Use our Accessibility Toolbar to customise your experience on The LEVEL Centre Website
Residency Alumni
We love building the LEVEL community, and our connection to former residency artists doesn’t stop at the end of their time with us!
We’re always looking for ways of working with artists again in the future. When artists are awarded a residency it’s because we see something special – spark and innovation alongside values that mirror our own. We enjoy hearing how artists have continued to develop their practice and shouting from the rooftops about their successes, we’re proud to to have played our small part.
Meet our Residency Alumni
Click on the images below to read more about the artists and their time with LEVEL.
Bethany Smith
Bethany Smith is a contemporary dance artist, actor, and a Dance Co-Director of Hubbub Theatre Company. As both a performer and choreographer, Bethany’s work explores emotional depth, storytelling, and innovative performance practice within contemporary dance.
Natalie Sharp
Natalie Sharp is an artist who’s work spans across sound, vision, and costume, bringing them together through interactive multimedia performances that challenge perceptions and societal norms.
Robyn Rocket
Robyn is a disabled musician and visual artist who plays trumpet through guitar pedals. Robyn is Autistic and is supported by Heart N Soul who believe in the power and talents of people with Learning Disabilities and Autistic people. Robyn’s aim is to create spaces that welcome as many different people in as possible.
Kao Hove (aka kaoti)
Kao Hove (aka kaoti) is a multidisciplinary artist, spanning across music, theatre, dance and poetry. They are a Factory International Fellow 2023, Manchester Independent Artist 2023, Graeae Beyond Artist 23-25, and BBC Word’s First Artist 2022.
Maya Edwards
Maya is a visual artist working across all media in research-based collaborations, fieldwork, site specific intervention, live art, sculpture and participatory encounters to foster a sense of reflection and resistance. Their work centres forgotten, or disadvantaged sites to re-envision a sense of place and community.
Sarah ‘Rain’ Kolawole
Sarah ‘Rain’ Kolawole is a playwright, spoken word artist and published poet. Sarah’s writing confronts societal issues such as race, gender and inequality. She uses her writing and experiences to challenge concepts of the family, relationships and life journeys.
Debbie Bandara
Debbie is a director, choreographer, teacher, digital artist and producer. Her two strands of work land in the creative and teacher / coach realm. She reaches out to audiences that may not necessarily experience embodied movement in a theatrical setting, including people additional needs. Debbie’s most recent piece of work has been around embedded haptic technology for PMLD (profound and multiple learning disability) audiences.
Imogen Ashby
Imogen is a contemporary performance maker and facilitator with over 30 years experience of making theatre with people in community settings. Imogen creates safe spaces where everyone can be themselves and where we can play and experiment together. Participation is at the heart of everything she does.
Elle Chante
Elle is a disabled musical self expressionist, artist, model and photographer based in the West Midlands. Fuelled by her experiences, she threads her reality of illness, complex mental health and disability into her work.
Raquel Meseguer Zafe
Raquel’s work straddles theatre, dance, installation, performative conversations and photo-documentary. She identifies as dis-abled, and works with rest and horizontality as creative impulses.
Aaron Williamson
During the last thirty years Aaron Williamson has created over 300 performances, videos, installations and publications around the world. Williamson’s work is informed by his experience of becoming deaf and by a progressive sensibility towards disability.
Maiya Leeke
Maiya is a London based Contemporary Dance Artist and Jazz musician. She is a Sadler’s Wells Young Associate 2023/24, was a finalist in BBC Young Dancer 2022. Her artistic practice is rooted in research exploring the physical language of hope and expression of a voice being more than spoken words.
Alfie Heffer
Alfie Heffer is an artist, theatre maker and producer from Sheffield. He has received funding from Arts Council England’s Develop Your Creative Practice (DYCP) to support this residency, alongside partnership with LEVEL Centre and Sheffield Theatres.
