ORLA MOLONEY Orla is head of Arts Participation with the Arts Council Ireland and specialises in arts development in social contexts. She previously worked as a freelance consultant specialising in arts participation and held the positions of Director of the Bealtaine Festival (which celebrates creativity in older age) and Regional Development Manager for Music Network.
PETER JENKINSON Peter, born in Essex of English and Irish heritage, has worked for over twenty-years in the cultural sector, passionately advocating and acting for deep and lasting change across the cultural and political landscapes. Peter s key areas of interest include the critical roles of creativity, innovation, diversity and broader cultural participation across society as well as a commitment to building social justice and intelligent democracy. As an independent cultural broker Peter works within a diverse portfolio of disciplines and sectors including broadcasting, public policy, regeneration, the arts, creative industries and leadership development. Prior to this Peter had a distinguished and award-winning career including that of founding director of the Creative Partnerships programme and initiation and delivery of the New Art Gallery Walsall. He was involved both on and off screen in Channel 4 s audacious 2009 Big Art Project television series. Peter also chaired a symposium at the Post-War Arts and Culture Festival in Kurdistan-Iraq in November 2009. Peter was a member of Derry s successful bid team for the first UK City of Culture 2013. He is currently involved in a portfolio of projects including that of advisor on the post-conflict art programme between Derry~Londonderry and London. Queen Elizabeth II has awarded him an OBE.
BONITA BENNETT Bonita has been a District Six Museum (Cape Town) staff member since 2001. She has worked variously as collections manager, research coordinator (with a particular interest in memory and narrative), and threeyears ago became its director. Originally established as a mixed community of freed slaves, merchants, artisans, labourers and immigrants, District Six in Cape Town was a vibrant centre, however, at the beginning of the twentieth century there began a period of removals resulting in marginalization. The first to be forcibly displaced and resettled were black South Africans. Then, in 1966, District Six was declared a white area under the 1959 South African Group Areas Act. By 1982, 60,000 people of colour had been forcibly removed and their homes in District Six were flattened by bulldozers. At the end of apartheid the District Six Museum was established to give voice to those forcibly removed and thereby include their memories in South African history. Bonita completed a BA at University of Cape Town 1982 and in 2005 went back to complete her M.Philosophy in Applied Sociolinguistics. Her dissertation focused on the narratives of trauma of people who had been forcibly removed from various areas in South Africa since 1901. Between 1983 and 2007, Bonita was variously employed as a youth worker, high school teacher and life-skills facilitator. Later, she was project manager at the South African Institute of Race Relations, then project manager for African Tenants Verification Project of the Western Cape Land Claims Commission.
INEZ McCORMACK Inez currently chairs the pioneering and highly commended Participation and the Practice of Rights (PPR) project (www.pprproject. org). The project supports communities and groups experiencing disadvantage in using a rights based approach to tackle social and economic inequalities that affect them, and to improve the way services are delivered and government decisions are made. This is one of the projects Inez initiated when elected President of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and was the first woman to hold this post. Originally from Belfast Inez became active in the Northern Ireland civil rights movement in the late 60 s. She then became a trade union and equality activist, campaigning to organize and revalue the work and contribution of forgotten workers, most of whom were women. Inez also led major campaigns for strong equality laws and to assert the rights of the most disadvantaged. She led an ultimately successful campaign to ensure that strong, inclusive equality and human rights provisions were included in the Good Friday Agreement. She has since campaigned for implementation of these rights as key to an understanding of conflict resolution based on the practice of justice. Her work is contributing to a growing recognition that the ability to participate on the basis of right is integral to deepening democratic practice and reconnecting economic growth and social progress at global and local levels. She has received a number of national and international awards in recognition of her outstanding contributions to the causes of human freedom and dignity. These include the Eleanor Roosevelt Award from New York City; an honorary doctorate from Queen s University Belfast; Aisling Person of the Year Community Award and the Inclusive Ireland Award. In 2008, she received the prestigious Irish Tatler Women of the Year Award. Meryl Streep recently portrayed Inez s work in a groundbreaking documentary theatre production in the United States. Entitled SEVEN, the production captures the important work and remarkable lives of a diverse and courageous group of women leaders around the world. Inez is also a well known broadcaster and writer. Examples of her writings can be found in Learning to Disagree: Peace and Development in Ireland; Beyond Hate; Border Crossings; Women s Voices; and Truth Justice and Reconciliation. They were also chosen for inclusion in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing.
