such as New Scientist, The Huffington Post, Elephant Magazine, DAMN° Magazine, Dezeen, Designboom, VICE, Dazed Digital, Daily Mail, New York Post, and so on.

Robert Johnson is a British designer with an MA in Social Design from the Design Academy Eindhoven and the founder of Studio Ficta, a creative start-up that fuses film, interactive design, and design research across anthropological, ecological, and social contexts. Working with film and interactive design, Johnson’s projects create alternative narratives using fictional writing as a design research tool, creating characters and dialogues that highlight issues surrounding social attitudes towards labour, materials, and waste streams within the circular economy.

In 2020, Johnson completed his residency at the Design Museum, London, where his project titled Fatconomy, presented fat as a valuable resource in urban society, illustrating the potential of discarded fats for the economy, material innovation and urban planning. His work on ‘fat as a new material’ was exhibited at the Tallin Architecture Biennale in 2022 and has given several key lectures at the Cooper Union in New York. the Design Museum, London and the Industrial design academy of Taiwan.

In 2022, he was awarded the design fellowship by the Royal Commission of 1851 in which he will be bringing his speculative design methods to the biofuel sectors within the U.K. focusing on the development of a future factory and cross-collaborative methods on new innovation labours from oil waste streams. His works has been exhibited at TAB 2022, Dezeen, Droog gallery, Design Week, and the Design Museum, London.

Anat pioneered her multichannel video-work in the early 1990’s at the School of Visual Theatre in Jerusalem Israel. In 2017 Anat has written, composed, performed and directed Kairos OperaArt with designer Zowie Broach (Boudicca) at the Victoria and Albert museum, and since delved further into the conjunction between classical-music forms and electronic and digital synthesis, collaborating on the last and current albums: Tzipora and The Promise Of Meat, with opera singer Anna Dennis and Poet and countertenor Richard Scott. 

As a lecturer, Anat is leading performance-improvisation workshops at various universities across the UK and abroad, she is also an associate lecturer at the RCA and Central Saint Martins (London, UK) she is a collaborative member of Chicks On Speed art-band since early 2000. In her PhD: Oscillation and Disturbance in the OpeRaArt, she claims that Interdisciplinary work is work that arrives out of interactions of systems- such as language and sound, and that meaning arrives out of that interaction.

Giorgia Ohanesian Nardin is an artist, independent researcher and queer agitator of Armenian descent.  Their research is built of a collection of pedagogic and performative events that focus on experiencing pleasure as a form of resistance to systemic oppression by relating a queer/transfeminist approach to somatic practices.  Trained in dance, their work exists is the shape of movement, video, text, choreography, sound and gatherings, and deals with narratives of hostility, survival strategies, rest, friction, sensuality, healing.

Giorgia took part in LIFT’s podcast Plans For The Future.

Lina Lapelyte’s (b.1984, works in Vilnius and London) performance-based practice is rooted in music and flirts with pop culture, gender stereotypes and nostalgia. Her works engage trained and untrained performers often in an act of singing that takes the form of a collective and affective event questioning vulnerability and silencing. Her works were exhibited at 13th Kaunas biennial, Haus der Kunst, Munich; Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Brussels; Tai Kwun, HK; Glasgow International; Riga Biennial – RIBOCA2; Lithuanian Pavilion at the 58th. Venice Biennale; Cartier Foundation gallery, Paris; CCA Ujazdowski, Warsaw; Baltic Triennial 13, Tallinn; Moderna Museet, Malmo; FIAC, Paris; Hayward touring show, UK; Serpentine, London; Her upcoming solo shows include Lafayette Anticipation gallery in Paris and Space gallery, London.

Maryan Abdulkarim is a public speaker, writer, and activist interested in themes relating to freedom. She participates actively in public discussion as a political commentator and a columnist. She collaborates regularly with choreographer Sonya Lindfors and is a member of Miracle Workers Collective that represented Finland at the 58th Venice Biennale. Abdulkarim is also a founding member of the Nordic Feminist Network, including community organisers from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Sami regions. Abdulkarim’s and Eeva Talvitie’s book, About ten myths on feminism was published in Finnish in 2018. Her second book will be published in collaboration with photographer Uwa Iduozee. She made her debut as a screenwriter in the short film Dream Job produced by Tuffi Films. Abdulkarim received the Minna Canth prize in 2019, awarded annually to a person shaking the Finnish society.

