The Rights in Focus Conference is aimed at arts professionals, socially engaged artists, curators, arts commissioners, facilitators creating workshops in arts and community spaces, artist educators, and those working in community settings - regardless of what stage in your career or practice you are at.

Linda Bell Resident Artist, ActionSpace
Linda Bell has been a resident artist at the ActionSpace South London Studio since 1999. Linda creates interactive artworks, which develop through her experimental and playful approach to exploring materials, movement and interaction. Linda frequently collaborates whilst creating work, exploring the relationship between herself, her work and the viewer or collaborator.The quality and unique nature of her interactive artwork is widely recognised. Linda’s work has is frequently selected for group exhibitions alongside other contemporary and outsider artists. www.actionspace.org/ar tists/linda-bell/

Sheryll Catto, Co-Director, ActionSpace
Sheryll Catto is Co-Director of ActionSpace, a London-based visual arts organisation that supports artists with learning disabilities and creates innovative projects for people with learning disabilities to engage with the visual arts. Sheryll joined ActionSpace in 2008, having worked in the creative sector for over 25 years. She has a personal and professional interest in supporting the development of creative practices and providing artists with learning disabilities with the same opportunities as their peers in the contemporary visual arts sector. www.actionspace.org

Marice Cumber, Founder, Accumulate
Marice set up Accumulate in 2013 to bring together and use creative skills to empower and provide positive experiences for young people who are affected by homelessness and living in hostels or temporary accommodation in London.Accumulate delivers its creative workshops in collaboration with major cultural organisations and also fundraises for scholarships so that its participants can progress their creative education at university. Previously, Marice has set up and delivered creative business courses in prisons and developed business support programmes for creative students and graduates. www. accumulate.org.uk

Ali Eisa, Public Programme Manager (Education), Autograph
Ali is an artist and educator. He coordinates the education programme at Autograph, producing workshops and events for diverse audience to engage with Autograph’s exhibitions and photographic archive. He is a visual artist who exhibits nationally and internationally, and has a background in social circus, youth arts and youth work. www. autograph.org.uk

Dr Errol Francis, Chief Executive, Culture&
Errol is an artist, curator and former mental health activist. He was formerly head of arts at the Mental Health foundation and Director of the Anxiety Arts Festival 2014 and consultant to the Big Anxiety Festival, Sydney 2017. He is currently chief executive of Culture& and Director of the curatorial group PS/Y and visiting professor in arts and health at the University of London. www.cultureand.org

David Hevey, Director, Shape Arts
Shape Arts makes break out cultural content reaching millions through several projects – Unlimited, NDACA, Adam Reynolds Memorial Bursary and much more – all based on the premise of removing barriers to creative careers for disabled, diverse and different people. In his own right as a creative leader, Shape CEO David Hevey has a track record of making his innovative content through lm, television, media and the arts which explores how outsiders challenging barriers can create new content which also plays to millions. www.davidhevey.com

Charlotte Hollinshead, Associate Artist, ActionSpace
Charlotte Hollinshead has led the ActionSpace South London Studio at StudioVoltaire for over 20 years, Charlotte supports artists with complex needs to develop their individual arts practice and delivers an extensive range of commissions, projects, events and exhibitions including Stretch and Squeeze atThe Royal Festival Hall and Nnena Kalu’s solo exhibition for the Glasgow International Arts Festival 2018. Charlotte manages ActionSpace’s innovative participatory programme, including Part of It, WatchThis Space andTate Exchange, where ActionSpace artists create ambitious, interactive installations, artworks and live art happenings, inviting participants to create alongside them and share their creative processes. Charlotte also has her own inclusive participatory practice developing sculptural works and installations for outdoor public events. www.actionspace.org 

Jessica Horn, Programme Director, African Women’s Development Fund
Jessica Horn is Programme Director for the African Women’s Development Fund based in Accra, Ghana. She has worked for almost two decades as a feminist analyst and technical advisor with a focus on politics and practices around bodies, movements, funding and feminist futures in Africa and globally. A published poet, Jessica hosts and facilitates initiatives that promote feminist voice, human rights and revolutionary love through the arts. www.awdf.org/jessica-horn-2/

