A Podcast from the Goethe-Institut London
Talking Culture

Anicka Yi (b. 1971 in Seoul, South Korea) is a Korean-American conceptual artist known for her focus on olfaction and her use of unorthodox, living, and perishable materials,

Informed by scientific research, biology, and perfumers, Anicka Yi has produced a unique body of work over the past decade at the intersection of politics and macrobiotics. Her practice questions the increasingly hazy taxonomic distinctions between what is human, animal, plant and machine, and is the result of an alchemical process of experimentation that explores often incompatible materials. She collaborates with researchers to create media that are often inherently political, and delves into the cultural conditioning of sense and perception in a way she describes as a "biopolitics of the senses." Her diverse installations, which draw on scientific concepts and techniques to activate vivid fictional scenarios, ask incisive questions about human psychology and the workings of society.

Yi's work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions around the world, including Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan; Tate Modern, London; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany; Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; List Visual Arts Center, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts; The Kitchen, New York; and the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio. In 2016, Yi was awarded the Hugo Boss Prize and in 2019 her work was featured in the 58th International Venice Biennale, titled May You Live In Interesting Times. Anicka Yi was awarded the 2020 Tate Turbine Hall Hyundai Commission.
 

Keith Williams is an assistant professor (educational studies) at Athabasca University. His work focuses on better understanding how to be good relations with our more-than-human kin, specifically in his home province of Mi’kma’ki (Nova Scotia) where he lives.

Keith draws heavily on Haudenosaunee teachings (part of his paternal lineage is from a Mohawk community on the northern shores of Lake Ontario), posthuman philosophy, and his lived experience with family members—human and otherwise.

Lucy Rose Sollitt is an experienced researcher and cultural programmer, specialising in innovatively merging art, technology, and ecosystemic change. Lucy’s career is dedicated to forging new narratives for sustainable development that prioritise restoration, kinship, and flourishing. Originally trained as a philosopher, Lucy approaches art as a form of felt knowledge and a gathering point for exploring alternative ideas for how things can be.

Lucy’s work includes writing, cultural programming, innovation strategy, funding and policy design. Lucy works with organisations ranging from Serpentine Galleries, Rhizome, Rupert and FACT, to the Goethe Institut, DACS, Creative United and the British Council. She previously led on Creative Media at Arts Council England (London office) and digital innovation lead for DCMS. She has worked for organisations including Tate Modern, the Mayor of London and the RSA. She regularly participates in panel discussions in the UK and internationally, lectures at Christie’s and the Royal College of Art, and mentors artists independently and for SPACE Studios and Somerset House Studios. Lucy is an Advisory Board member for Furtherfield and is based at Somerset House, London.

Agnieszka Kurant (Łódź, Poland, 1978) is a conceptual artist investigating collective and nonhuman intelligences and the exploitations present in digital surveillance capitalism.

Kurant is the recipient of the 2020 LACMA A+T Award, the 2019 Frontier Art Prize, and the 2021 Google AMI Award. She has had numerous solo exhibitions, including Crowd Crystal at Castello di Rivoli (2021-22), Uncomputables at Hannover Kunstverein (2023), Exformation at Sculpture Center (2013) and Errorism at Kunsthal Gent and Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz (2021). In 2015 she realized a commission for the façade of the Guggenheim Museum, New York, and in 2021-22 a permanent commission for the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA. In 2010 she co-represented Poland in the Polish Pavilion at the 12th Venice Biennale of Architecture (with A. Wasilkowska). Kurant’s works were also exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Pompidou Center and Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Istanbul Biennial; the SFMOMA, Kunsthalle Wien, Witte de With; Whitechapel Art Gallery, the Kitchen, the De Young Museum, Gamec, Bergamo, CAPC Bordeaux, Moderna Museet; Louisiana Museum, Denmark; Villa Medici, Rome; Milano Triennale; Bonner Kunstverein; Kunstverein in Hamburg; Mumok, Vienna, Mamco, Geneva;Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw; Frieze Projects, Performa Biennial and FRONT Triennial, Cleveland, among other institutions. Kurant was an artist in residence at the Berggruen Institute (2019-2021), a visiting artist at MIT CAST (2017-2020), and held a fellowship at the Smithsonian Institute (2018).

