HUB - Key Persons
Now one of our associates, with a specialism in digital and live production, Andi started at the hub many years ago as an ...Read more
Now one of our associates, with a specialism in digital and live production, Andi started at the hub many years ago as an intern, moving on to become our projects assistant and then operations manager. He's played pivotal roles in many of our creative projects, including Fertilizer and Phrased & Confused, as well as steering the good ship hub for several years. These days he gets stuck in on plotting projects in our hub lab, and providing digital expertise to all aspects of our operation.
All that aside, Andi Studer also leads the web development team at the environment and business data start-up company amee. Having introduced the agile development framework Scrum, he acts as scrum master while also contributing code - mostly Ruby on Rails.
In 2006, Andi founded the Netaudio London festival. After two festivals (2006 and 2008), Andi set up the community interest company Cenatus with Matt Spendlove. Together and with a wider network of like-minded people, they went on to produce the 3rd and so far final issue of the Netaudio London festival in 2011. By developing Netaudio London, Andi realised his dream of producing a music festival focused on new music, sound art and creativity enabled by Internet technologies. During 2009, Andi Studer participated in the New Music Plus… produced development progamme, developed by the PRS Foundation in association with the hub. As part of this programme, Andi worked with the Serpentine Gallery on a series of music events.
Andi is an Advisor to the PRS for Music Foundation.
Danielle brings to the hub specialist expertise in charity law and intellectual property, as well as substantial experience ...Read more
Danielle brings to the hub specialist expertise in charity law and intellectual property, as well as substantial experience on the boards of arts organisations. She is a great trainer, and is responsible for a whole generation of New Music Plus…[link to New Music Plus… landing page] producers getting inside - and excited by - company, copyright and contract law!
Formerly a solicitor, she has advised arts organisations and other charities from start-up, through development and restructuring, merger and dissolution. She has also advised commercial and not-for-profit organisations on contracts, branding issues and dispute resolution. She is currently Chair of the board of the Oxfordshire Touring Theatre Company and on the board of the Oxford Literary Festival, having served on the boards of various other arts and community organisations over some ten years. She has provided specialist services to arts organisations under the Arts & Business Skills Bank scheme. Hailing from Zimbabwe, a graduate of the University of Cape Town, and of Italian descent, Danielle's cultural knowledge is diverse.
Job Titles:
- Associate
- Consultant
- Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts
Fiona is an arts consultant, fundraiser and mentor with 25 years sector experience across art forms who has been helping ...Read more
Fiona is an arts consultant, fundraiser and mentor with 25 years sector experience across art forms who has been helping artists and arts organisations to realise their creative visions since the 1990s. She learned her craft as a freelance producer within touring theatre, subsequently becoming Admin and Finance Manager at Colchester Arts Centre in 1995 and then General Manager at DanceEast in 1999, where she raised over £3m in lottery and other funding for the iconic Jerwood DanceHouse on the Ipswich Waterfront. She founded her own arts consultancy and producing company in 2005 and since then has undertaken a range of leadership roles within theatre, contemporary dance, music and live art, and produced tours, festivals and events with national and international artists and companies in partnership with Southbank Centre, Royal Opera House, Aldeburgh Music, City of London Festival, the Barbican and many other small to mid-scale venues on the UK touring circuit. She's supported a portfolio of over 50 clients across strategic development, fundraising, producing and mentoring, and to date, has raised over £7.5m for arts projects from public and private funders.
Fiona is fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a full member of the Institute of Fundraising and an accredited life coach. She holds MAs in Philosophy (Essex 1992) and Creative and Life Writing (Goldsmiths 2016). In 2016, she co-founded writing development company, Word After Word as a vehicle for teaching creative writing, editing, publishing and mentoring writers. Short listed for the Pat Kavanagh Prize in 2016, she was awarded a Developing Your Creative Practice grant from Arts Council England in 2018, to complete a work of life writing.
At the hub, Fiona's focus is strategic planning and fundraising.
Gavin Sharp studied music at University College Salford before embarking on a professional career as musician and road manager with the critically acclaimed band ‘Edward II' amongst others. He Toured throughout the world, including North America, the UK and Europe, before working for the British Council across South America, North Africa and Asia; eventually leaving to work as Marketing and Programme Manager at Band on the Wall. He continued his career as Music Officer and The Brewery in Kendal and most recently as Programme Manager at Liverpool Philharmonic Hall where he produced its Capital of Culture programme featuring, amongst others, the Wayne Shorter Quartet with the RLPO, The Bays with the Heritage Orchestra, McCoy Tyner and the Gypsy Queen's & Kings.
