We’re delighted our Writing Award competition has been joined by five long standing friends, advocates and practitioners in Community Arts. You can read more about them below.
Emily Bowman is Managing Director of Junction Arts, a leading organisation for participatory arts in the UK. Emily champions community-led creative initiatives that foster cultural engagement and social impact. Previously, she served as Deputy CEO of The Mighty Creatives. She is dedicated to ensuring that communities have access to meaningful cultural experiences. She believes in the power of the arts to bring people together, amplify voices, and drive positive change, working to create opportunities where creativity can thrive at a grassroots level.
Emily has over 20 years of experience in the creative sector, with a background in performance and arts leadership. She is deeply committed to arts, culture, and creativity, with a particular focus on co-producing high-quality, inclusive programmes that engage and empower communities. Throughout her career, Emily has worked with a range of cultural organisations, beginning as an actor and facilitator in international productions. She has extensive expertise in facilitation, producing, fundraising, project development, and cultural leadership. Her passion lies in interdisciplinary, collaborative, and participatory work, co-producing projects that respond to community needs and aspirations.
Beyond her role at Junction Arts, Emily is a trustee for Hubbub Theatre and an Area Council member for Arts Council England in the Midlands. She also chairs the Culture & Place group for Bolsover and sits on the Neighbourhood Board for Chesterfield, actively contributing to regional cultural strategy and community development.
Rob Elkington MBE is Director of Arts Connect. His work in creative and cultural education includes leading a young people’s theatre company, working on national creativity in education programmes, leading the regional Bridge infrastructure programme in the West Midlands and for major national organisations in local partnership development roles. What connects this work is an interest in system wide improvement that leads to social justice ends and democratisation of arts and culture. He is a fellow of the Clore Leadership Programme, a Trustee of the Cultural Learning Alliance and is Chair of the Black Country Music Hub Board.
Anissa Ladjemi is a Community Arts Drama Graduate from 2004. She currently works with those with life-limiting health conditions, supporting them to get what they are entitled to and advising them on their rights, while giving a listening ear. She has run youth theatres and art projects around the world but fell into the third sector during the years of austerity. She has worked with local government and organisations that support and advocate for the homeless, those with mental health issues and learning disabilities. She found working in the third sector allows her to use her creative side. Her arts background has helped her to communicate openly and problem solve, needed when working with those whose voices are often overlooked. She says: “Every career plan I made ended up taking me down a very different path than I planned. It wasn’t always easy but it has certainly been fulfilling and interesting. I guess you could say that working with people is what drives and inspires me. Thank you to Nick and Roger who took a chance on me the day I walked into the LIPA audition. When my school teacher said ”good luck but you will never get in there”, thankfully he was wrong!”
Maddi Nicholson is a freelance Artist and founder director of Art Gene, a visual art charity and Arts Council NPO in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria. Art Gene’s research remit extends across a program of environmentally aware placemaking, socially engaged art projects, residencies, exhibitions, and education work focusing on the role and engagement of artists and communities in the revisioning of their social, natural and built environment. As an Artist Maddi produces challenging work for varied and diverse situations nationwide, video, cast iron and stitched works to huge paintings, signage and inflated and recycled plastic sculptures.
Works range from an inflated replica of a Barrow terraced house due for demolition, in ‘Going home from here’ which toured beauty spots in Cumbria, to a set of cast iron enamelled terraced house models, commenting on the lives of 18th and 19th Century working class women in Spinningfields Manchester in ‘a place lived’. Her Art Gene art works include the Roker Pods for Sunderland City Council: spherical mobile eco off grid pods on the beach and the prom, as café, education and events facilities. The Peoples Museum on Piel Island, for Barrow Borough Council; including a cabinet of curiosities, repurposed engraved tables, beer maps and the islands of Barrow Map. Seldom Seen Maps and Mobile Apps walking tours for coastal areas of Cumbria and Lancashire. Razzle Dazzle bird hides as education resources with interior artwork interpretation for Cumbria Wildlife Trust. Walney Island Nature reserve, mobile App walking tour and non civic war memorial gate and sculpture for Natural England’s North Walney Island national nature reserve.
Bee Patience is Communications and Marketing Manager at The Mighty Creatives in Leicester. She graduated from the University of Nottingham with a first-class BA(hons) in Creative and Professional Writing. She started her career as a creative practitioner, delivering creative writing and poetry workshops in schools. Since then, she has completed CIM qualifications and spent more than 12 years working in marketing; first in the fast-paced world of EdTech and now in the charity sector. She is Nottingham Poetry Society’s 2012 Poetry Slam winner and founded the Run Your Tongue spoken word night in her hometown of Kettering.
More news on future judges to follow!
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