Her work will be featured in the upcoming Sydney Biennial (March 2024). Kurant’s upcoming solo exhibitions and projects include a solo show at Mudam Luxemburg (June 2024), as well as commissions for the Pompidou Center (June 2024), and for Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection in Paris (October 2024). Kurant’s monograph Collective Intelligence, co-edited by Stefanie Hessler and Jenny Jaskey will be published by Sternberg Press/ MIT Press in March 2024.
 

After receiving his PhD in genetics from the University of Cambridge, Johannes Vogel worked at the Natural History Museum in London and took up his appointments in Berlin in 2012. Since then, he has been working as the Director General of the Museum für Naturkunde, Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Research Berlin, and Professor of Biodiversity and Science Dialogue at the Humboldt University Berlin since 2012. He is also President of the European Citizen Science Association and advises the European Commission (Chair & member Open Science Policy Platform) and German Government (e.g. Bioeconomy Council, High-tech Forum, Chair of German Science year 2022 ‘Ask your Question’).

With a natural history collection of over 30 million objects and some 200 scientific staff, the museum is one of the largest research museums in the world. The Museums vision is to promote scientific and social dialogue to foster action for nature and democracy. It sees itself as a ‘political museum’ attracting up to one million visitors annually, 60% of which are young adults.
 

Michael Levin is the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor of Biology at Tufts University, an associate faculty at Harvard’s Wyss Institute, and the director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts. He has published over 400 peer-reviewed publications across developmental biology, computer science, and philosophy of mind. His group works to understand information processing and problem-solving across scales, in a range of naturally evolved, synthetically engineered, and hybrid living systems. Dr. Levin’s work spans from fundamental conceptual frameworks to applications in birth defects, regeneration, and cancer.
 

Gugulethu Duma (aka Dumama) is a musician, composer, sonic poet and creative producer from the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. Her practice plays with the deconstruction and critique of archaic modes of representation in Southern African/African sonic and performance culture, while also composing music for herself and others. As a storyteller and lyricist, she weaves together childhood songs, stories and personal memories with electronic hues and gestures, experimenting with the divide between traditional oral culture and futuristic, globally oriented poetics in her embodiment of an African technological consciousness.
 
As an emerging curator and cultural organiser, Gugulethu intentionally works to bring artists together in workshops and performances centred around Embodied Social Justice, while unfolding and activating the voice(s) through unique narrative-making processes. 
 
She has been an artist in residence with the Solo Magic Radical Black Femme Project, curated by Base Arts (2021) Seattle, One Beat Music, Goethe Talents, Nirox and Red Bull Music.

Marta Bausells is a writer, editor, translator and artist. Her work has received support in the form of fellowships, residencies, grants and awards by Headlands Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, SPACE on Ryder Farm, Carraig-na-gCat (the Albers Foundation), Arts Council England, Tin House Summer Workshop, the London Writers Awards, Can Serrat, Ventspils House, Faber Residency, and the International Journalists’ Programmes in Berlin.

Her work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian (where she was a staff journalist for four years), VICE, ELLE magazine, The Paris Review, and others outlets.

She's currently at work on her debut novel and on a creative non-fiction manuscript titled "Not My Story to Tell," on intergenerational trauma around the Spanish Civil War. 
 

Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. Her interests lie in the poetics of science and the politics of technologies. Current work focuses on turbid media and the aesthetics of turbulence.

Her books include various studies and translations of Walter Benjamin, as well as Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant Garde (2002); Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (2005); Derelicts: Thought Worms from the Wreckage (2014) and Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form (2016). Recent work on the biopolitical economy of dairy, with Melanie Jackson, includes the publications Deeper in the Pyramid (with Melanie Jackson) (2018/2023) and The Inextinguishable for the Limerick Biennale, 2020. A book on anti-fascist radio pioneer Ernst Schoen  (written with Sam Dolbear) is out in July with Goldsmiths Press, and a study of ICI and its impact in Teesside is soon to be published in Palgrave Pivots series.
 