Gavin has returned to Band on the Wall (Inner City Music Ltd) as CEO, guiding it through the final stages of a successful capital programme, completed both on time and on budget, and re-launching the organisation as a 21st century IT and media savvy events company, which is now producing a broad range of diverse music concerts across north England as well as in its home venue.
Jason Phipps is a seasoned BBC Sony Gold winning radio/online producer now working in the areas of radio/podcast production, ...Read more
Jason Phipps is a seasoned BBC Sony Gold winning radio/online producer now working in the areas of radio/podcast production, digital strategy consultancy and education.
At the hub Jason is an important contributor to all things digital, and in the past has worked on consultancy projects with venues such as The Stables. He's also an experienced hub trainer, and pioneered our hugely popular Penniless Podcaster programme. He's now to be found regularly helping to plot hub lab projects!
Also presently working for the Guardian multimedia team, producing their Science Weekly and Tech Weekly podcast strands, Jason took the Best Internet Programm' Gold at the 2012 Sony Academy Radio Awards, for his Sounds of the Space Shuttle, an Acoustic Tribute podcast. The judges said of his work, "[a] brilliant piece of soundscape. It is a great piece of storytelling pulled off with huge skill and imagination. There is a lovely quietude to it all making for a brilliant acoustic tribute to a piece of history."
He has produced a broad range of content in the arts and specialist music genres from Norman Jay and Charlie Gillett to Vanessa Feltz and Sean Rowley's Guilty Pleasures programme. In 2006 Jason launched and produced BBC World Services highly innovative trends and new ideas programme Culture Shock presented by White Cube director Tim Marlow.
Jenny's programming, commissioning, fundraising and marketing experience, plus her background as an artist, mean she's right ...
At the hub, Jenny gets to use her producer's toolkit across our creative projects and apply her expert knowledge to a range of our music and creative industries projects. Based in West Yorkshire, she has directed, programmed and produced festivals and events including imove - the 2012 Cultural Olympiad programme for Yorkshire, Yorkshire Festival, Interrogate Festival of Social Justice and the Arts, Halifax Festival, Phrased & Confused on tour and at the Summer Sundae Weekender, Fertlizer Festival, FuseLeeds and much more.
Jenny had a successful career as a freelance musician for a number of years before deciding to trade in her amp and life on the road for a promoting and producing role.
John Hart has racked up over 20 years of experience within the music industry. He is a man who has seen it, been it, and got ...Read more
John Hart has racked up over 20 years of experience within the music industry. He is a man who has seen it, been it, and got the t-shirts. With a wealth of first hand knowledge and specialist skills, John is a leading consultant in his field and equipped for most hub projects.
As a member and self-manager of the group Edward II, John has toured the world, signed deals with Cooking Vinyl, Pure Bliss (Big Chill), Zomba and BMG publishing as well a being responsible for setting up the bands own label and co-ordinating a busy touring schedule which saw them feature at many major festivals such as Glastonbury. In 1999, he moved into music education and worked for Access to Music and became part of the senior management team. During his time at ATM, he was heavily involved in the New Deal for Musicians provision in the East Midlands and set up ATM's flagship Artist Development Programme. Going on to design, deliver and manage a wide range of industry based programmes including two foundation degree's, John is a key consultant and trainer in the music education sector.
Joining the hub in 2007, John has demonstrated his ability in management, consultancy and training and is currently working on skills and business development programmes for both AIM and Ocean. He also manages and mentors independent artists and lectures at the De Montfort University in Leicester.
Job Titles:
- Chief Executive
- Business Adviser for Creative United
Julia was one of the hub's founding directors back in 2002 and continues to lead the organisation now that it's into its second decade.Read More
Julia was one of the hub's founding directors back in 2002 and continues to lead the organisation now that it's into its second decade.
She has 20+years experience in promoting, marketing and fundraising for independent ‘beyond mainstream' music. She earned her stripes working in venues, including London's Barbican Centre, as development director at a music charity and as a producer. After a spell as music officer at Arts Council England, she co-founded the hub, curious to explore a new development agency model in the music sector. A natural leader, the hub evolved out of a desire to work with like-minded visionaries who shared her talent for lateral thinking, a determination to make a difference and a passion for asking ‘what if?'
Julia leads on our in-house ‘hub lab' programme, and is currently heading up our Joining the Dots project, exploring new potentially ‘game-changing' ideas for the independent music sector and new ways to share knowledge. She also led on New Music Plus…, a scheme created in partnership with PRS for Music Foundation, which supported the professional development of music producers over a five year period.