Persis Jadé Maravala has worked as artistic director of ZU-UK’s projects (London) since 2006. Her artistic work has won awards and nominations in the fields of interactive theatre, hybrid art and innovation. Her most acclaimed project, Hotel Medea, was the highest rated event by both public and press, becoming the standout hit of the Edinburgh Fringe 2011. She is the director and writer of Goodnight Sleep Tight, Binaural Dinner Date, Pick Me Up (& hold me tight), #RioFoneHack, East London Workers Party and Missing. She works at the intersection of games, performance and technology and believes post-immersive* approaches to dramaturgy can enable audiences to find new ways of engaging with one another meaningfully. Her work has focussed more recently on mediating relationships between strangers, particularly through the use of sound design and instruction-based performance. Her response to Covid-19 has been to create PlagueRound (an online interactive live game show) and Project Perfect Stranger, which has seen close to 250 strangers connected in intimate encounters across the world via their phones. Jadé is committed to reclaiming public spaces as sites for people to gather, as a way to reduce barriers to audience participation and to actively push for fairer and more equal opportunities for working class people.

Cade & MacAskill are Rosana Cade (they/them) and Ivor MacAskill (he/him): renowned queer artists and facilitators based in Glasgow, Scotland. Their work, together and individually, straddles the worlds of experimental contemporary theatre, live art, queer cabaret, film, children’s performance, site specific, and socially engaged practices.

Their collaboration is born from a shared love of subversive humour, experimentation with persona and text, playful theatricality, and the joy they find in improvising together. They also share a passion for LGBTQIA+ rights and culture. They create strange, full aesthetic worlds on stage, with unique sonic elements embedded into their work due to ongoing collaboration with sound artist and designer Yas Clarke.

They are both experienced facilitators and trained volunteers with LGBT Youth (Glasgow). They are currently in the process of setting up a co-operative to open a new LGBTQIA+ secondhand shop/community space in Glasgow.

Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė (b.1983, based in Vilnius) works as a filmmaker, theatre director and visual artist. In her creative practice, Barzdžiukaitė explores the gap between objective and imagined realities, while challenging an anthropocentric way of thinking in a playful way. Her recent full-length documentary film-essay Acid Forest was awarded at the Locarno International Film Festival among others, was shown at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, Lincoln Center in NYC, American Film Institute festival in LA and many other events and venues for cinema and contemporary art. Sun & Sea is her latest collaboration in the medium of performance.

Sonya Lindfors (1985) is a Cameroonian – Finnish choreographer and artistic director that also works with facilitating, community organising and education. In 2013 she received a MA in choreography from the University of the Arts Helsinki.

She is the founding member and Artistic Director of UrbanApa, an inter-disciplinary and counter hegemonic arts community that offers a platform for new discourses and feminist art practices. UrbanApa facilitates workshops, festivals, labs, mentoring and publications among other things.

Lindfors makes her own and collaborative works such as performances, curated programs and performative actions. Her performance works have been shown and supported by Beursschouwburg, Kampnagel, Spring Utrecht, CODA – festival, Black Box Theater Oslo, Zodiak – Centre for New Dance among others. She is a member of Miracle Workers Collective that represented Finland at the 58th Venice Biennale.

Lindfors’s recent works We Should All Be Dreaming, camouflage (2021), Soft Variations Online (2020) centralise questions around Blackness and Black body politics, representation and power structures, speculative futurieties and decolonial dreaming practices. On a larger scale Lindfors’s time is divided between her own artistic work , educational work and working as the artistic director of UrbanApa. In all her positions she pursues creating and facilitating anti-racist and feminist platforms, where a festival, a performance, a publication or a workshop can operate as the site of empowerment and radical collective dreaming.

Lindfors has been awarded with several prizes, the latest of which being the international Live art Anti Prize 2018. During the season 2017 – 2018 Lindfors was the house choreographer for Zodiak – center for new dance.

Timi is a filmmaker and photographer based in East London, working mostly as a self-shooting director. He is deeply passionate about telling stories, constantly working on building his skills as a narrative writer/director and is ‘pretty much always in the process of making a film’.

Tim Spooner works in performance, collage, painting and sculpture. His work uses materials and objects in ways that reveal unexpected properties, aiming to open up perspectives beyond the human scale.

The Nest Collective is a multidisciplinary arts collective living and working in Nairobi. Founded in 2012, the collective has created works in film, music, fashion, visual arts and literature such as the critically-acclaimed queer anthology film Stories of Our Lives, which has so far screened in over 80 countries and won numerous awards. The Nest Collective also founded HEVA—Africa’s first creative business fund of its kind—to strengthen the livelihoods of East Africa’s creative entrepreneurs.

The collective uses an applied-research holistic methodology to create cultural bodies of work with film, fashion, literature and other media. These interventions are designed to engage audiences using multiple points of entry and reflection, thus enabling nuanced consideration, discussion and debate of the issues raised, while also advancing aesthetic and artistic value.