Louis Porter is a London based artist, photographer, researcher and educator in photographic processes. His work focusses on the circulation and recirculation of images, texts, ideas and the technologies of reproduction that enable this. Publishing and printed matter are an important part of his practice, via his own imprint Twenty Shelves, independent publishers and as a member of The Artists’ Books Cooperative.

His books and multiples are held in numerous artists’ books collections including those of Tate Modern, MoMa, the New York Centre for Book Arts, The Victoria and Albert Museum and the Reina Sofia Museum. He has undertaken residencies at the Zentrum Für Kunst und Urbanistik (Germany), Awagami paper Factory (Japan), Australian Archaeological Institute of Athens (Greece) and The Red Gate Gallery (China)
 

Gala Porras-Kim has been working and living in Los Angeles (USA) since 1996. She holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and an MFA in Latin American Studies from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Her work has been part of the Biennials in Gwangju, Korea (2021); São Paulo, Brazil (2021) and Whitney, New York (2019). Last year she had two major solo exhibitions at Gasworks in London and Amant in New York.

In 2023, in addition to CAAC, she is exhibiting her work at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo de México (MUAC). Gala Porras-Kim was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2019) and an artist-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute (2020-2022).

James Webb is an artist known for site-specific interventions and installations. His practice often involves sound, found objects, and text, invoking references to literature, cinema, and the minimalist traditions. By shifting objects, techniques, and forms beyond their original contexts and introducing them to different environments, Webb creates new spaces of tension. These spaces bind Webb’s academic background in religion, theatre, and advertising, offering poetic inquiries into the economies of belief and dynamics of communication in our contemporary world.

Webb has had solo exhibitions at, amongst others, the Art Institute of Chicago, USA, 2018; SPACES, Cleveland, USA, 2018; Norrtälje Konsthall, Norrtälje, Sweden, 2018; Galerie Imane Farès, Paris, France, 2016 and 2019; Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, United Kingdom, 2016; Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen, Norway, 2015; blank projects, Cape Town, South Africa, 2014, 2016, and 2020; CentroCentro, Madrid, Spain, 2013; Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2012; and mac, Birmingham, United Kingdom, 2010.

Major group exhibitions include the 9th and 16th Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon (2007, 2022), 13th Biennial of Dakar (2018), 4th Prospect Triennial of New Orleans (2017), Documenta 14 (2017), 13th Biennial of Sharjah (2017), 12th Bienal de la Habana (2015), 55th Biennale di Venezia (2013), and the 3rd Marrakech Biennale (2009). Other notable group shows include  those at spaces such as MONA FOMA, Australia; Wanås Konst and Historiska, Sweden; MAXXI Roma, Italy; Darat al Funun, Jordan; Théâtre Graslin, France; and the Tate Modern, London.
 

Matthew Herbert is a musician, artist, producer and writer whose range of innovative works extends from numerous albums (including the much-celebrated Bodily Functions) to Ivor Novello nominated film scores (Life in a Day) as well as music for the theatre, Broadway, TV, games and radio. He has performed solo, as a DJ and with various musicians including his own 18 piece big band all round the world from the Sydney opera house, to the Hollywood Bowl and created installations, plays and operas. He has remixed iconic artists including Quincy Jones, Serge Gainsbourg, and Ennio Morricone and worked closely over a number of years with musical acts as diverse as Bjork and Dizzee Rascal. 

He has been sampled by J Dilla for Slum Village and another of his pieces (Café de Flore) inspired a movie by Jean-Marc Vallee (Dallas Buyers Club). He has produced other artists such as Roisin Murphy, The Invisible, Micachu and Merz and released some of these works alongside others on his own label – Accidental Records. He also set up NX records with Goldsmiths University to support the release of music from alumni and others. Notable collaborators have included chef Heston Blumenthal, playwrights Caryl Churchill and Duncan Macmillan, theatre director Lyndsey Turner, musician Arto Lindsay and writer Will Self. 