Adrian Jackson, Artistic Director, Cardboard Citizens
Adrian Jackson is the Artistic Director of Cardboard Citizens, a theatre company working particularly with homeless people, which he founded in 1991 whilst working for London Bubble. He has directed over 30 productions for Cardboard Citizens, including Pericles and Timon of Athens, co-produced with the Royal Shakespeare Company,The Beggar’s Opera (with ENO),The Lower Depths (with London Bubble) and the Evening Standard award-winning Mincemeat. He was awarded an MBE in the 2018 New Years Honours. www.cardboardcitizens.org.uk/

Lucy Keany, Public Programme Manager (Projects & Events), Autograph
At Autograph, Lucy programmes events and creative activities for a wide range of audiences. She has worked in a variety of creative programming roles for visual arts organisations in both Scotland and London. Previously, she was the events curator at Edinburgh Art Festival and then went onto work for the Glasgow-based photography gallery Street Level Photoworks. www. autograph.org.uk

Mark Lawrence, Resident Artist, ActionSpace Mark Lawrence has been a resident artist at ActionSpace since 2014. Mark has developed an extensive body of artwork, from paintings, drawings, collage and most recently with sculpture, lm and projection. His practice is highly experimental as Mark is keen to try his hand at many varied processes. He is currently developing a series of immersive lm projection works, using himself and his mixed media artworks as props to explore movement, shadow and reflection. www.actionspace.org/ar tists/mark-lawrence/

Ben Platts-Mills, Development Director, Headway East London, and author Ben has worked with people with learning disabilities, the neuro-diverse community and people with neurological changes caused by injury in adulthood. Stories of his work with survivors of brain injury are recorded in a book, Tell Me the Planets, published by Penguin last year. He is interested in the power of witness, in the pragmatics of inclusion, and in art practice as a means of redefining value. www.headwayeastlondon.org

Kate Pleydell, Arts Engagement Manager, Imperial Health Charity
Kate runs Imperial Health Charity’s audience engagement programme, looking at how art can be used as a tool in healthcare environments.The programme encompasses visual art, music, dance, drama and gardening for patients and staff across the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, London.The programme also has an ongoing artist residency scheme, inviting artists to work with particular patient groups in collaboration with galleries such as The Showroom and Serpentine Galleries. https://www.imperialcharity.org.uk/

Denise Rose, Project Director, Mouth That Roars
Denise Rose has been running Mouth That Roars (MTR) for over twenty one years. She previously trained as a youth worker and completed her MA in children, youth and international development. She has worked in Television Production, during which time she witnessed firsthand the lack of opportunities and misrepresentation of young people living in marginalised communities and lack of diversity. Denise set up MTR to enable young people to gain access to media and become the makers of their own unique stories. MTR operates a youth media studio in East London but has also facilitated many lm making projects with marginalised children and young people globally - in Iran, Kurdistan, Morocco, India and Palestine.These lms have been used to raise cultural awareness and as tools to explore human rights and responsibilities www.mouththatroars.com

Deborah Williams, Artist
Deborah’s career started in the mid-1980s with her first theatre company. She moved toThe Pleasance in Edinburgh and became the rst manager at Pleasance Islington.She was an actor with GraeaeTheatre Company,worked with the London disability arts forum,and taught stage management at the Webber Douglas Drama School. In 1999 she started Reality Productions and in 2008 went to Rich Mix where she was responsible for the one day arts and activism event 6 Billion Ways. Deborah has worked with Arts Council England, leading on equality analysis and the introduction of the Creative Case for Diversity, and at the British Film Institute, leading on diversity and creating the BFI Diversity Standards. Currently she is CEO of Creative Diversity Network. She travels around the world sharing her process and experiences on how equality, diversity and inclusion can lead change and transform the creative and cultural industries. www.creativediversitynetwork.com

Akhera Williams, Artist
Akhera Williams is a young speaker, artist and activist who has run her own campaign as part of the Advocacy academy to make the histories of a range of POC identities accessible within the secondary curriculum. She is an Art Assassin at the South London Gallery (a youth art group who make art to respond to society), and has worked with Consented (A magazine on race, gender, class and systematic change). She’s interested in global politics and race, climate justice, intersectional feminism, and wants young people to be more conscious of building a fair and just world.