Due to the multidisciplinary nature of their work, the collective have screened film and TV works at the Toronto International Film Festival, the Berlinale, the BFI, the MoMA and other festivals in Colombia, Ghana, Cape Town, Botswana, Seoul, Taiwan and Lagos, exhibited their visual arts works at the Vitra Design Museum, the Royal Pavilion, the Guggenheim Bilbao, hosted talks and performances at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Design Indaba and What Design Can Do, held DJ parties in Amsterdam and Copenhagen, all while continuing to draw connections and parallels back to their home in Nairobi.

Vaiva Grainytė‘s (b. 1984, based in Lithuania and Canada) text-based practice shifts between genres, interdisciplinary theatre works and publications. As a writer, playwright, and poet she takes action as an observant anthropologist: challenged by Grainyte’s poetic interpretation, mundane social issues take on a paradoxical and defamiliarised nature. Her book of essays Beijing Diaries (2012) and the poetry collection Gorilla’s Archives (2019) were nominated for the Book of the Year awards, and included in the top twelve listings of the most creative books in Lithuania. Her oeuvre has been translated into over 10 languages. Her bilingual, cross-genre collage novel, Roses and Potatoes (2022), intellectually and ironically deconstructs the stereotypical concept of happiness embedded in contemporary culture.

Carla Nobre Sousa is co-artistic director of Alkantara, an international contemporary performing arts festival and residency space in Lisbon, Portugal. Her previous roles include programming assistant and festival coordinator at Alkantara, as well as several years working across international touring, artist development and festivals at Materiais Diversos (Lisbon). She holds an MA in Performing Arts Studies (Université Libre de Bruxelles) and a BA in English Drama and Theatre & Political Science (McGill University).

For this virtual residency, Igor Cardellini and Tomas Gonzalez (Lausanne) invited “Colectivo” utópico, an international group they form with the artists Rita Aquino (Salvador), Rébecca Balestra (Geneva), Paula Baró (Buenos Aires), Felipe de Assis (Salvador) and Marina Quesada (Buenos Aires) and a special participation by UK artist Ira Brand.

Together, they conceived Performance Telling, a project in which they share/recycle existing pieces through their respective prisms. Here they propose a work composed of four variations inspired by End meeting for all by Forced Entertainment. In doing so, they question togetherness and parasitism.

This project is supported by Pro Helvetia through their Swiss Selection Edinburgh: Virtual Residency programme, which builds profile & networks for Swiss artists in the UK.

A performance-maker, actor and writer, Dickie Beau is best known for breathing new life into lip syncing through his distinctive “playback” performances. He has received multiple awards, including the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award, and Best Supporting Actor in the Off West End Theatre Awards. He played Ariel in Deborah Warner’s celebrated production of ‘The Tempest’ for Salzburg Festival, and has made several solo theatre shows which have toured internationally. His most recent solo show, ‘Re-Member Me’, premiered as a “haunting” of the set of Robert Icke’s production of ‘Hamlet’ at the Almeida Theatre before travelling to New York’s Under the Radar Festival at the Public Theatre, Melbourne Festival, and Perth Festival. In Australia, ‘Re-Member Me’ was nominated for a 2019 Helpmann Award.

Dickie is interested in using “playback” as a strategy for engaging with cultural history and archives, and as a mode through which to think through a range of themes relating to subjects such as: the function of nostalgia; the dynamics of identity; the presence of absence in theatre, art and the history of human image-making; the relationship between mediumship and the function of art; ways of feeling; the interplay of virtual technology with the living body; intimacy; and ideas of “inscribing” knowledge in/on space in such a way that considers alternative perspectives on authorship and reflects questions about the stability of material (and immaterial) carriers of knowledge in the digital age.

Dickie’s recent stage performances as an actor include playing Botticelli in ‘Botticelli in the Fire’ at Hampstead Theatre, and the Dame in the National Theatre’s recent production of ‘Dick Whittington’. Feature film performances include playing Kenny Everett in ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and the original inventor of lip-synching, cantomime artist Georges Wague, in ‘Colette’.

As a writer, Dickie is currently under commission to write a television pilot for an original drama series, and has recently made contributions to Attitude magazine and Tortoise. He is also developing ideas for a future solo show emerging from his a recent research fellowship at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

Dickie is an Artist Research Fellow at both Queen Mary University of London and Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre.

Gaël explores themes of gender, identity, displacement and environmental issues through women’s voices.  She makes theatre & films as a solo artist and with communities – often collaborating with women’s rights agencies, young adults and migrants – bringing unheard voices to audiences across the globe with her company Footprint Productions .