Parallel Perspectives
In 2023, Old Diorama Arts Centre (ODAC) and LEVEL launched Parallel Perspectives – an open call for disabled artists interested in undertaking a paid residency in both centres, providing two distinctly different locations in which to explore their work. The artists and companies selected for the residencies were Lisa Hammond & Rachael Spence – ‘Bunny’, Tam Reynolds a.k.a. Midgitte Bardot and a collective of Jonny Leitch, Elana Binysh & Jenny Davies.
Pif-Paf
Eleanor Hooper and Pete Gunson have carved a wildly meandering path through outdoor arts over the last 20 years – always with a distinctive visual and musical flavour and mostly as co-directors of Pif-Paf, a highly respected company that succesfully blends music, installation and physical performance.
Alex Billingham
Alex creates work amongst the overlaps of Live art, Experimental Theatre, Film and Digital art. They enjoy an analogue approach to manipulating digital technology that allows them to explore a low-fi visual style that binds grime with glitter to make beautiful work.
East Lab Dance Company
East Lab Dance Company is a dance company led by Matilda Rowland, that aims to create and perform family-friendly works. Matilda has worked on a variety of community dance projects and is keen to continue sharing the benefits of dance and the creative arts with different communities.
Kasra Jalilipour
Kasra Jalilipour is an Iranian-born multidisciplinary artist, writer and lecturer based in the UK. Through humour, provocation and storytelling, their practice uses the body as the subject to talk about race, gender identity and sexuality.
Conor Alyward
Conor Aylward is a playwright and performer who has been working in entertainment for 20 years. Conor has been commissioned 10 times and his work has been presented at Cambridge Junction, Camden People’s Theatre, Trinity Bristol, Home and Contact in Manchester.
S. L. Page
S.L. Page is a writer and artist making work about their experiences as a disabled, neurodiverse, genderfluid, queer person, who has survived prolonged abuse. Their previous work includes the fictional podcast New Women, described as ‘smashing the box of disabled feminism’ by BBC News.
Corinne
Corinne is a disabled queer self-portrait artist creating photographic depictions from the same 2 by 1.5 metre space, her bed. Their kick-start work will focus on a period survival quilt depicting ‘Daisyland’ a queer utopia that Corinne and their only childhood and imaginary friend named Daisy created.
Elana Binysh and Jonny Leitch
Elana is a dramaturg, live sound artist and performer who explores different forms and has a desire to tell contemporary oral histories to people in uncomfortable and tender ways. Jonny Leitch is a disabled session drummer, sound designer, composer, and aerialist performer.
Henry Driver
Henry Driver is a digital artist and game developer. During the residency they will research and prototype an accessible digital artwork that uses elements of game design and interactive art to create a playful and visually stunning experience that reveals the microscopic world hidden to us.The residency will explore environmental themes…
Aby Watson
Aby is an artist, dance maker, performer, and researcher based in Glasgow, Scotland. She makes playful, sensuous and stimulating performance that expresses the neurodivergent energy and embodiment of her dyslexic, dyspraxic and ADHD mind-body. Through the use of movement, choreography, voice, and object, her work toys with tensions…
Ethan McKenna
Ethan is based in Nottingham and enjoys using technology, light and projection in an immersive way. He is currently interested in interactive control methods for installations and how they can be adapted for different accessibility requirements.
Gobscure
Gobscure make award-winning sound-art and are part of Graeae’s Beyond scheme supporting disabled artists. During their residency they will be collaborating with Alex Kelly of Sheffield-based theatre company Third Angel, developing their next show Heartfelt – a highly visual show with bleak humour, offering creative and interactive ways to rewrite the future
Billy Read
Billy is a performing artist and dance teacher from Birmingham. Deaf since the age of three, Billy was inspired to take up a career in dance, specialising in street dance and Hip Hop theatre. After founding the deaf dance crew called Def Motion in 2011, Billy has performed and taught dance to deaf and hearing people around the UK and overseas.
Brew Projects
Brew Projects work collaboratively with communities and arts professionals to create innovative, site specific exhibitions and experiences for audiences, with a focus on accessibility and de-mystifying the arts. During their residency they will be working with audiences and a workshop group to explorine what makes art fun.
