- Posted on February 16th, 2023
Creative Climate Leadership UK 2023: Participants Announced
We are pleased to share the full applicants list of who will be joining us for our Creative Climate Leadership (CCL) programme in the UK. This is the first of many CCL courses running in 2023, putting creative climate leadership at the forefront of our work. With over 100 applicants of high calibre, we are delighted to welcome and announce this year’s cohort of 24 arts and cultural professionals joining the CCL community.
What is Creative Climate Leadership?
This CCL UK is funded by Arts Council England and will be held at Hawkwood College from 6 – 10 March 2023. Hawkwood is a beautiful, sustainably run estate in the Cotswolds, that embodies the intersections between arts and culture and environmental sustainability.
CCL is an international training and transformation programme to empower artists and cultural professionals to take action on the climate and ecological crisis with impact, creativity, and resilience.
This year’s candidates work in areas as varied as music, activism, AI, theatre, ecology, radio, journalism and cultural policy. This staggering breadth of experience from our participants will support the dissemination of their newly adopted skills and learning from the programme, back into the wider arts and culture sector.
Creative Climate Leadership UK – Full List of Participants
Alistair Gentry
(he/him)
Alistair is a writer and artist.
Anna Wallace
(she/her)
Anna has worked within secondary education for almost 20 years.
Having completed her BA in Three-Dimensional Design, she took up a career as a secondary school teacher of art and design. Anna has progressed to be Head of Faculty, Assistant Head of School, and is currently Lead Commissioner for the Bradford SAFE Taskforce.
Anna-Marie Francis
(she/her)
Anna Francis is an artist and researcher whose work aims to create space to discuss and reframe city resources, through participatory art interventions.
Anna is Associate Professor of Fine Art and Social Practice at Staffordshire University, and a Director at AirSpace Gallery, and The Portland Inn Project.
Chloe Naldrett
(she/her)
Chloe Naldrett is the mother of two boys. She is a theatre producer by choice and a climate activist by necessity.
Chloe has been concerned about the climate since she was a child, and stepped into activism with Extinction Rebellion and Culture Declares Emergency in 2019. She is now a spokesperson for Just Stop Oil.
Clare Slater
(she/her)
Clare is the Artistic Director and Joint CEO of HighTide.
Clare previously worked as Executive Director of the Gate Theatre in Notting Hill and, prior to that, she was the Assistant Literary Manager at the National Theatre and worked in TV and film development with Rare Day. She also sits on the Creative Council of Shakespeare’s Globe.
Eleanor White
(she/her)
As a socioecological artist in this time of compounding crises, Eleanor White works deeply in and with communities to engage with personal, social, and environmental ecologies.
Weaving together her work in climate justice and cultural interventions, she is now working as Sustainability Coordinator for West Dunbartonshire Libraries – reconfiguring libraries as the space to develop eco-capacities for multispecies relationality and care.
Emma Blake Morsi
(she/her)
With over a decade in the creative industry, Emma Blake Morsi is an award-winning Multi-Disciplinary Arts Producer, Non-Executive Director of Rising Arts Agency and former Bristol City Council’s Culture Board member.
She challenges approaches to inclusion and innovation in the spaces she works, producing work that can be experienced by all but most importantly gives visibility to and engages those from marginalised groups.
Faith Lawrence
(she/her)
Faith is a poet and radio producer.
Her arts programmes are regularly broadcast on national radio, and my poetry pamphlet ‘Sleeping Through’ was selected for publication by Carol Ann Duffy. She is fascinated by the poetic process and wrote about contemporary poets who ‘listen’ to the earth for her Creative Writing PhD.
Feimatta Conteh
(she/her)
Feimatta Conteh is the Environmental Sustainability Manager for Factory
International.
Feimatta has worked across sustainability, technology development, digital culture and the arts for over 15 years, for organisations including the LSE, Arcola Theatre, Arcola Energy and FutureEverything.
Francesca Panetta
(she/her)
Francesca Panetta is Director of the University of Arts London’s new AKO Storytelling Institute. She is an Emmy award-winning immersive artist, journalist and curator.
Her work has been shown in museums and film festivals around the world, as well as venues such as the White House and European Commission.
Hannah Overton
(she/her)
Hannah has been Managing Director for Secretly Group in Europe for the past 11 years.
Previously she spent 10 years at XL Recordings in their A&R department across publishing & records. She has completed two appointments to the AIM board & continue on AIM’s steering committee.
Helena Wilson
(she/her)
Helena Wilson is an actor and activist based in London.
She has performed at theatres including the Old Vic, the Bridge Theatre and the National Theatre and she is also a script reader at the Donmar Warehouse. She served as vice-chair of Equity for a Green New Deal in 2022, and also sits on Equity’s Young Members Committee.