But he is most known for working with sound, turning ordinary or so-called found sound into electronic music. His most celebrated work ONE PIG followed the life of a pig from birth to plate and beyond. He is relaunching an online Museum of Sound and is the creative director of the new Radiophonic Workshop for the BBC. His debut play The Hush was performed at the National Theatre, his debut opera The Crackle at the Royal Opera House and he continues to work on projects for the screen as well as the stage. His debut book called The Music was published in 2018.

Mercedes Bunz is a professor in Digital Culture and Society at the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London. She studied Philosophy, Art History, and Media Studies at the FU Berlin and the Bauhaus University Weimar, and wrote her thesis on ‘The history of the internet-driven by a deep curiosity about digital technology'. Until today, she has not been disappointed by the transforming field that is digital technology, which provides her reliably with new aspects to think constantly about. At the moment, that is Artificial Intelligence and ‘machine learning’. Delving into the topics of AI and ‘machine learning’, Bunz co-leads the Creative AI Lab, a collaboration with the Serpentine Gallery, London.
 

Mithu Sanyal is a novelist, academic, literary critic, columnist and broadcaster. Her work has been published by international newspapers including The European and The Guardian, DIE ZEIT, Süddeutsche Zeitung, NZZ, Frankfurter Rundschau etc. Her books include a cultural history of the Vulva (Wagenbach) and Rape – from Lucrezia to #metoo (Verso Books). Her debut novel Identitti (2021) was shortlisted for the German Book Award and is published in English by Astra House and V&Q Books. Her new book about Emily Brontë has just come out with KiWi.

A philosopher by training, Lucy’s research-led practice maps the contours of emerging art and how it intersects with technologies, economies and ecologies. Lucy works across scales, exploring systemic phenomena and co-/subjective embodied experience. She is motivated by a belief in art as felt knowledge, wonder and the pursuit of fairer and more meaningful forms of coexistence.

Lucy’s work includes writing, curation, strategy and policy development - for organisations ranging from FACT, Serpentine Galleries and Rhizome to the Goethe Institut, DACS, Tate, Arts Council England and UK government. Lucy regularly teaches and participates in panel discussions, for example, at V&A, QUAD, Christie’s and the RCA.

Lucy’s approach is artist centred. She enjoys working as an artist mentor for SPACE Studios alongside her other projects.

 

Emily Haworth is a Quantum Science & Technology MSc student at the Technical University of Munich. She is originally from Lancashire, England and did her Physics BSc at University of St Andrews. Alongside her studies, she created ‘PushQuantum: Climate’ which aims to support quantum technology to be an overall carbon negative endeavour. As part of this, the group recently curated an interactive exhibition at Munich’s Deutsches Museum exploring the role of technology in the environment and society. 

Eduardo Reck Miranda’s distinctive music is informed by his unique background as an Artificial Intelligence (AI) scientist and classically trained composer. He is internationally known for his research in neurotechnology for music and is championing investigation into quantum computing for musical creativity. Eduardo was a research scientist in the evolution of language group at Sony CSL Paris. Currently, he is a professor at the University of Plymouth, UK, where he leads the Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research (ICCMR). His opera ‘Lampedusa’, composed with sonification of subatomic particle collisions and live-electronics was premiered by BBC Singers.

Isabel Raabe is a curator and project developer from Berlin. She studied Contemporary Dance and later cultural management and curated numerous interdisciplinary international art and cultural projects. She is interested in curatorial and artistic strategies that deconstruct Western perspectives and traditions of thought. She recently initiated RomArchive - Digital Archive of the Roma. Isabel Raabe initiated the project Talking Objects consisting of the Talking Objects Lab, which she runs with Mahret Ifeoma Kupka, and the Talking Objects Archive, a digital archive for decolonial knowledge production to be launched in 2024.
 
Isabel Raabe is part of the curatorial team of Talking Objects Lab together with Mahret Ifeoma Kupka, Malick Ndiay (Musée Théodore Monod, Senegal), Njoki Ngumi (The Nest Collective, Kenya) and Chao Tayiana Maina (African Digital Heritage, Kenya).

