Introducing our new Programme Committee!

About the Committee 

Holly Argent is an artist and curator. Their work is research-focused and collaborative, finding shape through a variety of activities including writing, custodianship, workshops, performance-lectures, librarianship, video, sculpture, reading groups, commissioning, screenings, and publications. Holly founded Women Artists of the North East Library (2017-). 

Ellie Armon Azoulay is a cultural historian, a precarious academic and a union member (UCU), a DJ and an occasional curator. She is committed to strikes, social justice activism, anti-racist work and learning about and from communities on music, performance, photography, storytelling, and radical archival practices. 

Dan Goodman is a curator, artist, and researcher exploring the social world of art and what it means to be part of it. This is informed by their experience of running System Gallery for 7 years. For their recently completed PhD they developed System into a site to explore different ways of being and working together through performance, karaoke, storytelling, and exhibition making.

Kaan K works with poetry, performance, publishing and drag king-ing. Their practice is rooted in community organising, building solidarity, dreaming and creating ideas in collaboration with other people. They are a facilitator and train activists in creative facilitation, storytelling and campaigning. 

Shelly Knotts is an artist-researcher who produces performances and projects which explore aspects of sound, code, data, collaboration and improvisation. In 2017 she was a winner of BBC Radiophonic Workshop and PRSF ‘The Oram Awards’ for innovation in sound and music. At NewBridge Shelly runs ‘Creative Code Club’.

Seymour Mace is a comedian, actor and artist. He worked as a clown in the mid-1990s before becoming a stand-up comedian. He has appeared in film, tv and live shows. Recently he was nominated for an Edinburgh Comedy Award for his show Seymour Mace: Niche as F**k!

Background

The Programme Committee has played a vital role in developing exhibitions, projects and events at NewBridge since the organisation was founded in 2010.  

Every two years we recruit a group of 3-8 committee members from an open-call, who are paid to work together with us to create a programme that is based on collaboration, is responsive to our social, political, civic and environmental context. The committee acts as a hands-on development programme for those wanting to gain greater experience in different aspects of commissioning, curating and programme development.

We aim to reflect the diversity of contemporary art practice, be responsive to our environment, build solidarity, and place community-centred, experimental, collaborative and socially conscious programming at the heart of all our work. Past committee exhibitions include Bordered Belonging, Hidden Civil War, Deep Adaptation, Overmorrow, Blazing New Worlds, Staking the Claims on the Distance, and Socially Awkward.