Fluent in 4 language: English, Portuguese, French and Spanish,  she has also performed and collaborated in over 25 stage productions including the one-woman shows The Other, Frida Kahlo: Viva La vida!, The last days of Gilda and Camille Claudel.  Gaël has worked in various capacity for companies such as SBC Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Ex-Machina, Secret Cinema, Theatre Sans Frontieres.  She is currently an associate artist with performance and immersive technology company Limbik Theatre.

Giorgia Ohanesian Nardin is an artist, independent researcher and queer agitator of Armenian descent.  Their research is built of a collection of pedagogic and performative events that focus on experiencing pleasure as a form of resistance to systemic oppression by relating a queer/transfeminist approach to somatic practices.  Trained in dance, their work exists is the shape of movement, video, text, choreography, sound and gatherings, and deals with narratives of hostility, survival strategies, rest, friction, sensuality, healing.

Giorgia took part in LIFT’s podcast Plans For The Future.

Ira is an artist, performance-maker, writer, curator, and teacher. She creates live interdisciplinary performances: visceral, funny and tender attempts to explore often vast contemporary topics in a way that celebrates both personal and collective experience. Previous and current projects are about fear, ageing, illness, gender. 

Over the past few years Ira has been interested in exploring power and how it is enacted, seen, and felt, specifically looking at the relationships between power, gender, sexuality, desire, and language. In her work Ira wants to create a space in which we can acknowledge and celebrate the ambiguities and inconsistencies of contemporary living, that are sometimes hard to hold in focus. She wants to create a space in which we can both feel strongly and think critically, a space of equal openness and rigour, emergence and boldness. 

Ira’s process is one of using personal starting points to speak to wider social, political, and formal concerns. Her work makes use of text, video, auto/biography, found material, research and interview processes, and physical practices, exploring a language of the untrained body through dance, movement, and gesture. She has an interest in achieving particular states in the body, in the looseness and explicitness brought on by exhaustion or obstacle or a lack of control. 

Ira regularly works in collaboration with other companies and artists as a performer, writer, and dramaturg. Her work has toured the UK extensively and has also been shown internationally at Malavoadora Porto, Matadero Madrid, Kanagawa Arts Theatre Yokohama, Hessisches Landestheater Marburg, Studiobühne Köln, Frascati Amsterdam, The Basement Auckland, and Abrons Arts Centre New York. 

She is also one of the Co-Directors of the award-winning artist-led collective Forest Fringe, which she runs with Andy Field and Deborah Pearson. 

She is a recent graduate of the Masters Programme at DAS Theatre, Amsterdam (2019). 

Jorge’s work is based on the belief that extraordinary art and activism are not mutually exclusive and can be powerful allies for cultural and social change – where games and theatre are intrinsically connected. Over the past 20 years, his work as an artist-researcher has taken the form of multi award-winning performances, digital work, public installations and exhibitions in venues, conferences and festivals including London2012, Southbank Centre (Hayward Gallery), FACT Liverpool, LIFT Festival, The Lowry, amongst others. For the last decade, Jorge has led on research projects and artworks that have addressed the scalability of intimate performance whilst retaining the quality, depth and care of the live experience. More recently, his work has focused on mediating the space between strangers, often in public spaces. As co-author of The Post-Immersive Manifesto (2020), he believes we are responsible – as makers – to challenge privilege, articulating who our work is by, with and for.

Juliet Knapp is currently co-director of Kyoto Experiment alongside Yoko Kawasaki and Yuya Tsukahara. She graduated from Oxford University with a BA in English Literature and Language and began working in Japan in 2013 on the JET Programme as an English teacher at Elementary and Middle Schools in Shizuoka Prefecture. After interning and volunteering for Kyoto Art Centre and Shizuoka Performing Arts Centre she later became Communications Manager and Project Manager for Music and Performance at Ryoji Ikeda Studio. Following this, from 2017-2019 she was part of the PR team at Kyoto Experiment and assisted the director in the programming of the festival. She also has experience in editing as well as translation and interpretation related to the performing arts. 

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Kopano Maroga is a performance artist, writer and cultural worker. They are currently living in Brussels, Belgium and working as a curator and dramaturge at Kunstencentrum Vooruit in Ghent, Belgium. Their debut anthology of poetry Jesus Thesis and Other Critical Fabulations was released in December 2020 through uHlanga Press. They very much believe in the power of love as a weapon of mass construction.

LJ Findlay-Walsh is Artistic Director of Take Me Somewhere Festival, Glasgow’s international contemporary performance festival in Scotland. She is Senior Performance Curator of Scotland’s largest contemporary arts venue Tramway and curator of the biennial, Dance International Glasgow (DiG). Previous roles include Senior Producer of the Arches arts venue in Glasgow where she worked for over a decade on projects such as Behaviour and Arches Live festivals. She has worked across Europe as Co-Curator of Plateaux Festival in Frankfurt specialising in live art. She has held roles as Board Member of Articulation, (Scotland’s advocacy organisation for physical performance) and advisor to BSL Buzzcut, Glasgow. She has held various advisory roles through the Federation of Scottish Theatre and Erdlangen Festival, Germany. She is an ISPA fellow (International Society of the Performing Arts), holds an MA in Art History from the University of Glasgow and is part of Festivals of the Future a European cooperation project.