MARY JANE JACOB Mary Jane Jacob is a curator who holds the position of Professor in the Department of Sculpture and Executive Director of Exhibitions and Exhibition Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. As chief curator of the Museums of Contemporary Art in Chicago and Los Angeles, she staged some of the first U.S. shows of American and European artists. Then shifting her workplace from the museum to the street, she critically engaged the discourse around public space, commissioning many permanent and temporary works, and organizing such landmark site-specific and community-based programs as Culture in Action in Chicago, Conversations at The Castle in Atlanta, and Places with a Past which launched two decades of public engagement in Charleston, South Carolina. Recently Mary Jane co-edited anthologies have become key references in the field, beginning with Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art (University of California Press, 2004) in which she furthered her research into the nature of art, the artist, and the audience. This was followed by Learning Mind: Experience into Art (University of California Press, 2009) and The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists (University of Chicago Press, 2010); forthcoming is Modern Mind (University of Chicago Press, 2012). At the 2010 College Art Association Conference, Mary Jane was awarded the Women s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award and the Lifetime Award for Achievement in the Field of Public Art from Public Art Dialogue.
JOHN PETO John has worked at the Nerve Centre since 2000 across a range of cultural and educational projects. Primarily a film-maker John has produced a trilogy of documentaries looking at seminal events in the conflict history of Derry for the BBC, in addition to a diverse range of broadcast and corporate productions through the Nerve Centre, including work looking at the Apprentice Boys, Protestant depopulation along the border in Fermanagh and the experiences of former political prisoners in Northern Ireland. Most recently John wrote and directed Voices, the bid film for Derry~Londonderry s winning entry to 2013 UK City of Culture competition. John facilitates the Cultural Diversity/ Community Relations programme at the Nerve Centre and is involved in resource development and delivery, utilising multimedia and digital technologies to create targeted and relevant interventions for young people in Northern Ireland today.
URSULA BIEMANN Ursula is an artist, curator and theorist who s work focuses on migration, resources and the global economy. She has published numerous books on art practice in the field. Her video essay on Geography and the Politics of Mobility has been exhibited internationally. Recent projects include Black Sea Files on the Caspian oil pipeline, Sahara Chronicle on clandestine transit mobility and X-Mission on Palestinian refugee camps. She is a researcher at the Institute for Theory at ZHdK, Zurich. www.geobodies.org
JANNA GRAHAM Janna is Projects Curator at Serpentine Gallery where she oversees The Edgware Road Project, an international artist in residence programme (London). Based at the recently established Centre for Possible Studies, the Edgware Road Project invites collaboration between local and visiting artists and the people who live and work in the area. Collaborators create studies of the possible which take the form of art projects, study groups, exchanges, performances, discussions and an ongoing free cinema school. The project is undertaken in collaboration with Townhouse Gallery (Cairo) and Ashkal Alwan: The Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts (Beirut). In past lives, Janna has initiated a number of radical pedagogy projects combining popular education, participatory research and The Arts. She was Community Programmes Manager at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto) working with young people and other local groups on exhibitions and programming for many years; collaborated on ACADEMY: Learning From the Museum at the Van Abbemuseum, developed an Inuit Circus Project at Project Arts Centre (Dublin), and was guest curator for No Programme: Chronicles of a Bureaucratic Beyond at the Plymouth Arts Centre. Janna is one of nine members of the international sound art collective Ultra-red and works with the Micropolitics Research Group in London. She is currently a PhD candidate in Curatorial Knowledge at Goldsmiths University, writing on the relationships between radical pedagogy and the arts.
MARGO HARKIN Margo of Besom Productions in Derry, Northern Ireland, has worked in the film & television business as a company manager and award winning producer/director since 1984. Her work has spanned many genres from short film, to feature film, to long and short format social issue documentary, to arts documentary and education series. Her multi award-winning first drama Hush-A-Bye Baby has been distributed internationally and has been widely anthologised. One of Margo s most recent and highly personal documentaries, Bloody Sunday A Derry Diary for ZDF/Arte and RTÉ, was made over a period of twelve-years culminating in 2010 at the publication of the Tribunal of Inquiry Report into the events of Bloody Sunday in January 1972 when thirteencivil rights marchers were killed by the British Army. The unfinished 2007 version was nominated in the Best Documentary categories for the Prix Europa 2007 and the IFTAs 2008. The final version was screened on RTÉ on 24 June 2010. Margo s collaboration with Joel Conroy of Inís Films produced the multi award winning feature documentary Waveriders which won the Audience Award on its first screening at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival in February 2008 and played to capacity festival audiences over the next twoyears. It had a highly successful theatrical run in Ireland/UK in spring 2009 and is currently being distributed worldwide. Margo has been an advocate for the arts and independent filmmaking for over twentyfive-years. She is a former board member of The Tyrone Guthrie Centre, The Irish Film Institute, the Irish Film & Television Academy, a founding member the original Northern Ireland Film Council and Vice Chair of the former Northern Ireland Film Council.