ONCA - Key Persons
Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. She is a writer of novels, short stories, plays, and criticism. Her latest novel, HOW TO BE BOTH, was recently announced the winner of the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction.
Amie is a practitioner, researcher, project manager and fundraiser in the arts. She gained her experience in local authority, gallery, community and educational settings and has delivered a wide range of creative arts projects and initiatives.
She has always been deeply enthused about the importance of creativity and arts to activate free thinking. Her passion is to promote the arts as a platform, a practice and a place for increasing harmony and balance on Earth.
Beverly Naidus is a US-based interdisciplinary artist, writer and facilitator. She has been creating interactive installations, digital projects, artist books and narrative and conceptual drawings for over four decades. Inspired by lived experience, topics in her art focus on environmental and social issues, including how we are individually and collectively affected by racism, climate change and multiple forms of systemic oppression.
She developed an innovative studio arts curriculum in arts for social change and healing for UW Tacoma and has taught activist art in many places, including the Institute for Social Ecology. Her book, Arts for Change: Teaching Outside the Frame, discusses much of that work. She is also the author of numerous essays on socially engaged art and pedagogy and some recent pieces of speculative fiction.
After many years subverting within neoliberal academia, she is now an Emerita Professor, gratefully stretching her wings as an artist, community workshop facilitator (both in person and online) while co-directing the non-profit, SEEDS (Social Ecology Education and Demonstration School). Their new project, the Tacoma Story Hive, is about to open to the public as a place to share stories about how people have moved through this pandemic time and what their dreams are for the world we can co-create now. She is currently writing, "Rewilding Our Muses: Creative Strategies for Navigating the End of this World" and her new project, "The Dead Ocean Scrolls and Other Possible Futures" is now on exhibit at the Tacoma Community College Gallery.
Job Titles:
- Member of Parliament for Brighton Pavilion
Caroline Lucas is Member of Parliament for Brighton Pavilion and served as leader of the Green Party of England and Wales from 2008 to 2012. In 1999, she was elected as one of the Party's first MEPs and represented the South East region until the 2010 general election, when she was elected to serve the people of Brighton Pavilion as the first Green MP. A passionate campaigner across a broad range of issues, Caroline is Vice President of Stop the War Coalition and the RSPCA, a CND National Council Member, a Director of the International Forum on Globalization, a Matron of the Women's Environmental Network, and a Patron of Action for UN Renewal and the Martlets Hospice. Caroline is married with two sons and lives in Brighton.
Chris Drury describes himself as an artist who "makes connections between different phenomena in the world, specifically between Nature and Culture, Inner and Outer and Microcosm and Macrocosm. To this end I collaborate with scientists and technicians from a broad spectrum of disciplines and use whatever visual means, technologies and materials best suit the situation. Recent projects include a residency at The Nirox Foundation in The Cradle of Humankind, South Africa, a British Antarctic Survey residency in Antarctica, a work for the Australian National University in Canberra and an exhibition about place, ecology and politics at The Nevada Museum of Art called Mushrooms|Clouds."
Ishtar is a Brighton-based 3D Design and Craft graduate. Having specialised in woodwork and with experience working with clay and metal, her practice is multi-disciplinary. Motivated by the belief that community and communication lie at the heart of revolution, Ishtar feels strongly about the importance of bringing people together through making.
Ishtar joined ONCA in spring 2022 as an apprentice through the UK Government's Kickstart Scheme, and has stayed on to become a community artist running Community Afternoons and other parts of our creative programme. She is committed to continuing environmental, political and social conversations through community craft.
Joshua Virasami is an artist, writer and political organiser whose work intersects across political struggles and whose campaigning sits in a variety of organisations.
He has been involved in various movements including Occupy and Black Lives Matter. Joshua uses writing, film, music and direct action to educate, agitate and organise toward social change. As well as being a political activist in the UK, Virasami has spent time studying and travelling in Balochistan, Kurdistan, Mauritius and over eighteen countries around the world. He is a second generation immigrant who grew up in Hounslow, West London.