Low Kee Hong is the Head of Theatre, Performing Arts at West Kowloon Cultural District Hong Kong. He is responsible for formulating the district’s artistic direction for Contemporary Performance and Theatre. In this role, he created Hong Kong’s first International Workshop Festival of Theatre, an ongoing series on Scenography, a program on dramaturgy, international residencies with Scotland, New Zealand and Australia, new commissions with the Manchester International Festival and GREC Festival Barcelona. Since 2018, he is the co-curator of the Hong Kong International Black Box Festival with Hong Kong Rep. He was Artistic Director of the Singapore Arts Festival (2010-2012) and General Manager for the Singapore Biennale (2005-2010).

From the Summer of 2022 at Freespace West Kowloon, Silvia Bottiroli (currently Artistic Director of DAS Theatre and former Artistic Director of Santarcangelo Festival) and Low Kee Hong will co-curate a new platform built around Queering – a practice inspired by theories that re-examines and dismantles accepted frameworks of identity, power and privilege – as a political field and as a methodology: what does it mean to queer our practices? How can we operate within the artistic and cultural field as if it were possible not to be reactionary towards existing positions and protocols? How can curation participate in the creation of our common futures, responding to the needs of the many and supporting the multitudes that are active within civic society? How can we appropriate artistic institutions and transform them into the tools that are needed for a democratic participation in designing the cultural and social dimensions of the arts of the present time? The platform proposes many speculative futures and an understanding of curation as one of the attempts we can make to rehearse and trial the world that we would like to live in.

Mariano Pensotti (Buenos Aires – 1973) studied cinema, visual arts and theatre. His performances have been presented in Argentina and in festivals and venues in Belgium, Germany, France, Ireland, Latvia, Brasil, Canada, Japan, Austria, Spain, Chile, England, Denmark and Switzerland.

For his work he has won the prizes Rozenmacher, Clarin and Premio F; and the scholarships Unesco-Aschberg, Rockefeller Foundation, Fundación Antorchas and Casa de América de Madrid.

He formed the Grupo Marea together with Set Designer Mariana Tirantte, the musician Diego Vainer and the artistic producer Florencia Wasser.

Malú Ansaldo is an international arts leader, programmer and producer; currently Interim Programming Director at Battersea Arts Centre and previously Head of Performing arts at London’s iconic Roundhouse.

Malú focuses on long term strategy for the team and the artistic programme as well as developing international relationships; sector profile and co-producing and presentation opportunities both live and digitally.

Her major projects have been for Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre:  Globe to Globe Hamlet world tour (2014 – 2016) and the world famous Globe to Globe Festival in 2012, part of the Cultural Olympiad.

Malú has developed an impressive network of contacts all around the world, and has worked with a huge variety of stakeholders, from National Theatres, Cultural centres, Schools and Universities, to Embassies, NGO’s, governments, UN and UNHCR agencies and individuals in order to take shows to each and every single country in the world.

In recent years Malú has worked as Executive Producer at National Theatre Wales; developing site specific productions with different communities across Wales; and has also worked for Cirque du Soleil managing one of their big top tours in 2017. She has produced a series of international festivals in the UK and in Latin America (Such as the Norfolk and Norwich festival, GDIF and FIBA) and has advised and helped programme several organisations; Festivals and individual artists across all continents. She has become a bridge for many companies and organisations that otherwise would not be able to engage and collaborate.

Previously a theatre writer and performer, Malú also enjoys writing and working as a dramaturg on specific projects, working on several languages at the same time for multinational projects.

Namatshego (Tshego) Khutsoane is a creative practitioner drawn to work of ARTivist/ARTivism orientation and sensibility that explores complex human and social issues. An experienced theatre-maker and educator Tshego has honed expertise enabling learning and engagement, in work across multiple performance and facilitation contexts, for more than a decade. Tshego enjoys involvement in site-responsive performance; collaborative theatre making/devising; intercultural and interdisciplinary performance and gender studies with a particular focus on Role, Expectation and Behaviour.