 

Thomas Schaupp is a dance dramaturg and curator. Initially trained as a medical laboratory technician, he later embarked on new paths and completed a bachelor's degree in theater studies and art history in Berlin. While still a student, Thomas started working as a dramaturg in the dance scenes of Berlin and Bucharest, soon after devoting himself fully to freelance work. Since then he has worked internationally with choreographers and performing arts institutions across Europe and beyond.

Thomas Schaupp is part of the curatorial team of Goethe Morph* Iceland.

Dan Hicks FSA is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, Curator of World Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. His most recent book is The Brutish Museums: the Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (Pluto Books, 2020). 
 

Using the structures of music as mediums in her multimedia universe, Juliana Huxtable is a DJ and musician singular in her approach. Where her visual art and poetry navigate the complexification of desire in a life increasingly mediated by technology, her music utilizes the sounds of technology itself to construct parallel realities to be inhabited and embodied in rhythm and harmonic tableaux.

Her sets skillfully deploy the notion of sampling, and re-blogging as DJ strategies, ecstatically mixing an array of influences that frolic at the boundary of genre intuition and experimentation. At once an assertion of freedom and an ode to the evolutionary structure of electronic music subcultures, she aspires to the sublime in what can often only be described as a witchcraft seance behind the decks on stage.

John Kampfner is an award winning author, broadcaster, commentator and force in the UK creative sector. He was Chief Political Correspondent at the Financial Times, political commentator for the BBC's Today programme, and editor of the New Statesman, regularly contributing to British and international media. He established the Creative Industries Federation in 2014 and was its CEO for five years. John Kampfner was also the founder Chair of Turner Contemporary, one of the UK's most successful art galleries.

His previous five books include the best-selling Blair’s Wars (2003) and Freedom For Sale (2009), which was short-listed for the Orwell Prize. Kampfner is a Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) and adviser to the Frankfurt Book Fair. He presents the podcast series Pale, Male and Stale with the comedian Shazia Mirza which looks at politics and identity.

His forthcoming book is provocatively titled Why the Germans Do It Better. Lessons from a Grown Up Country (to be published in July 2020). When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, John Kampfner was working as the East Berlin correspondent of the Telegraph. Thirty years later, he finds a country transformed. Germany, for sure, faces problems: the social effects of the refugee influx, the rise of the AfD, a slowing economy, an ageing population, worsening infrastructure and a continued timidity in foreign affairs. Yet Kampfner juxtaposes contemporary Germany with the mayhem of 'Brexit Britain' and Trump's America and argues that its political maturity enables it to confront the challenges of the contemporary world better than others.

Alice Boyd is a London and Bristol based composer, sound designer, theatre maker and environmental campaigner. Her work uses the voice, everyday sounds and electronic textures to tell stories about the world around us. She has been selected as one of Sound and Music’s New Voices composers for 2020, supported by Arts Council England, the Garfield Weston Foundation and the PRS Foundation.

Alice Boyd | Composer, sound designer, theatre maker, environmental campaigner

Simon Strauß ist a German author, theater critic and historian.
He studied antiquity and history at the university of Basel, the university of Poitiers and the university of Cambridge.
In 2017 he published his first book "Seven Nights" and in summer 2019 hist second one "Romain Days". 2020 he was responsible for the publication of the theater piece collection "Spielplan-Änderung".
He is a founding member and board director of the association "Arbeit an Europa e.V." and is also a full member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in the section Performing Arts.

Simon Strauß @ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Iwona Blazwick has been Director of the Whitechapel Gallery, London since 2001 and is a curator, critic and lecturer; formerly at Tate Modern and London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) as well as being an independent curator in Europe and Japan.

