Author: Carmela Vienna

Tide (Teadayblogs) is a multifaceted artist, illustrator, content creator, and video editor with over seven years of experience in the creative industry. Her work explores self-expression, mental health, and the many layers of being human through a thoughtful and visually distinctive lens.

Alongside her creative practice, she has collaborated with brands including adidas, Crocs, Sky TV, ohne, Lucy & Yak and Sainsbury’s on highly creative illustrated campaigns. She also regularly brings her community together through workshops and live events centred around creativity, conversation, and connection.

Tide is also the founder of Re-education, an activist platform focused on reimagining lifelong learning and making activism more accessible to wider audiences.

Debbie Meniru is a writer, curator and editor. Her art writing has been published internationally, including by Hatje Cantz, Rizzoli, Plaster Magazine, CURA and Numéro Art. She has held curatorial roles at the Hayward Gallery, Tate Modern, Tate Britain and the Migration Museum, and curated exhibitions at Pi Artworks in London and Istanbul. Debbie is the editor of Tate Dialogues: The 80s (2024) and co-editor of Jyll Bradley’s monograph Running and Returning (2025).

Korantema is a curator and dancer from London, whose work focuses on creative storytelling. You can usually find her making zines, talking about afro hair or dancing jazz. She is currently Senior Curator of Anthropology at the Horniman Museum & Gardens, where she recently led an award-winning project on co-curation, repatriation and west African cultural heritage, including the African and Caribbean Collections Research Hub.

For the last ten years, she has been a Lindy Hop and African American Vernacular Jazz dancer, teaching locally and across Europe. When she’s not dancing or curating, Korantema runs Black Hair Stories, a creative project exploring afro hair that won the Mayor of London’s Making History Award and has been featured in gal-dem, Vice and on ITV. Korantema is a 2015 Churchill Fellow and a former trustee at the East End Women’s Museum.

Nuria Revuelta is a multidisciplinary creative working across art, design, culture, and education. She is the founder and creative director of The Dyás, an independent platform that develops limited-edition collaborations with women artists, transforming artworks into wearable pieces through responsible production and local manufacturing. She is also the creator and host of The Creative Corner, a podcast developed in collaboration with Ladbroke Hall and GowithYamo, exploring creativity, culture, and contemporary life and opening up creative dialogue to wider audiences.

Alongside her independent practice, she is a Group Lead Lecturer in Digital Marketing, where she supports emerging creatives in developing concept-driven and industry-facing work. Previously, she has worked across design, creative direction and brand strategy in London, New York, and Berlin, collaborating with emerging fashion and cultural brands including Ottolinger, Tombolo Company, and Nicholas K. Her work is driven by an interest in social impact and how cultural production connects with audiences through digital platforms. 

She has been a finalist for the UK Start Up Awards (Creative Start Up of the Year), Drapers Conscious Fashion Awards, and Marie Claire Sustainability Awards.

Jodi Kwok (HK/GB) is a UK-based curator and cultural producer working across photography, moving image, digital media, and socially engaged practice. As Curator at QUAD and FORMAT International Photography Festival, she curates exhibitions, commissions new work, and develops residencies and public programmes through international and cross-sector collaborations. Alongside her institutional practice, she develops freelance curatorial projects and contributes to portfolio reviews, photobook markets, festival and exhibition catalogues, and international open-call juries. Her work focuses on cross-cultural dialogue and politically engaged contemporary art.

Recent projects include FORMAT25 (2025), FORMAT24: Future Now (2024), REFLECTOR (2024) at the New Art Gallery Walsall, Petra Szemán: Towards a New Monomyth (2024), LingFei Ren: From That Day On (2023), and Lawrence Lek: Nepenthe (Summer Palace Ruins) (2022).

Niamh Treacy is the QUAD Exhibitions & FORMAT Producer. Producing and curating events, public programme activity and exhibitions for QUAD and FORMAT International Photography Festival, the UK’s leading international contemporary festival of photography and related media, based in Derby.

She has reviewed work internationally for organisations including Belfast Photo Festival, Uganda Press Photo, Triennial of Photography Hamburg, London College of Communication and Les Rencontres d’Arles. She has also juried open calls for FORMAT, Uganda Press Photo Awards, Zealous, the United Rugby Championship and New York Centre for Contemporary Art.