"In an increasingly reactionary world, ONCA is a haven of lucidity and nuance, using culture and critical practice to engage the climate catastrophe, proactively. The output from ONCA is not just refreshing but radical and necessary, playing a vital role in planting seeds for the climate activism of tomorrow. I'm proud to be a patron of ONCA simply because it represents the commitment to transformative praxis that is urgently needed to carry environmentalism to the space it need to be." - Joshua Virasami
Job Titles:
- Facilitator and Assistant
Katie is a History of Art and Design graduate from the University of Brighton. She volunteers for ONCA one day at week at our central hub in Brighton, facilitating a weekly session called BSL Brunch where staff, members and volunteers learn sign language together over coffee and croissants. As well as supporting ONCA Katie is completing a masters in Climate Change, Development and Policy at the University of Sussex. She is exploring various aspects of art, sustainability and community engagement. In her free time, Katie can be found cooking for friends and family or making ceramaics.
Job Titles:
- Chairman of Trustees
- Founder
- Trustee
Lu-Lu joined the ONCA team in 2015. Having previously worked in artist management in London and Brighton, she has a wealth of experience and knowledge to share. Lu-Lu is passionate about supporting both established and emerging artists.
Maddy's is an anthropologist and activist who believes in the power of the arts to create social change and support community learning. Their approach to communications draws upon their experiences as a visual storyteller, writer, care-giver and organiser across the climate justice movement. Maddy is also a creative producer and facilitator, she currently runs Climate Café, a restorative space focused on nurturing community resilience and emotional health.
"ONCA is an inspiring organisation: passionate, energetic and agile. It brings together communities and creativity in open-hearted and mind-altering ways. The great American essayist and agrarianist, Wendell Berry, reminds us that technological fixes for global problems will only get us part of the way; cultural change is, eventually, far more powerful and far-reaching. But cultural change is also, of course, mysterious in its origins and unpredictable in its outcomes. Organisations such as ONCA help to stimulate and shape such change for the good: I am proud to be one of their patrons."
Robert Macfarlane is a writer, critic and academic. At Cambridge, he teaches and lectures on Anglo-American fiction since 1945, post-modern theory, literature and environmentalism, and the history of the novel. His book, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination(2003), a travel-history about the Western love affair with mountains, won the Guardian First Book Award in 2003. Other books include The Wild Places (2007), Original Copy (2007), and The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (2012). He writes regularly on fiction for, among other publications, the Times Literary Supplement, The Sunday Times, The London Review of Books, and The Observer.
Job Titles:
- Artist
- Interim Co - Director
Sally is an inclusive artist and maker. She works collaboratively on projects that aim to benefit mental health and wellbeing through supportive, creative environments that connect people and build community resilience. At ONCA, Sally founded and facilitates Dresscue, our community sewing space to make, mend and upcycle, as well as being deeply committed to developing and growing ONCA's community led connections.
Job Titles:
- Interim Co - Director & Curator
Tania ‘Nena' Baltazar Lugones was born in the Yungas region of La Paz. She studied biology at the University of La Paz when, in 1992, she founded Comunidad Inti Wara Yassi (CIWY) together with other activists to carry out activities in defence of the environment and wildlife. Inti Wara Yassi means "sun", "star", and "moon" in Quechua, Aymara and Chiriguano-Guaraní, the three main Indigenous languages in Bolivia.
CIWY created the first ever wildlife sanctuary in Bolivia for the care of animals rescued from illegal trafficking. Nena spent fourteen years as General Director of Machía Sanctuary and was instrumental in the expansion of CIWY in later years. In 2010 she was elected president, her current position. In 1997 she received the Environmental Leadership Award from the Junior Chamber of La Paz, for her work leading youth in environmentalism.
In 1998 she received the Women's Creativity in Rural Life Award from the Women's World Summit Foundation (WWSF) for her environmental work. She is the youngest woman to receive a WWSF award.
She has made CIWY's mission her life's work, having dedicated herself to the organization since she was 18 years old. It was then that she rescued a young spider monkey, also called Nena, and changed her life - left her studies in biology and went on to found Machía - in order to give that spider monkey, and all the others who were in need, safe homes in the rainforest.