With lead responsibility for our 150-strong client portfolio, Julia has a long track record of working with large and small organisations across the music industry, to support them with strategic planning, change management, fundraising and marketing. Julia is also heavily in demand as a researcher. Recently, she's worked on an economic impact assessment of English Folk Expo and research into The Great Escape and Soundhub, Kent's music education hub. She led our research which informed Arts Council and the British Council's development of their Artists' International Development Fund, and the Musicians - Have Your Say research project for Help Musicians UK, still the UK's largest ever survey of professional musicians.
She has a strong interest in education, and is an experienced trainer and mentor. She led the hub team that developed and managed BBC Talent's Fame Academy Bursary Scheme (now BBC Performing Arts Fund), and was instrumental in developing Guildhall School of Music & Drama‘s award winning Connect programme.
Julia enjoys mentoring artists and producers whose work she finds inspiring and is currently mentor to Chimera Productions. She's on the board of the National Youth Jazz Collective and Penned in the Margins, and an advisor for PRS for Music Foundation. In her spare time, she's an avid music and theatre attender, bakes cakes, grows things and does a bit of arty cutting and sticking.
Job Titles:
- Director of Innovation at King 's Cultural Institute
Katherine is currently Director of Innovation at King's Cultural Institute, King's College London. She joined the College in 2006 following 15 years working as a practitioner in theatre and opera, in cultural policy making, and in cultural diplomacy.
Between 1991 and 2001 she worked as a freelance theatre and opera director for, among others, Royal Exchange Manchester, English Touring Opera and Regents Park Open Air Theatre, as well as in script development for the Royal National Theatre and Channel 4 Series and Serials. She has a long standing relationship with the Royal Academy of Music and continues to direct the Academy's annual opera summer school in Liguria, Italy. In 2001 Katherine won a government competition to bring creative practitioners into policy making and was appointed Senior Policy Advisor (Arts Funding & Organisation), at the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries. There she led on the Department's work on culture in regeneration, and on the appointment of a new national council for Arts Council England. In 2003 she was invited to join the Canadian High Commission in London as Head of Performing Arts, developing Canadian theatre, music and dance partnerships in the UK as part of Canada's Foreign Affairs and International Trade agenda. Katherine has worked as an independent Arts Consultant working for a range of organisations including GLA and Visiting Arts.
Since 2007, she has been developing King's College London's relationship with the arts and cultural sector. As Business Development Manager, Creative & Cultural Industries, she held responsibility for forging new research, teaching and creative partnerships between academics in the Arts & Humanities and cultural organisations and artists across London. In 2009 she was appointed Head of Arts & Society at King's, with an expanded brief to include links with government, civil society organisations and legal London throughout the College. In 2011 Katherine played a key role in the creation of King's Cultural Institute, making collaboration with external cultural organisations central to the College's strategic mission. She was appointed Director of Innovation for the Institute in 2011, with responsibility for driving innovation in the cultural sector through King's research and expertise.
Matthew is one of the producers behind our Phrased & Confused commissions, tours and festivals, as well as other live ...Read more
Matthew is one of the producers behind our Phrased & Confused commissions, tours and festivals, as well as other live events we've produced, including the Interrogate! festivals we produced for Dartington. He also plays a key role in all our digital activity, and is a director of hub lab.
More usually, Matthew is to be found in Liverpool where he is CEO and Artistic Director of Unity Theatre.
Matthew has also worked as a freelance producer and consultant, when he produced UK tours for BadCo (Croatia), Damir Indos Bartol (Croatia), Murray Lachlan Young (UK), Jammy Voo (UK) and the Bloody Brits (UK). For 10 years he ran arts centres, in Bath (Michael Tippett Centre), Reading (21 South Street) and Leicester (Phoenix Arts), where he led on the capital development of the new Phoenix development in Leicester's Cultural Quarter.
Nikki Shepperd spent over ten years in the private sector working for FTSE 100 companies (BT, O2) and several start ups ...Read more
Nikki Shepperd spent over ten years in the private sector working for FTSE 100 companies (BT, O2) and several start ups (Genie Mobile Internet, Infinito and Blu). She picked up a wealth of marketing, market insight, strategy and business development know-how whilst working not only in the UK but also in Italy, Spain, Norway, India and Singapore.