At present (April 2021), a part-time tutor in Performance Studies with the legendary Market Theatre Laboratory and Development Manager with The Forgotten Angle Theatre Collaborative – a pioneering performance focused social justice organisation, which in 2021 created a world-first WhatsApp #PhoneFestival (Message ‘Hi to +27 600 110 444 to experience).  Tshego is an MBA degree graduate and the recipient of the 2016 Johnny Clegg Scholarship for Creative Practitioners with Henley Business School of Reading University, with a qualifying LGBT+ focused study intersecting Business and Identity Matters, highlighting policy, culture and social factors influencing visibility/invisibility negotiations.  Prior studies include a Bachelor of Arts (BA) and Honours (BAH) degree with specialisation in Acting, Directing, Contemporary Performance, Applied Drama and Theatre through the (UCKR) University Currently Known as Rhodes; and a Master of Dramatic Arts (MADA) through The University of the Witwatersrand. Through various creative international collaborations and exchanges as Performer, Theatre-Maker and Facilitator, Tshego has travelled abroad to Ethiopia, Germany, Netherlands, Senegal, Switzerland, Zambia.

As Actor, Tshego celebrates a 2020 Best Production for Independent Fringe – South African Naledi Theatre Award, for No Easter Sunday for Queers (Market Theatre 20-25 August 2019) written by Koleka Putuma and directed by Mwenya Kabwe. Other standout performances include the widely toured and award-winning Animal Farm produced by ShakeXperience and directed by Neil Coppen. Mwenya Kabwe’s Afrocartography, and UBOM! Eastern Cape Drama Company’s Wreckage and Breed (Stand Bank Silver Ovation Award Winner) directed by Brink Scholtz, Door by Jori Snell and The Adventures of Little Nobody – Award winner at the 2010 Out the Box Festival of Puppetry and Visual Performance. As Director, Tshego has enjoyed National Arts Festival Standard Bank Ovation celebration for works, For Colored girls (2016) written by Ntozake Shange and ChoirBoy (2018) written by Terrel Alvin MacCraney. As Teaching-Artist, Facilitator and Project Director, Tshego continues to develop works that intersect in some way with Sex, Sexuality and Social Circles.

Nassim Soleimanpouris an Iranian playwright and theatre-maker, and the Artistic Director of Berlin based theatre company Nassim Soleimanpour Productions. His plays have been translated into more than 30 languages and performed globally in over 50 countries. Best known for his play White Rabbit Red Rabbit, written to travel the world when he couldn’t, his work has been awarded multiple awards across theatre festivals worldwide. White Rabbit Red Rabbit had a 9 month Off-Broadway run casting celebrated actors like Whoopi Goldberg, Nathan Lane, Martin Short, Bobby Cannavale, Wayne Brady, F. Murray Abraham and Cynthia Nixon. By the time Nassim was permitted to travel for the first time in early 2013, his play White Rabbit Red Rabbit had already been performed hundreds of times in more than a dozen languages.

His most recent play NASSIM produced by the Bush Theatre in London premiered in August 2017 and won a Fringe First Award, followed by more than 300 shows in 12 languages across the world, including a five-month Off-Broadway run casting celebrated American actors.

A retrospective of Soleimanpour’s plays was held at the Bush Theatre in 2017 under the title Nassimplays.

While most theatres were shut due to a global pandemic, Nassim mentored 7 young playwrights to publish a book which could be read and performed at first sight around a fire. October 2020, produced by Boundless Theatre lit fires across the UK!

On March 13th 2021, to mark the anniversary of theatres having to shut down around the world, White Rabbit Red Rabbit was performed in 120 venues around the world – from a prison in Mexico to a local theatre in Pakistan – at 8pm local time.

Soleimanpour currently lives in Berlin with his beautiful wife and dog, and is busy finalising his new play for the audiobook platform Audible.

Nigel Barrett and Louise Mari make wild, bold, visual performance for people who don’t really like theatre and unusual theatrical experiences for those who do. They create work both for, and with, children and adults – in traditional theatres and studios, outdoors and in found spaces. They have been commissioned by Manchester International Festival, Tate Britain, the ICA, Museum of London, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, National Theatre Studio, The Science Museum, Cambridge Junction, New Wolsey Ipswich, Torquay Wavelength Festival, Shoreditch Town Hall, Unicorn Theatre and National Theatre Wales. They met as members of pioneering cult performance collective shunt, and together ran the radical arts club and bar ‘the shunt lounge’ under London Bridge station. They received the FringeReview Outstanding Theatre Award for ‘The One Man Show’ and won the Samuel Beckett Award with ‘The Body’ at the Barbican.

Dr. Njoki Ngumi is an artist, writer and feminist thinker who has held positions in private and public health care sectors in Kenya. As a Nest founding member, she has been co-writer, screenwriter and script supervisor for several of the Nest’s film works, and is currently expanding her filmmaking practice as  co-director of The Feminine and The Foreign. Her keen eyes and ears are a critical component of the  collective’s post-production process, as well as its strategic, resource mobilising and research outputs. In addition, she coordinates the Nest’s external collaborative projects, and serves as programs and strategy lead at sister-company HEVA.

