Biographies
About Dr Ruth Pethybridge
Dr Ruth Pethybridge is a Dance Artist and Senior Lecturer in dance at Falmouth University, and at The Place London where she has played a key role in the team co-creating the MA Participation, Communities, Activism. Previously, Ruth has worked extensively as a practitioner in the Community Dance sector. Her research interests centre on the body as a form of cultural knowledge and the politics of participation in dance. Most recently she has worked as a researcher exploring trauma-informed dance practice for young people with adverse childhood experiences.
Ruth is a board member for People Dancing and she also works as a dramaturg to co-produce choreographic work, supporting dance artists to achieve their visions ethically. Recent publications include ‘Dancing through the hard stuff’: Repetition, Resilience and Female Solidarity in the landscape - Rosemary Lee’s Passage for Par (Routledge 2019) and ‘From Direct Action to Being There: The Ambiguous Politics of Community Dance and the Occupy movement (a historiography)’ (Dance Books, 2020). In 2020 Ruth conceived of and featured in her podcast Dance Futures which has run for three series.
Image: Ruth Pethybridge. Credit: Abbie Lynch.
About Patsy Corcoran
Patsy has worked within the local communities of Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire for nearly 30 years after graduating from Bradford University with a BA Hons in Peace Studies. Patsy started working with people with learning disabilities in 1994 in a local care setting, supporting communication, inclusion and speaking up. Patsy continued this work for the next five years within a local day service for adults with learning disabilities.
In 2000 Patsy joined a local advocacy organisation to develop a speaking up group for adults with learning disabilities.
From 2000 to 2022 Patsy worked within the advocacy industry developing community advocacy and a volunteer-based community advocacy programme. During this time Patsy successfully completed a Training and Assessing Qualification (TAQA) with Stoke-on-Trent College. Patsy achieved a qualification in participatory community research whilst undertaking community research about people’s experiences of living with hardship with Staffordshire University.
Patsy is a published author and contributes to local and national events, promoting equality and inclusion principles and practice. In 2022 Patsy was awarded a lifetime achievement in Advocacy in recognition of her work within the advocacy industry locally and nationally and in our communities.
Patsy joined BJF in early 2022 as Volunteer Development Manager and lead for a local partnership project Discover Digital. Patsy promotes strength-based volunteering and continues to work with volunteers and communities to develop digital inclusion, community supports and promote positive ageing.
Image: Patsy Corcoran.
About Kevin Edward Turner
Kevin started dancing at the age of eight with Trafford Youth Dance Theatre. Here, his love for dance was born and he learned improvisation, contact improvisation and creative dance. His formal studies were at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance. As an undergraduate Kevin performed and choreographed with the National Youth Dance Company and graduated with a first-class honours’ degree.
Kevin’s professional engagements include working with Rambert Dance Company, Scottish Dance Theatre, Phoenix Dance Theatre, CassaniDance, Rubberbandancegroup (Canada), Henri Oguike Dance Company, Company Decalage, Mad Dogs Dance Theatre, Finn Walker and Roda. He has worked as an independent artist in collaboration with Gansango in Seattle, Crossfade in Budapest and Navala Chaudhari in London. He has taught in most major British contemporary dance institutions, as well as in Canada, USA, Hungary, Trinidad and Tobago, South Korea, South Africa and all-over continental Europe.
Kevin co-founded Company Chameleon in 2007 and has since created, performed, led, directed, produced, taught and facilitated performances, masterclasses, workshops, residences, interventions and participatory projects nationally and internationally.
By invitation, Kevin has featured in several television programmes and documentaries including BBC One’s Going Back, Giving Back in 2016 and BBC Two’s Dancing to Happiness with Darcey Bussell in 2018, which explored how dance can improve your mental health.
Kevin is a passionate advocate for the positive impact of dance on overall health and wellbeing and as a result has vast experience delivering workshops in many different settings from hospitals and care units to prisons and young offenders’ institutions.
He has been invited to speak at various symposiums and conferences such as TEDX on the transformative power of dance and its relationship with health, wellbeing and mental health.
His stage production Witness, which drew from his own personal journey of living with bi-polar disorder, was received with critical acclaim being praised for its honesty and courage and for creating a totally original view of mental health through dance and movement.
As an award-winning dance artist, Kevin has been awarded the dance web scholarship in 2007 under the framework of Impulstanz and in 2016 won a residency at Impulstanz after winning the dance improvisation battle Rhythm is a Dancer.
