Box Tickers

Conor A on Disability, Nasima Begum on Faith and Jackie Hagan on Sexuality. Presented by Sarah Emmott & Rachel Moorhouse. Scroll to find out more about episode 1’s artists.

Nasima Begum (aka Nasima Bee on stage) is a performance poet, producer and creative practitioner. She’s a trustee for Manchester’s Young Identity (www.youngidentity.org), an advocate for Contact Theatre (www.contactmcr.com), and is the Youth Coordinator at Ananna (www.mbwo.org.uk). Nasima’s most notable performances include Manchester Literature Festival, British Council’s BritLitBerlin conference and BBC’s Contains Strong Language. Nasima’s most recent residency was Belgium’s Museum Nacht, where she spent 24 hours with 14 artists making performance work. She has taught poetry with young people nationally and internationally through various projects. Nasima was 1 of 5 Greater Manchester recipients of the Jerwood Creative Fellowship with Manchester International Festival in which she observed ANU Productions ‘The Anvil’ and was also commissioned to write and record poetry for an installation piece as part of this. Currently she’s working on an audio commission with New Creatives North entitled ‘Salt’. This work is funded by BBC Arts and Arts Council England.

Jackie Hagan has council estate bones and an odd number of limbs. Aw. She is a Jerwood poetry fellow and has won the Sabotuer award for Best Spoken Word Show twice. She has recently written and starred in a new piece ‘Paper Knickers’ for BBC4. She has performed in Southbank, Barbican, Sage Gateshead, etc, she has got her stump out at The Secret Policeman’s ball, The Palace, Manchester, performed at The Slipper Room, New York; Cripping the Arts festival in Toronto, Flupp Poetry International slam in Rio de Janiero. She has delivered over two thousand workshops in prisons, psych wards, schools and fields.  Aw.

Gemma Green on Parenthood, Ali Wilson on Neurodiversity and Oskar Marchock on Gender Identity. Presented by Sarah Emmott & Rachel Moorhouse. Scroll to find out more about episode 2’s artists.

Gemma Green MA (she/her) is an actor and voiceover artist who trained at the Academy of Live and Recorded Arts. Theatre credits include Sarah in O Go My Man, Olivia in Twelfth Night and Julia in Me and My Friend. Gemma also has a vast range of voiceover experience, including commercials and corporate voiceovers for Royal Mail, Yorkshire Building Society and Tameside Radio. This is the second time Gemma has worked with Art with Heart following a week of Research and Development in 2019 on their new production of Stan. Gemma lives in Cheshire with her partner, daughter and cocker spaniel and thoroughly understands the struggles of being a working parent.

Ali Wilson is a theatre maker, dramaturg and producer working in Manchester and Berlin. She enjoys making + supporting creative interventions with others, and devising performance about the things that make us who we are. Her work has been presented across the UK. She is currently working with Quarantine, Toni-Dee Paul, Roma Havers, and Chris Brown on various projects. She enjoys living with ADHD and the many adventures this takes her on.

Louise Wallwein on Class, Keisha Thompson on Sex and Denise Vernon on Age. Presented by Sarah Emmott & Rachel Moorhouse. Scroll to find out more about episode 3’s artists.

Louise Wallwein is a Poet/Playwright

Her work has been performed on shorelines, the sea, the streets, on the wing of a WWII Shackleton aircraft and in theatres across the UK and the world.

BBC Radio 3 and 4, BBC One, produced by Contact, Red Ladder, National Theatre Wales, Royal Exchange Theatre, Walk The Plank, BAC, Z Arts, HOME.

GLUE, her acclaimed, theatre demolishing one-woman show is published by SmithDoorstop.

She has taught in communities across the North, and has completed residencies across the world, working with thousands of people to develop their voice.

Her approach is fearless.

The late Denise Vernon was a Senior Lecturer and Director at the University of Salford. Her academic areas of interest were Performance, Comedy, Gender and Sexuality and Cultural Representation. She directed, wrote and adapted plays with a specific interest, though not exclusively, in children’s theatre. The power of art, particularly live art, to speak to the social and cultural moment was central to her teaching and practice, and the application of a wide range of performance practice to facilitate that exploration.

Minna Moffatt-Feldman on Deafness, Caitlin Gleeson on Singledom, mandla on Gender Binary and Reece Williams on Race. Scroll to find out more about episode 4’s artists.

Minna Moffatt-Feldman has recently completed a Doctorate in Education focusing on therapeutic conditions and sign language learning.  This has enabled her to understand the challenges that both the deaf and hearing communities face when they come together.  Minna has over 10 years’ experience working teaching deaf awareness and British Sign Language and is passionate about improving accessibility and understanding in mainstream services.  Minna has personally and professionally won a number of awards including making an appeared on the 2018 NatWest WISE100 list.

Caitlin Gleeson is the Senior Programme Producer at Contact, Manchester, and is also a theatre maker, facilitator and writer with care, connection and community at the centre of her work. Works include Pour and Serve, a site-specific solo performance on the language of sexual harassment; A Show About Plants, a performance about care, queerness and nature as resistance against capitalism; and ONE FOOT IN FRONT OF THE OTHER, an audio series about walking.

mandla is a Zimbabwean-born, queer writer and performer. mandla’s work draws on the artist’s intersectional existence. Using words as a medium, the artist is heavily concerned with communicating the many sensations associated with being a person.

mandla uses names in place of pronouns, this is because mandla is agender and gendered pronouns do not exist in mandla’s first language, isiNdebele.

mandla is obsessed with words and uses their power both written and performed to carve out a mandla-shaped space in the world.

Photo credit: Apechhya Gurung

Reece Williams is a poet, theatre producer and racial equality campaigner from Manchester. He is a Trustee at Contact (The Manchester Young Peoples’ Theatre Trust), an organisation dedicated to the engagement of young people through the arts, serving as the Chair of the Resources Committee. Reece is the Peer Mentor on The Agency, a project delivered by Contact and The Battersea Arts Centre which empowers young people from economically and socially deprived communities to create projects which foster change. .

Reece’s main areas of artistic interest are literature (live and print) and theatre. He has extensive experience as a writer, performer, Project Administrator and Project Manager having joined Manchester-based poetry collective Young Identity (YI) in 2007, working with and opening for the likes of Saul Williams, Kate Tempest, The Last Poets and the late Amiri Baraka.