Introducing the Coventry Biennial Board
We are delighted to introduce our new Board.
The ten members below will play a vital role in delivering the vision of Coventry Biennial, while shaping and influencing the organisation’s direction over the coming years. They include the Directors of the Contemporary Visual Arts Network (CVAN) and Arts Council Collection; representation from regional Universities; experts in communications and digital visualisation; curators; specialists in innovation, leadership and collaboration, as well as great artist talent.
Meet the Board:
Paula Orrell (Chair)
Paula Orrell spent the early part of her career invested in Plymouth’s cultural development in 2006. She was the curator of Plymouth Arts Centre and Artistic Director of the River Tamar Project. Paula worked with and commissioned artists such as Marina Abramovic, John Akomfrah, Melanie Manchot and produced citywide exhibitions, including the Hayward touring exhibition British Art Show 7 in 2011 with curators Lisa Le Feurve and Tom Morton. Shifting the dynamic of cultural investment in Plymouth, Paula’s ten years led to working in New Zealand as the Director of Contemporary Art Christchurch Toi Moroki – transforming a gallery space from a conservative artist society to a bilingual public art gallery as part of the social transformation of the city post-earthquake. Touring exhibitions of David Shrigley and commissioning the first significant exhibition in fourteen years of Paemanu–Ngai Tahu Contemporary Visual Arts. Moving back to the UK, working with the Arts Council England, Paula Orrell is based in Bristol and is the Director of CVAN and leads Visual Arts South West, part of the nine regional areas of CVAN.
Paula is incredibly passionate about socially engaged practice, having worked alongside the artist Lucy Orta as a young curator and developed the transformational programme Take a Part in Plymouth with Efford and Plymouth City Council’s community. Paula believes in the equity of fair investment in artists who live in a place alongside the development of a city and region’s cultural infrastructure and volunteers for Creative Youth Network in Bristol. Paula studied MA in Creative Curating at Goldsmith College alongside Anna Harding and a BA in Sculpture at Sheffield Hallam, Psalter Lane.
Deborah Smith
Deborah Smith has worked as a curator for over 2 decades. Through exploring different strategies for collaboration and the presentation of interdisciplinary practices she has delivered exhibitions alongside large-scale commissions, residencies, conferences and publications, interwoven with programmes of learning, engagement and interpretation. Projects have been developed in galleries and in the public realm with internationally respected organisations such as Hayward Touring, The New Art Gallery Walsall, Norfolk & Norwich Festival, Camden Arts Centre, Chapter, and Contemporary Art Society. Her work has included Curator, Arts Council Collection National Partners Programme at Birmingham Museums Trust and Head of Programmes (Interim) at the Serpentine Galleries. Deborah worked with Arup (global company of engineers, architects and planners), with Invisible Dust, an organisation specialising in art and science, and currently curating the exhibition ‘Human conditions of clay’ with Chapter opening in October 2021. In September 2020 Smith was appointed Director of Arts Council Collection. In addition she is an elected board member of IKT Association of Contemporary Art Curators (2017-2021), a steering group member of Intoarts (disability studio practice), a Shadow Board Member of The Box, Plymouth, and on the Art Collection Committee at the University of Warwick.
Lara Ratnaraja
Lara is a freelance cultural consultant specialising in diversity, innovation, leadership, collaboration and cultural policy implementation within the HE, cultural and digital sector. She develops and delivers projects and policy on how cultural and digital technology intersect for a number of national partners as well as programmes around leadership, resilience and business development for the arts and creative industries. She works or has worked with the University of Birmingham, Coventry University, Birmingham City University STEAMhouse and University of Salford delivering and developing projects on diversity, digital engagement and research collaborations between arts, HEIs and SMEs. Other consultancy clients include Jerwood Arts, Imagineer, The Big Draw, Film Hub and West Midlands Screen Bureau.
With Helga Henry, she co-produced RE:Present and ASTONish leadership development programmes which supported the development of cultural leaders from diverse backgrounds so that the cultural ecology of the city better reflects its changing demographic. They are currently delivering AD:Vantage a leadership programme that places the vantage point of d/Deaf, neurodivergent and disabled creative practitioners at the heart of leadership
She is also on the Boards of Derby Theatres, Vivid Projects and the Advisory Group of SHOUT Festival. She is on the Midlands Area Council for Arts Council England, the Equality Monitoring Group for Arts Council Wales, and is a Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre Industry Champion.