Recent curatorial projects include William Kentridge: Thick Time (2016), Thomas Ruff Photographs 1979-2017 (2017), Mark Dion: Theatre of the Natural World (2018) and Michael Rakowitz (2019) at the Whitechapel Gallery and Carlos Bunga: The Architecture of Life at MAAT, Lisbon (2019), The Palace at 4am, a group show at the Archaeological Museum Mykonos (2019) and Sight, a solo show with Antony Gormley and the Neon Foundation on the Island of Delos (2019).

Iwona Blazwick has written monographs and articles on many contemporary artists, published extensively on themes and movements in modern and contemporary art, exhibition histories and art institutions and is series editor of the Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Documents of Contemporary Art. 

Sharon Dodua Otoo (*1972 in London) is an author and a political activist. She writes prose and essays and is editor of the English-language book series “Witnessed” (edition assemblage). In 2017 her first novellas “the things i am thinking while smiling politely“ and “Synchronicity” were published in German translation by S. Fischer Verlag. Otoo won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2016 with the text “Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin”. In 2020 her inaugural speech at the Festival of German Language Literature “Dürfen Schwarze Blumen Malen?” was published by Verlag Heyn. Her first novel in German “Adas Raum” was published in February 2021 by S. Fischer Verlag. Otoo is politically active with the Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland e. V. and Phoenix e. V. She lives with her family in Berlin.

Ben Vickers is a curator, writer, publisher, technologist and luddite. He is CTO at the Serpentine Galleries in London, co-founder of Ignota Books and an initiator of the open-source monastic order unMonastery.  

Ruth Ctalow is an artist, curator and researcher of emancipatory network cultures, practices and poetics. Artistic director of Furtherfield, a not-for-profit international community hub for arts, technology and social change founded with Marc Garrett in London, in 1996. Co-editor of Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain (2017); curator of the touring exhibition New World Order (2017-18); runs the award winning DAOWO arts and blockchain lab series with Ben Vickers, in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut; principal investigator for the blockchain research lab at Serpentine Galleries. Director of DECAL Decentralised Arts Lab, a Furtherfield initiative which exists to mobilise research and development by leading artists, using blockchain and web 3.0 technologies for fairer, more dynamic and connected cultural ecologies and economies. 

Dzina Zhuk is an artist and tech-politics researcher based in Moscow and Minsk. She is part of the group eeefff and Flying Cooperation. She co-organizes the annual event WORK HARD! PLAY HARD! in Minsk. Her alter-ego bitchcoin works with voice, audio, future beats and sci-fi synth. Her major interests include jeopardized interfaces; emotional effects of algorithms; non-anthropocentric view towards machine intelligence; and imaginary scenarios of the present day.

Nicolay Spesivtsev is an artist and researcher based in Moscow and Minsk. With a technical background as a computer scientist, Spesivtsev combines a critical approach to computer science that is interwoven with computational economies and queer futurism. He works with imaginations born from overlapping technological, economical, and political landscapes in present day culture. His interests include solidarity born from affective labor, critical approaches to emancipation of joy from assemblages of bodies of living subjects (human and non-human), and systems based on computation, digital decolonialism in Eastern Europe, among many others. He is part of the group eeefff and Flying Cooperation. He co-organizes the annual event WORK HARD! PLAY HARD! in Minsk.

Calum Bowden creates stories, worlds, and platforms that reimagine relations between organisms and algorithms, humans and nonhumans, the Earth and the cosmos. He co-founded Trust and Black Swan. Calum took part in the post-graduate program at the Strelka Institute, Moscow. He has an MA in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art and a BSc in Anthropology from University College London.

Laura Lotti is a researcher investigating the relations between technological, economic and cultural systems. She is a research partner at Other Internet, where she collaboratively explores headless dynamics in networked cultures. She co-founded Black Swan and is a member of Trust.

Kris Nelson is Artistic Director and CEO of LIFT, the London International Festival of Theatre. He was Festival Director of Dublin Fringe Festival from 2013 until 2017.

Home in Canada, Kris Nelson founded the performing arts agency Antonym where he represented Theatre Replacement, Public Recordings and 2boys.tv. He was a producer and Encounters Curator for Magnetic North Festival and initiated and co-curated a variety of platforms devoted to artist touring such as PushOFF.