Twitter @njokingumi 
Instagram @njokingumi 

Italian of Palestinian descent, Omar trained in Italy and then graduated from Jacques Lecoq International Theatre School in Paris in 2005. He’s based in London since 2009.

He was the resident Associate Director at the Bush Theatre from 2012 to 2019, where he commissioned and directed some of the theatre’s most successful shows.

As sole director for the Bush, his credits include smash-hit Misty by Arinzé Kene (Bush and West End), NASSIM by Nassim Soleimanpour (Bush, Traverse Theatre and world tour), Going Through by Estelle Savasta and Islands by Caroline Horton. As Associate Director working alongside Madani Younis, his credits include The Royale by Marco Ramirez, Leave Taking by Winsome Pinnock and Perseverance Drive by Robin Soans. Outside the Bush, he directed Olivier nominated show You’re Not Like The Other Girls Chrissy by Caroline Horton and co-created acclaimed site-specific show The Mill: City of Dreams with Madani Younis for Freedom Studios. His last show before the lockdown, Autoreverse, created with Argentinian performer Florencia Cordeu, opened at Battersea Arts Centre in February 2020.

Omar is currently living between Milan and London, developing projects with the Almeida, National Theatre, Royal Court, Collective Malouba and The Shed in New York.

Peter McMaster (he/him) is an experimental performance artist, collaborator, facilitator/educator, father, ex-dog owner, current boat owner, lover of the underdog and fan of the amateur/less noticed practices. Works under his directorship span award-winning ensemble touring theatre works, long standing home village professional art group facilitation, solo and intimate performance practices, sited and community sensitive projects, artist to artist mentoring, consultation and long-standing collaborations with artists such as Hanna Tuulikki and Louise Ahl/Ultimate Dancer.

Peter is a member of the Take Me Somewhere Artist Constellation and has shown his work extensively nationally and internationally. Current works include The Village Artist, a long term professional art project for and with the small village of Bowling, West Dumbartonshire where he lives, Elephant a new solo performance for film in collaboration with artist Tim Etchells and Chaill/Lost a sited work on one of Scotland’s most remote and once inhabited Gaelic islands. Threaded through each facet of his practice is a tacit investigation of contemporary male-nesses and an attempt to hold, love, destabilise and understand this complex gender territory.

http://www.hydraarts.org

Rachael Young is an award-winning artist and writer based between Nottingham and London. Their Transdisciplinary practice exists on the boundaries of live art, text, movement, activism and neurodiversity. Their work provides a shelter from which to explore the multiplicities of their lived experience. They use their evolving practice to hold space for those at the intersection of multiple realities championing and centring alternative narratives and forms. Rachael is a recipient of the Jerwood Live Work Fund and was the inaugural winner of the Eclipse Award, which supported Edinburgh Fringe 2019 runs of NIGHTCLUBBING and OUT, where both shows were nominated for Total Theatre awards and Rachael was named the British Council’s Artist to Watch. Rachael was recently appointed as Associate Artist with Something to Aim For. Recent work includes a commission for Herstory – a visual audio experience as part of Brighton Festival, and Blacklash – a series of informal discussions providing Black Artists with a chance to reflect on their practice and their position within the wider arts sector, hosted by the Gate Theatre. In 2020 Rachael’s writing was performed as part of My White Best Friend, a curated programme, at the Royal Court in 2020. Their work is presented widely across the UK and internationally including The Place, The Yard, Skopje Pride, Live Collision (Dublin), Theatre de L’Usine (Geneva) and ImPulsTanz (Vienna International Dance Festival).

Rhiannon Armstrong is an interdisciplinary artist making works with empathy, interaction, and dialogue at their core, often for unfiltered audiences. Conversation and collaboration are central to her practice: between makers of different disciplines, public contributors, and audiences.

Born and raised in rural Massachusetts, Sacha Yanow is a New York City based performance artist and actor. Their recent solo performances are experimental and embodied portraits of the inner lives of archetypal family figures—the father in Dad Band, (2015), the grandmother in Cherie Dre (2018) and currently the uncle —as a way to connect to estranged personal and cultural histories. Drawing from theater and performance art, these intimate works use humor and physicality to explore aging, gender, desire, and Ashkenazi Jewish-American assimilation. They have been presented by venues including Danspace Project, Joe’s Pub, and the New Museum in NYC; PICA’s TBA Festival/Cooley Gallery in Portland; and Festival Theaterformen in Hanover, Germany. Yanow has received residency support from Baryshnikov Arts Center, Denniston Hill, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, SOMA Mexico City, and Yaddo. They received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and studied at the University of Capetown, SA for a semester. Yanow is a graduate of the William Esper Studio Actor Training Program in NYC.

