Resistenze e MetabolizzazioniOcean. Motion. Hydration. Liquid flow.This is the place where everything changed… All my perceptions. Community work became a practice of relations. A social practice. A practice of friendship. Dare I even say it, a practice of love.Held in the soft hands of sweet southern Puglia in Italy, amongst lemons and siestas, it was a situated practice. The heat changed the pace of the day. A bright ‘Buongiorno’ to Fabio the hairdresser and the fishermen, a daily ritual, as I stopped on my bike. Suspended in a pause between language and time, somehow we understood each other. The strange intimacy of becoming temporarily local.June 2026, a month I will never forget. As part of my Masters in Contemporary Physical Performance Making, I took part in TЯA's artist residency. Over the course of a month, I lived and worked within the town, allowing its people, rhythms, and everyday encounters to shape my practice. Rather than arriving with preconceived ideas, I responded to the place as it unfolded, creating responses that explored memory, absence, belonging, and the ways we carry one another through moments of change.Alongside my residency practice, I continued my role as Artistic Director and co-founder of Compass Collective, dedicating one day a week remotely to the refugee art charity. The work followed me into the quiet spaces of the residency - meetings held during the midday siesta, emails written in the evenings, and conversations carried across distance and time zones. In many ways, this was a parallel form of community practice.This residency experience invited me to reflect on how my understanding of community has shifted - from creating intentional spaces for a defined group of participants, towards a more porous and spontaneous practice of encounter, where relationships, ideas and moments of connection emerged organically. The creative possibilities through unplanned and chance encounters stretched what I perceived to be possible, revealing unexpected connections and directions that I could not have reached alone.I found myself working at the peripheries of what I understood to be artistic practice. At times, I was creating without knowing that I was creating. A family dinner looking over a photo album became material. A day with two photographer brothers became a film. An encounter with an angel led me to reencounter my grief, and get to know a ghost of the town who passed away ten years ago.To say I am grateful is an understatement. I am profoundly changed. I met my past and my future. And now have a circle where I feel I belong. Melpignano, carry me back to you.LEMONS. BIKES. WALLS. TREES. BEES. SEEDS.

BIO / FORGETTING WHO I AM?

An artist in transit. Lost in between forms. Found in the waves. From a classical acting training (RADA BA Hons Acting graduate) to the contemporary landscape of performance making, I happily exist in the unsettled, the unfixed, the unknown…(at least for now). I am in motion, making space... I'm interested in what can remain flexible and how to exist without resistance in states of change. From elsewhere, I become local.

COMPASS COLLECTIVE

Alongside my independent freelance practice, I am Co-Founder and Artistic Director of the award-winning refugee arts charity, Compass Collective.The company supports the integration of young refugees and asylum seekers through high quality creative projects. My main focus has been developing a trauma-informed methodology based on co-creation, and transcultural collaboration - that recognising the cultural heritage and transitioning identities of the young people. My current research lies in decentering a western and Eurocentric modes of making within our spaces, opening space for multiple cultural dramaturgies, storytelling traditions and embodied ways of knowing to shape the creative process.Compass Collective now supports over one thousand young sanctuary seekers, and is recognised as an important organisation bridging the arts and refugee sectors, linking major cultural institutions with displaced communities. We have collaborated with the Shakespeare’s Globe, Barbican, Leeds Playhouse, Midlands Arts Centre, Southwark Playhouse, Arcola Theatre, BAFTA, Somerset House, TATE, to name a few. We have reached an audience of over 500,000 people, including MP’s, local councillors and change-makers. They’ve performed at conferences seen by delegates from the Government and Home Office with the aim to inform policy change.

INTERNATIONAL WORK

I've led our international portfolio of work, with arts projects across Sweden, Denmark and Iraqi Kurdistan. Project Makan, a collaboration across Europe and Syria, is currently in development. More news coming soon...

ACTING

As an actor, I am represented by Eamonn Bedford Agency. Acting credits include: Alys Always at the (Bridge Theatre) dir Nicolas Hytner, Macbeth (Chichester Festival Theatre), Film: Prizefighters (Camelot Films) and for TV: Doc Martin (ITV), Bloodmoon (HBO), Doctors (BBC).

WRITNG

Also a writer for theatre and film, I completed the RADA Advances into Playwriting course in 2023 and the Pentabus National Writers Group in 2024. My play ‘Over Mum’s Dead Body’ was shortlisted for the prestigious Papatango Playwriting Prize. My latest short film, in collaboration
with Syrian film-makers Hassan Kattan and Al-Halabi, is coming soon... watch this space.

SHIFTING

This residency marks a shift in my practice and in how I understand community-based theatre-making. Through my work with Compass Collective, I have spent years developing collaborative processes rooted in participation and co-creation. Here, I am interested in moving beyond the idea of community as something we engage or facilitate, towards a practice grounded in encounter, reciprocity and listening. Rather than arriving with a methodology to apply, I explore what it means to enter into the intelligence of a place, to recognise that every community already holds its own histories, artistic languages and ways of making meaning. My research asks how performance can emerge from these encounters - where the artist is not simply making work with or for a community, but allowing myself to be transformed through the relationship. I see this as a practice of de-centring authorship, embracing uncertainty, and creating the conditions for artistic exchange in which multiple performativities and socialities can coexist without hierarchy.

I spent a day with two brothers looking for a stone...How did this happen? One of the tasks was an invitation for each artist was invited to learn a new skill from someone in the town. Through a chance encounter, I met brothers Roberto and Antonio, two photographers from Bari, and spent the day alongside them as they photographed Melpignano.I learnt by walking, watching and listening, observing not only their approach to photography, but also the quiet understanding that existed between two brothers who have spent years working side by side.This short film is composed of video footage I captured throughout the day together.The photographs Roberto and Antonio took that day were published in Bell'Italia magazine.

Context coming...

Context coming...