Daniel Longhurst
Daniel Longhurst is a Derby born dance artist, graduating from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance with a focus on physicality, improvisation and contact work at the core of his practice. In 2021 Daniel spent time exploring grounding and non-verbal communication; themes that are informed by his brother who is non-verbal and on the autistic spectrum. During his residency, Daniel will be exploring his experiences of working as his brother’s informal carer through his choreographic work.
Young Amici
Part of Amici Dance Theatre Company, Young Amici shares the same ethos as its parent company, providing a safe space where individual creativity can develop. During their residency Young Amici will be exploring connection – choreographing a piece with other dance groups through sending written dances, messages and drawings to each other.
Separate Doors
Separate Doors is a theatre company who aim to increase the representation of people with learning disabilities and neuro-diversities in theatre, film and TV. Following on from the success of their Writing Tomorrow’s Theatre project, during their time at LEVEL they will be using their residency to work with an advisory board of learning-disabled actors and explore ideas for their next project Directing Tomorrow’s Theatre.
Shadia Houssein
Shadia is a mixed media artist who creates contemporary installations that challenge the conventional use of objects and explores environmental themes. During her residency, Shadia created a multi-sensory interactive space using repurposed materials and delivering workshops with learning disabled adults.
John Whall
John Whall is a digital participation artist, curator and producer who uses digital tools to engage audiences with contemporary arts and culture. During his residency, John explored participatory practice through conscious experiences of online and offline immersive creative spaces.
Hubbub Theatre
Hubbub Theatre Company create original theatre productions and provide actor training for people with Learning Disabilities. During their time at LEVEL they developed a wellbeing workshop programme using physical theatre and a range of creative approaches.
Ryan Heath
Ryan Heath creates moving image, painting and sculpture. He explores the history and potential futures of urban and rural landscapes through world-building, in turn framing new possibilities for them. During his residency Ryan worked remotely with some of LEVEL’s participants to create a series of drawings on the theme of ‘The Derbyshire Countryside’ to be used in a digital artwork.
Maral Mamaghani
Maral is a Deaf Iranian artist. Her work explores the barriers she encounters in everyday life, being Deaf, female and a refugee. She communicates through her artworks, combining feminism and cultural politics. Her aim is that her jewellery has a story. As both an artist and a narrator, she depicts the wearer’s character through the jewellery she makes.
Juke & Lake
Jake Jarvis and Luke Greenwood make up the duo Juke & Lake. Jake is an accomplished physical theatre performer in both theatre and film, he has performed in several short films and has extensive theatre experience. Jake is also a skilled drama practitioner and works in special schools. Luke is a skillful actor and physical theatre performer, and is a founding member of Spectra, a performance company that draws on the diverse creativity of its mixed professional and learning disabled community to devise multi-sensory theatre.
Abbie Thompson
Abbie is a freelance dance artist. Her practice is driven by finding the enjoyment of movement. Abbie works with improvisation, Laban movement principles and primarily strives for her practice to be inclusive. Abbie relishes in her own projects to be research-based, her recent projects have included exploring the relationship between the audience and humour in contemporary dance and investigating how Laban’s theories can be incorporated into inclusive practice.
Chisato Minamimura
Chisato Minamimura is a Deaf performance artist, choreographer and BSL art guide. Born in Japan, now based in London, Chisato has created, performed and taught internationally, including 3 years as a company member of CandoCo Dance Company. Chisato approaches choreography and performance making from her unique perspective as a Deaf artist, experimenting and exploring the visualisation of sound and music. By using dance and digital technology, Chisato aims to share her experiences of sensory perception and human encounters.
Will Hurt
Will Hurt is a Visual Artist and Creative Technologist based in Norwich. He uses computers and code to investigate novel modes of drawing and virtual representations of physical spaces. His inclusive work often invites people to co-create with the software he has produced. Outputs include interactive installations, apps, large-scale prints and gallery exhibitions, leaving participants with a new appreciation of their locality and a playful excitement for the incredible things they can create.
Address
LEVEL Arts Centre, Old Station Close, Rowsley, DE4 2EL
Call Us
01629 734848
Email Us
info@levelcentre.com