Sonia is currently an associate artist to Festspillene i Nord-Norge in Harstad. Previously she collaborated with Quarantine as writer, performer, co-creator including their award-winning Susan & Darren and Wallflower. She also wrote Jeremy Deller’s MIF17 opening event, What is the City, but the People? She has been doing this art shbizzle for over 20 years only now becoming an artist in her own right. 

What do we want?!… Is a poster exhibition of people’s desires for a proximate Utopia, made for the Great Exhibition of the North with Lisa Mattocks. Jo Fong and Sonia have devised Neither Here Nor There, it delves into the heart of people’s everyday life, where they live, what makes them cross, what can they do and in the end what really matters. Essentially a series of questions and conversations between the audience. During the pandemic, it has incarnations as a live writing and filmed conversations. 

These two works and IAFR mark out new territories Sonia is interested in – addressing the complexity of big ideas but close up with audience key to the action. 

‘I want to make work with a disarmingly simple premise, which throws light on the intricacies of both our everyday lives and global affairs. 

Sonya Lindfors (1985) is a Cameroonian – Finnish choreographer and artistic director that also works with facilitating, community organising and education. In 2013 she received a MA in choreography from the University of the Arts Helsinki.

She is the founding member and Artistic Director of UrbanApa, an inter-disciplinary and counter hegemonic arts community that offers a platform for new discourses and feminist art practices. UrbanApa facilitates workshops, festivals, labs, mentoring and publications among other things.

Lindfors makes her own and collaborative works such as performances, curated programs and performative actions. Her performance works have been shown and supported by Beursschouwburg, Kampnagel, Spring Utrecht, CODA – festival, Black Box Theater Oslo, Zodiak – Centre for New Dance among others. She is a member of Miracle Workers Collective that represented Finland at the 58th Venice Biennale.

Lindfors’s recent works We Should All Be Dreaming, camouflage (2021), Soft Variations Online (2020) centralise questions around Blackness and Black body politics, representation and power structures, speculative futurieties and decolonial dreaming practices. On a larger scale Lindfors’s time is divided between her own artistic work , educational work and working as the artistic director of UrbanApa. In all her positions she pursues creating and facilitating anti-racist and feminist platforms, where a festival, a performance, a publication or a workshop can operate as the site of empowerment and radical collective dreaming.

Lindfors has been awarded with several prizes, the latest of which being the international Live art Anti Prize 2018. During the season 2017 – 2018 Lindfors was the house choreographer for Zodiak – center for new dance.

Persis Jadé Maravala has worked as artistic director of ZU-UK’s projects (London) since 2006. Her artistic work has won awards and nominations in the fields of interactive theatre, hybrid art and innovation. Her most acclaimed project, Hotel Medea, was the highest rated event by both public and press, becoming the standout hit of the Edinburgh Fringe 2011. She is the director and writer of Goodnight Sleep Tight, Binaural Dinner Date, Pick Me Up (& hold me tight), #RioFoneHack, East London Workers Party and Missing. She works at the intersection of games, performance and technology and believes post-immersive* approaches to dramaturgy can enable audiences to find new ways of engaging with one another meaningfully. Her work has focussed more recently on mediating relationships between strangers, particularly through the use of sound design and instruction-based performance. Her response to Covid-19 has been to create PlagueRound (an online interactive live game show) and Project Perfect Stranger, which has seen close to 250 strangers connected in intimate encounters across the world via their phones. Jadé is committed to reclaiming public spaces as sites for people to gather, as a way to reduce barriers to audience participation and to actively push for fairer and more equal opportunities for working class people.

Timi is a filmmaker and photographer based in East London, working mostly as a self-shooting director. He is deeply passionate about telling stories, constantly working on building his skills as a narrative writer/director and is ‘pretty much always in the process of making a film’.

Tom is an actor, multi-instrumentalist and composer. He grew up in South London, studied Drama at Exeter University, and trained as an actor at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

From 2017-2019 Tom was an Associate Artist and resident composer at Flute Theatre. Since 2019, he’s been an Associate Artist with Compass Collective and the NYT. He is a collaborator with The PappyShow and Squint, is a frequent guest practitioner at Guildhall, and is an Education Practitioner with Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. He is currently a commissioned artist with WAC Arts. 

Tom made his professional stage debut in Trevor Nunn’s King John at the Rose Theatre Kingston. He has since worked with Mischief Theatre, the Barbican, Chichester Festival Theatre, the Orange Tree, The Yard, MIME, the Bridge Theatre, Attic Theatre and English Touring Theatre. He was a part of the Globe’s Touring Ensemble from 2020-21.