This highly commercial background has been of immense value since Nikki joined the hub team. She's worked with clients including Attitude is Everything and WOMEX on marketing and income generation strategy as well as more general strategic development, and is also part of our training team, leading sessions on marketing strategy and planning.
In 2006 she held the post of Director at Tribal Tree Music developing a large team of staff, freelancers as well as creating and executing the business plan and personally fundraising in excess of £150k. Nikki also worked as Marketing Director with Tête à Tête the acclaimed contemporary opera company, having lead responsibility for marketing their three week festival and producing the company's three year marketing plan and strategy. This project neatly reflected Nikkis' real passion which is joining theory with practice. Other large (Scottish Arts Council) and smaller clients (New Media Music) have also benefited from Nikki's pragmatic but intellectually robust approach to planning, funding and delivering challenging projects.
Nikki holds a postgraduate Diploma in Marketing (John Moores University) and an MBA from Warwick Business School (A top 10 European Business School FT rankings).
Penny has spent the last 10 years working for Arts Council England in various music specialist roles, most recently as acting Director of Music. In this role she was instrumental in bringing about a shift in the Arts Council's support for contemporary popular music which resulted in the launch of the £600,000 Momentum Music Fund in partnership with the PRS for Music Foundation. Penny trained in music and dance from a young age and went on to study music at Goldsmiths' College, London and dance at the Laban Centre (now Trinity Laban) where she developed a strong interest in contemporary and non-western arts. This led to a career in live music and touring production and management for organisations including Lontano (contemporary music ensemble), Asian Music Circuit and the Contemporary Music Network, working with a wide range of artists such as Pandit Ravi Shankar, John McLaughlin, Michael Nyman and Kimmo Pohjonen. She was also a founding director of the hub! As a musician she is a member of the Southbank Gamelan Players and, as well as performing traditional Javanese music across the UK and Europe, has been involved in planning and developing many new works and collaborations with artists such as Björk and Plaid.Penny left the Arts Council in July 2013 and is currently on a career break, living in Barcelona and learning Spanish.
Remi shows creatives, arts organisations and entrepreneurs how to write about what they do in a way that makes funders want ...Read more
Remi shows creatives, arts organisations and entrepreneurs how to write about what they do in a way that makes funders want to back them. As a consultant who has secured more than a million pounds for clients, Remi has become an expert in helping people understand what funders want and how to turn their great ideas and passion projects into financial successes.
Her 15 years in the music industry, as a Director of Operations at UK Music and General Manager at Association of Independent Music, stands her in good stead as a consultant.
At the hub, Remi was part of the team who worked on the 2016 Going International research we did for the British Council into the support British musicians and music organisations need to work internationally. She's also put her business planning skills to work as a trainer on the OneFest programme we're currently working on.
Remi has a degree in Psychology and an MBA, and is author of the book: Easy Money? The Definitive Guide to Funding Music Projects in the UK (University of Westminster, 2013) and a contributor to publications including BBC.co.uk, The Works, Music Week and Complete Music Update.
Remi is based in London and is the founder of www.younggunsnetwork.co.uk and, like Julia, is a Business Adviser for Creative United.
Ruth has 20 years of qualitative and quantitative research experience, and specialises in embedded research design, impact ...Read more
Ruth has 20 years of qualitative and quantitative research experience, and specialises in embedded research design, impact measurement and creative research approaches. She has an extensive track record in designing and supporting others to use a range of data gathering and analysis methods. These include: cost benefit analysis; economic impact assessment; and statistical modelling that draw on her maths degree, as well as more action research-focused work that draws on her later academic work across the social sciences.
As well as being a senior research associate at the hub, she works as a freelance cultural consultant, advising both UK and international cultural organisations on measurement and evaluation systems. Her current and recent freelance work includes the following roles: Research Advisor to Aarhus (Denmark) European Capital of Culture 2017; Research and Intelligence Associate at firstsite gallery; Critical Friend to the Transported and Market Place Creative People and Places projects, and Evaluation Advisor to Future Projects, Norwich. She is also on the National Steering Group of Creative People and Places. As part of the hub team, she has recently worked with The Great Escape and English Folk Expo festivals to evaluate their economic impact. Between 2005 and 2010, Ruth was previously Programme Manager and Senior Research Fellow for Liverpool's European Capital of Culture Research Programme, a major five-year programme developing measures for understanding and evaluating the economic, social and cultural impacts of culture-led regeneration, which is seen as setting a standard for cultural impact assessment in the UK.