Craig Ashley
Craig Ashley is a curator and producer based in the West Midlands. He led the visual arts programme at Midlands Arts Centre (MAC) from 2009 to 2016. Notable exhibitions for MAC include By the Rivers of Birminam (2012), an important retrospective of the work of renowned photographer Vanley Burke, and Barbara Walker’s Shock & Awe (2016), newly commissioned drawings acknowledging the contribution of Black servicemen and women to British war efforts over the past 100 years. From 2016 to 2020 he was Director of New Art West Midlands, the contemporary visual arts network for the region, and has worked as consultant curator with clients including Coventry City of Culture Trust and Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. He is Chair of Dash, a leading Disability Arts organisation. Craig is currently Associate Head at the School of Art & Design at Coventry University where he leads on enterprise and innovation.
Jim Alimpertis
Jim is an interdisciplinary artist and a marketing communications professional. He was Creative Director of Puzzle of Little Polyphonies (P.a.m.p Theatre Company) and has worked in Arts Production, Performance Design, Marketing-Communications, Public Engagement, Volunteer Management and Ambassador Coordination with various organisations including Warwick Arts Centre and Athens Biennial. Currently he is working as a Student Communications Officer at the University of Warwick, where he also studied for his MA in Creative and Media Enterprises. For the latter, he focused his research on the Economies of Free Content, Traditional Cultural Expressions, Brand Narratives, the Importance of Tangibility in Cultural Consumption, the Production of New Cultural Meanings, Video Games and Fashion.
Helen Cuthill
Associate Dean (Enterprise and Innovation) in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities.
Helen’s role in Coventry University is to enhance the University’s academic engagement with business, public sector and voluntary organisations in order to create social, cultural and economic impact locally, nationally and internationally. She also sits on the board of New Arts West Midlands.
Helen’s expertise was initially developed through project work within creative publishing companies and the West Midlands Regional Development Agency before joining KPMG. While at KPMG, she developed her skills as a ‘fixer’ working on a range of projects as diverse as BBC reviews to Healthcare redesigns which spanned across Europe, Middle East, North America and Australasia.
Evie Kissack
Evie Kissack is PR and Communications professional based in Birmingham, originally from Yorkshire. In her role as PR and Communications Manager for Midlands Arts Centre, Evie has worked on a diverse range of projects, from collaborating with artists on region-wide festivals, to promoting MAC’s busy in-house programme across visual arts, indie cinema, learning and participation, performance and community outreach.
Having graduated from the University of Liverpool with a First Class BA Hons in English and Film Studies, Evie has since worked in roles as a Contributing Writer, Content Editor, and Marketing Assistant in publishing.
Evie strongly believes in the importance of arts and culture for local communities. She is dedicated to working with organisations that platform and represent diverse voices, and is passionate about celebrating the creativity of the West Midlands, and its connection with the international sector.
Outside of work, Evie spends as much time as she can at live music gigs, exhibitions, and travelling.
Derek Lawrence
Derek is a Chartered Design Engineer with over 20 years of experience working in the world’s leading engineering and property consultancies. Derek has a deep understanding of evolving digital visualisation tools and is actively involved in supporting artists to virtually prototype and communicate their ideas though virtual, augmented and mixed reality.
Helen Kilby Nelson
Helen Kilby Nelson is a neurodivergent and working class activist and multi-disciplinary artist based in Warwickshire. Helen’s practice is a politically engaged social art practice and she is one of the commissioned artists for Coventry Biennial HYPER-POSSIBLE. She is a founding citizen of the Parallel State, an activist breakaway state, project manager for a two year community art project in Stratford upon Avon and a member of the Coventry Artspace advisory group. Helen has facilitated a number of initiatives including a tenants’ support & action group, mental health creative well-being group, artist support & professional development opportunities and tech sector work opportunities, at the height of the dot com boom, to people who could not access site specific work places and/or regular shift patterns.
Kate Stoddart
Kate is a freelance curator, creative producer and mentor with programming and project management experience, and a specialist knowledge and understanding of how art operates in arts, heritage and community spaces. With 35 years of experience in the public independent and heritage sectors at local, regional and national level, her practice encompasses strategy development, team building and project delivery and consultancy, mentoring and she recently trained as a ceremony celebrant.
Her curatorial interest is how places and collections (objects, archives, architecture & landscape) act as jumping off points for creative thinking for inspiring and provoking experiences and stories which are relevant to a wide range of audiences and non-visitors. In some of my projects, she shares the curatorial role with non professionals and works closely with engagement colleagues to do this.
by Annabel Clarke