Jo Maker
(she/her)
Jo Maker is a Creative Producer with 18 years’ experience developing place based cultural projects, responding to landscape, heritage and ecology.
As Arts Officer for the National Forest Company she develops strategic projects across 200 square miles of the Midlands which reflect upon and reimagine our relationship to nature, climate and time.
Joel Gardner
(he/him)
Joel is a partnerships and strategy leader within climate and music.
Amongst other consultancy work, he is the Head of Partnerships for EarthPercent, a music climate charity co-founded by Brian Eno. In this role Joel works with the music industry and artists to help maximise their positive impact on the planet.
Khalil Thirlaway
(he/him)
An award-winning science communicator and presenter with a PhD in immunology and ethnobotany, Khalil has worked in a wide range of media creatively building audiences’ relationships with the social contexts of science and nature.
Khalil currently works at the Natural History Museum as a Creative Producer for Youth and Community,
Lora Aziz
(she/her)
Lora Aziz is a British Egyptian artist whose creative practice reimagines contemporary cross-cultural relationships with land and nature through wildcrafting, community herbalism, earth science and visual ethnobotany.
Her latest project and exhibition Motanafas: A space to connect is a UK – Egypt collaboration forming part of the British Council’s COP27 Creative Commissions that brings together art, science and digital technology as an innovative, interdisciplinary, inclusive response to climate change.
Ruby Pugh
(she/they)
Ruby is a designer, maker, activist and visual dramaturg.
Working across theatre, film, events & public art. She is passionate about using the arts to amplify systematically excluded voices and believes that storytelling plays a vital role in shifting societal norms and breeding empathy. Ruby is a collaborative and responsive multidisciplinary artist whose freelance career has meant she has travelled and worked with communities and organisations across the UK.
Sam Lee
(he/him)
Sam Lee plays a unique role in the British music scene. A highly inventive and original singer, folk song interpreter, passionate conservationist, committed song collector and successful creator of live events.
Alongside his organisation, The Nest Collective and fellow collaborators, Sam has shaken up the live music scene breaking the boundaries between folk and contemporary music and the assumed place and way folksong is heard.
Siegrun Salmanian
(she/her)
Siegrun Salmanian works as the Assistant Curator, Programme at The Mosaic Rooms.
Part-time, she also pursues a PhD in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is interested in collective practice, with recent and ongoing collaborations on projects as part of Geopoetics Research Group, Ada Zero, Kaloff and Counterfield.
Sita Brand
(she/her)
Sita has told stories for nearly 40 years.
She has written and performed several one-woman shows including Memories of an Indian Childhood. Her first interactive fiction for children Down the Rabbit Hole launched in September 2018. For many years she has been a student of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh. She is also a Buddhist Prison Chaplain.
Su Isabel Ferreira Shaw
(she/her)
Su Shaw is a Scottish-Portuguese artist, musician and producer who is based in Dundee, Scotland.
Tay Aziz
(she/her)
Tay is a community organiser, filmmaker, writer and science communicator living in Bristol, UK.
Her work emphasises the power of community climate action, highlighting diverse stories and leaders in the land and social justice movements. Tay has collaborated with researchers across the globe on natural history productions for the BBC and Netflix and worked with communities across Bristol to co-create green spaces for neighbourhoods and nature.
Yula Rocha de Castro
(she/her)
Yula Rocha is a Brazilian journalist and communications manager at People’s Palace Projects, where she works with artists from the Xingu Indigenous Territory and favelas of Rio de Janeiro.
Recently, she produced the first Indigenous Film Festival at the ICA and an arts installation at Venice Architecture Biennale and has chaired climate and arts events at Chatham House and for Chevening scholars.
Zoe Rasbash
(she/her)
Zoe Rasbash is Environmental Emergencies Action Researcher at Watershed in Bristol, a cultural organisation focussed on togetherness.
Zoe is co-founder of Lilith Film Club, climate editor for Shado-Mag and previously campaigned with UKYCC, Amnesty International and for UN Taskforce on Climate Displacement.
DOWNLOAD FULL PARTICIPANT BIOS
The Aims of the Programme
Creative Climate Leadership will:
- Explore the role of culture and creativity in responding to climate change and environmental challenges;
- Bring together a range of expert guest speakers to share case studies, research, approaches and practical solutions for environmental sustainability in the cultural sector;
- Enable each participant to develop their leadership and ideas;
- Prepare participants to apply their learning and new skills when they return to their work, and support ongoing learning and exchange through an alumni network.
- CCL recognises the unique role of culture to influence new ways of being, doing and thinking, and supports creative professionals to apply these abilities to the climate challenge through a programme of events, training programmes and policy labs.
We are planning a wide range of leadership development programmes this year, if you would like to stay up to date and be notified when other applications for CCL open up, please sign up to the Julie’s Bicycle newsletter.