In line with the diagnostic approach that characterises the hub's work across the board, as an evaluation consultant, Ruth's approach is to use and embed evaluation to effect internal and external change, and to embed evaluation practice into everyday working practice. She has a strong commitment to ensuring evaluation systems fit the user, and has advised both Arts Council England and Department for Culture Media and Sport committees looking at new models of measurement and impact that work for organisations at all levels. She also has experience of working with small and medium organisations in the voluntary and cultural sector, supporting them to improve their data literacy and effective use of evaluation for change, and has lots of experience of devising and using theory of change models to support organisations to develop and implement highly effective self evaluation frameworks.
Ruth is also an academic researcher, with 18 years of experience of bridging the policy and academic research sectors, and is currently completing a PhD on measurement in the arts at the University of Essex. Her PhD research focuses on the evaluation of the publicly funded arts sector, combining an analysis of artists responses to formal evaluation practice, with an empirical study of their emic, quotidian valuation practices, and how these are shaped by competing institutional logics. As such she has experience of producing literature reviews, including grey literature reviews, which are academically rigorous but also usable to the sector. She has written for academic, policy and practitioner audiences and has extensive experience of presenting her work at all levels.
Stuart Silver is a BAFTA nominated, Perrier Award Winning, writer / performer / Director / Tutor working across theatre and ...Read more
Stuart Silver is a BAFTA nominated, Perrier Award Winning, writer / performer / Director / Tutor working across theatre and gallery venues, television, radio, public spaces and experimental educational and mentoring contexts. He is the co-founder of multimedia performance group (nobleandsilver) and now performs solo and in new collaborations across the UK and internationally.
At the hub he is a key part of our creative producer team, working most often as a creative mentor and producer on commissioning and touring projects such as Phrased & Confused, and client events, such as the Interrogate! festival we produced for Dartington. He also works as a trainer, and with Jason Phipps devised our hugely popular Penniless Podcaster programme. He's also the man behind most of the hub films that you'll see on our site.
Stuart is also busy as a performer and writer. His first solo theatre show ‘YOU LOOK LIKE ANTS' (a monologue with bluegrass ukulele) played Soho Theatre in London and toured the UK and beyond. Stuart co-wrote and co-directed ‘Cabaret Simon', a show for 4-10 year olds, at the Barbican, London and also created the in-show film for Lone Twin's ‘Beastie', their real-world adventure for children. He devised ‘What we should have said…' an original spoken word format for poets and musicians that has toured the UK. As one half of (nobleandsilver) Stuart garnered a cult following for their Channel 4 TV series ‘(‘nobleandsiver): GET OF ME', major theatre shows and numerous one off commissions.
As a producer he creates bespoke, sometimes large scale, multi-discipline arts projects - playful, supportive, innovative environments for mixed ages that trigger collaboration and creative expression - for organisations including National Portrait Gallery, The Serpentine, The Open University, Colchester United FC and Arnolfini.
Job Titles:
- Senior Associate
- Trustee of the Ministry of Stories
Wendy was one of the hub's founding directors in 2002, bringing to the team a passion for helping artists and arts ...Read more
Wendy was one of the hub's founding directors in 2002, bringing to the team a passion for helping artists and arts organisations of all scales and at all levels reach their potential. Today she is one of our most experienced associates, and brings to our projects 20 years experience and specialist knowledge of strategy and business planning across all artforms, the creative industries, crafts and heritage.
Prior to the hub, Wendy's career spanned award-winning national radio station Classic FM and international arts venue The Barbican where highlights included working on a range of international festivals and events featuring everyone from the mighty James Brown to the legendary Steppenwolf Theatre Company of Chicago, Screen Talks with icon Richard Attenborough and exhibitions by everyone from Joseph Beuys to Eve Arnold.
At the::hub, Wendy has worked predominantly on strategy, business planning and fundraising for a range of clients including British Council, Birds Eye View, Leeds Rhinos, Voluntary Arts and a range of music, theatre, opera, film and literature companies. Wendy has also spent the last 10 years sharing her experiences as a passionate and engaging trainer and mentor in a range of professional and voluntary arts settings. Wendy specialises in topics including business planning and strategy, good governance and management, fundraising and sponsorship and dealing with difficult conversations and conflict.
Wendy is a Trustee of The Ministry of Stories, a creative writing and mentoring centre for young people in East London, and of the RC Sherriff Trust. In her spare time Wendy likes to run (slowly), make cakes (reasonably well), read contemporary fiction (quickly - there are so many novels to get through) and beat her family at Monopoly and Scrabble (with limited success).