In 2017, Kevin was commissioned by Manchester City Council and Library Live to create a significant site-specific work at Manchester Central Library. The Company’s biggest commission to date, the production featured a cast of 65 multi-disciplinary artists. The work went on to be nominated and shortlisted at the Manchester Culture Awards 2018 for Best Performance.
Image: Kevin Turner - photo credit, Joel Fildes.
About Freddy Gutierrez
Freddy Gutierrez, California poet and teaching artist. Freddy has facilitated writing and performance art spaces with people in incarceration from the San Francisco Bay Area to the UK for over 10 years.
He specializes in using metaphor alongside personal narrative in order to shape social commentary as catalysts for storytelling. His poetry seeks to foster agency of voice in those he creates with.
He’s been published by Los Angeles Poet Society Press, The Puerto Rico Review, The Acentos Review, the Nomadic Press, and University of Houston's Arte Publico Press; and was featured as LoWriter of the Week selected by U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera.
For further details please follow this link: www.instagram.com/fg_manos
Image: Freddy Gutierrez © Antwan Banks Williams.
About Kim Evans
Kimberly-Anne Evans MSc MUKCP, Director at KaeMoTherapy, helps practitioners and professionals overcome the blocks within inter-racial and cultural interactions to improve the quality of their work within the mental health sector. She's an accredited Person-Centred Psychotherapist and Research Supervisor at a Sherwood Psychotherapy Training Institute.
She's passionate about empowering practitioners to explore race and difference, by highlighting the importance of both understanding the difficult experiences of racialised individuals and appreciating their uniqueness. She offers relatable and practical ways to do this. Kim's anti-racist work began when she realised the eurocentric theories presented to her when training did not fully reflect who she wanted to be as a therapist, Now she has reconnected with her power through the work she does and helps other therapists do the same.
KaeMoTherapy has worked with companies such as Accenture, AstraZeneca, British Infertility Counselling Association & MIND. Kim has also been published in the Guardian, speaking on the mental health impact of shadism in beauty and fashion products.
Image: Kim Evans.
About Rhona Matheson
Rhona is CEO of Starcatchers, Scotland’s arts and early years organisation having joined as the project manager of the pilot project in 2006. She is a passionate advocate for the role that the arts have to play in the lives of our youngest children and championing their right to access high quality arts and creative experiences that they can share with their parents and carers.
She is currently undertaking a MSc in Children’s Rights at Queen’s University, Belfast with a specific focus on the (in)visibility of babies within children’s rights. Rhona is the co-chair of the Federation of Scottish Theatre and of Playground, a specialist early years arts initiative in Kent.
Image: Starcatchers.
About Priya Mistry
Priya Mistry b1980 (U.K) is a Midlands-based artist, Socially Engaged Worker & Creative Producer-Curator, working under the pseudonym whatsthebigmistry. Their extensive body of works straddle visual,performance, digital and live art since 2002. Graduated from DeMontfort University BA Hons Performance & Film & Photography in 2003. Mistry is known for an approach which is at once witty, bold and often provocative.
Mistry’s practice is underpinned by the deconstruction of language and exploration of sensory/non-word based vocabularies. Their work explores and generates discourse at the Intersection of Identities. It connects on the topics of invisible dis/ability/neurodiversity, BIPOC/Global Majority, Queer and Feminist politics; whilst investigating human bodies, functional and everyday objects as sculptural propositions, generating choreographies and arrangements between bodies, objects and space.
For further details please follow this link: whatsthebigmistry.com
Image: What's the big Mistry.
About Danielle Jones
Danielle Jones is an industry leading artist, director, and researcher whose work is driven by people and their stories, offering a chance for ordinary human life to be given value and everyday people to be seen. Danielle believes in the radical act of care in a careless society, and the value of offering truly person-centred experiences to people in a genuine and non-commodified way. Her practice aims to do this, and to build a relationship of trust and mutual respect with others, so that she can work with communities of non-dancers, to create work alongside them that is of professional quality.
Danielle has been a long time, leading contributor to practice and research in dance and health, and her most recent body of work has seen the development of multidisciplinary artwork with visual artists, musicians, film, photography, and dancers, using improvisatory approaches to evolve co-created experiences and outcomes. She has worked internationally in dance and Parkinson’s and Dementia and contributes to international professional exchange and training programmes including (in 2021-22) Sadler’s Wells Young Associates, Royal Opera House, Royal Ballet School, Dance Ireland, Arts Partnership Surrey, PDSW, Dance Base, Casson and Friends, Yorkshire Dance, and People Dancing.
For further details please follow this link: www.luminelle.co.uk
Image: Danielle Jones. Photo Credit Sara Hibbert for Luminelle