As part of the FORMAT and QUAD Derby curatorial team, Niamh has curated exhibitions both internationally and nationally, including [Re]Source at Lishui Photography Festival (2023), Radical Souls at FORMAT23, un/natural at Lishui Photography Festival (2021), Feature Shoot Emerging Photography Awards at QUAD (2021), #massisolation FORMAT at Derby Museum and Art Gallery (2021), FUTURE FOCUS at QUAD Gallery (2022) and Bruce Asbestos: Eye of Newt 2.0 at QUAD (2022).

Aurella Yussuf is a writer and art historian whose work focuses on Black artists in Britain and beyond. Her writing has appeared in Frieze, Hyperallergic, RA Magazine and other art publications.

She is a founding member of the interdisciplinary art collective Thick/er Black Lines and co-creator of the Blk Art Map.

Her research and writing explore contemporary Black artistic practice and the ways art moves through institutions, markets, and alternative networks.

Aurella is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Birmingham.

Follow Blk Art Map on Instagram to discover and support Black artists and exhibitions across the UK.

Cathy Wade is an artist and writer who engages with practices that are created and distributed within collaborative partnerships, through experimental pedagogies and commons. They work as part of a diverse and intersectional creative team at Vivid Projects (a media practice-based arts organisation founded in 2012 and based in Birmingham). Vivid’s curatorial focus centres on cultural and contextual histories, builds long-term relationships with artists and champions new voices, working with under-represented artists, contemporary practices and cultures through projects including Vivid Lab, the Birmingham Media Archive Project and the Black Hole Club Network.

Cathy has written about contemporary art for publications including Art Monthly, Frieze, Corridor8, Nero and a-n and is the course leader for MA Arts and Education Practices at Birmingham City University.

Now open: Birmingham Media Archive Project: The First Decade 1982–1992 is on at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery until 28 June 2026, Wed–Sun, 10am–5pm (open daily during school holidays). The exhibition explores the city’s overlooked community media heritage through newly commissioned responses and original archive works — free to visit.

Lisa Kennedy is a curator, critical friend and researcher. Lisa champions the inclusion of multiple voices in conversations around contemporary and historical art, museum collections, archives and the study of history. Collaborating with art organisations, galleries and cultural institutions, Lisa is driven by a passion to uncover what truly makes these spaces meaningful for the broadest possible audience. Her practice is rooted in expanding access to art, culture and history through a socially engaged approach, while also investigating models of accountability and the power of user research.

Recently, Lisa has worked with several organisations — including The Gap Arts Project | Sweet Patootee Arts, Bath Abbey, Global Learning London, the British Art Network, Multistory, the Government Art Collection, Collections Trust, Routing Diaspora Histories, the British Council, Art UK, the Bath & Colonialism Archive Project, Haringey Creates, London Unseen, London Museum and UAL Decolonising Arts Institute | Contemporary Art Society — to support community projects, embed anti-racist curatorial practices, and address language and accountability issues, bridging knowledge gaps in art, collections and archives.

You can read some of Lisa’s thoughts on her blog, discover inspiring people on Instagram, or see what she’s been working on lately.

A note from Lisa: “I am inspired by artists, thinkers and change makers building out futures that were once dreams, so I encourage you to check out the incredible work of the Black Curators Collective, 
Hood Futures Studios, Civic Square and Artsy Party UK“

Ceri Hand has spent thirty-five years inside the art world, in almost every role it offers. She has been an artist, publisher, curator, gallerist and institutional director.

She founded Ceri Hand Gallery in Liverpool and London, representing emerging artists whose work entered the collections of Tate and the Whitney and was shown at the Venice Biennale. As Associate Director at Simon Lee Gallery she worked with thirty-eight international artists across London and New York. As Director of Programmes at Somerset House she built a programme that drew 2.5 million visitors a year, including Get Up, Stand Up Now: Generations of Black Creative Pioneers and Mushrooms: The Art, Design and Future of Fungi. She was part of the programming team on the Liverpool Biennial in 2004 and 2006 and helped shape Liverpool’s Capital of Culture year. She has lectured at Central Saint Martins, Goldsmiths, the Sotheby’s Institute and the New Museum in New York.

In 2020 she left institutional leadership to coach the people who make the work. Her clients are artists, writers, founders, creative directors and cultural leaders across more than a hundred and twenty countries. Her podcast Extraordinary Creatives reached number one in Apple’s Arts charts within months of launch. Her first book is forthcoming with Profile Books.

She is Co-Chair of Castlefield Gallery, Manchester.