Above&Below is a London-based artist duo founded by media artists Daria Jelonek and Perry-James Sugden in November 2017, after graduating from the Royal College of Art. Their collaborative practice focuses on interactive and speculative projects, based on hands-on research at the intersection of art, technology and our environment. The collective's practice is known to push the boundaries of how emerging technologies are used by the industry; not only using interactive technologies for creative uses, but also to research and reveal their potential for new interactions between human, machine and society.

Will Hurt is best known for his brightly coloured, playful, digital interactives which cater to people of all ages and abilities and respond to the geometry of the physical sites they are installed in, abstracting and re-presenting local architecture and landscape. These site-specific interactives bring people together, forging connections and affording them a moment to play, leaving them with lasting memories of novel playful experiences and a new appreciation of their locality. Recent work focuses on contemporary modes of drawing, writing software in which complex geometric worlds can be drawn, animated and explored. Will’s work has been exhibited around the world due to its stand-out aesthetic, technical resilience and engaging immediacy.

Based in Nottingham, Katharina Fitz mainly works in the field of sculpture and installation, often in reference to industrial processes and architecture.

The physical engagement of the body is notably present in her practice, where traces and props of making draw the viewer into an exploration of the work. She questions the hierarchy and value of objects in a mass-produced, slick, and highly globalised world, embracing imperfection, provisionality and human touch. Fitz pushes the act of manual labour into the exhibition space to bring the energy and intimacy of making into contact with the audience. Her work explores the vision and understanding of our environment, offering a new reading of how it could be animated, changed, or extended into something else.

Her photographic work looks at issues surrounding the changes, phenomena, and structures that we find within the city and how they affect our coexistence within urban space.

Sophie Huckfield (she/they) is an artist. Her practice draws on contemporary research and histories related to technology, labour, craft, social-class and industrialisation. She incorporates layering and cutting as a conceptual tool to reframe these complex socio-political histories, to develop multidisciplinary works which reimagine and reconfigure ‘production’ contexts and challenge the dominant narratives employed to frame specific stories, histories and experiences. Her practice aims to re-purpose the tools and technologies of production, both materially and culturally, to make space for redefining how we produce values, relations and traditions which are in turn embedded into the objects and stories we make.

Callum is a Creative Technologist based in the East Midlands. Their work involves designing, developing and showcasing playful technology, bridging the gap between the digital and the physical and collaborating with others to augment their work. Most recent work "Hook-A-Haiku" was a blend of carnival game and Twitter, showcased at Nottingham City Arts and Future Realities, an interactive arts showcase.

Callum delivers adult learning courses for Nottingham City Libraries, is a digital consultant for Nottingham City Arts and delivers interactive education workshops across the East Midlands.

Candice Jacobs is an artist whose work focuses on identity and the collective experience between work and leisure; and how repetition can be a means of power, pleasure, control and escape. Drawing on aesthetics from mass media and consumerism, her output spans moving image, sculpture, product, graphic and spatial design.

Céline Siani Djiakoua is a French multidisciplinary visual artist based in Nottingham. In 2015 her work was selected for the regional Nottingham Castle Open, winning two prizes. Her core practice consists of delicate and elegant autobiographical line drawings which are both analytical and emotional, mainly representing a female figure. She presents her work in multidisciplinary and site-specific installations, using moving images, sound, words, projections and, more recently, virtual reality. With a background in psychology (MA) and dance, her creative and research process involves diary practice, body work, meditation and dream analysis. She is fascinated by the transcendent notions of macrocosm and microcosm and sees parallels between large-scale human conflicts and personal inner conflicts.

In 2020, she was awarded Arts Council England funding for her project, 'The Untouched Collection', a residency at Bromley House Library, Nottingham, where she researched a 19th century collection of travelling books to collect illustrations of African nature. Using personal and mythological narratives, she explored issues of de/colonisation. Working in collaboration with Near Now and Loughborough University workshops (AA2A scheme), she has created new interactive work, mixing printmaking, drawing, text, augmented reality and animation.

Chris A. Wright is an interdisciplinary and experimental artist, aiming to present sets of proposals that provoke and interrupt.

Concerned with borders and transitional spaces encompassing mental and physical boundaries using a wide range of media but often using sound and/or light as a way of transcending the border. She is particularly interested in the parts of sound and light that are silence and darkness. She has recorded in an anechoic chamber to try and record silence, sailed paper boats down the Mekong River at the border between Thailand and Laos, blown across a bottle top down a fjord in Norway, hummed in a crypt in Sardinia and imitated early morning birds and monkeys in India with a soprano recorder.

Joe Strickland is a theatre maker and mixed reality storyteller who examines interactivity, presence and liveness across various different live and digital media. They are a PhD student studying Future Experience Technologies, supported by the University of Nottingham, the Horizon CDT, and the BBC. They are an artist in development with the Nottingham Playhouse.

Joe is the artistic director of Strickland Productions, producing theatre across the country. They are also co-artistic director of Chronic Insanity, a theatre production company that is aiming to put on 12 shows in 12 months in Nottingham and the surrounding area in 2019/20.

Artist Claire Davies makes moving image, objects, sound, installation and performance. Her practice is built around semi-autobiographical moments of the everyday and expanding on these events into questions on subjective experiences and the anxieties of modern life. She use a variety of narrative structures from fictionalisation and humour to work through the changing perspectives of these events as they are continually re-processed in the mind’s eye.

With an ongoing interest in the development and presentation of moving image, Claire set up PEL PROJECTS, an online platform commissioning artists to make moving image screensaver artworks.

Claire is also a Senior Technician at Nottingham Trent University specialising in moving image practice in Fine Art. Recent exhibitions, residencies and projects include; Blush, Channel 4’s Random Acts Commission; Artists’ Bursary, AN; TCBTV, Somerset House, London; The Valley of Lost Things, Two Queens, Leicester; Alchemy Film Festival, Hawick, Scotland and Radiophrenia Project, CCA, Glasgow.

Dexter is an artist, sound designer and composer based at artist studio collective One Thoresby Street, Nottingham. He is working primarily on videogames and exploring the possibilities of how sound and music within interactive media can be experienced. Most recently he has been working on Playstation VR title 'Smash Hit Plunder' by Triangular Pixels, creating the soundtrack for the game and implementing a dynamic music system bespoke to the game.

Dexter teaches on a variety of sound design modules on Sound & Music Production and Animation courses at the University of Lincoln and runs a videogame discussion group in Nottingham called 'Not A Book Club'...which is like a book club, but for videogames.

Emily Foster is an emerging Creative Technology Artist specialising in Event Decoration and Design. Since moving to Nottingham in 2019, she has been running her business, Lumen Event Decor, from BACKLIT studio. She has previously exhibited works at Glastonbury Festival and Kendall Calling Festival, and with support from Near Now this year, at Nottingham Light Night, and the Festival of Science and Curiosity. Last year she was funded by Arts Council England and the Princes Trust to develop her art installation practice by using creative technology. Emily now uses this medium to address important themes and ideas through playful, vibrant installations.

Gabriela Rogula is a multidisciplinary artist particularly interested in moving images and sound. The common theme in her work is movement, decategorization and transition.

Her work is often influenced by biology, quantum physics, and socio-economic issues. She experiments with different mediums often combining solid materials with video projection and sound. She would like to engage the viewer as much as she can and stimulate their senses.

Jazz Swali is a curator, creative producer and trustee. He is Assistant Curator at Backlit Gallery, Nottingham, and is an Advisory Board Trustee for Eastside Projects Gallery, Birmingham. Jazz is also an artist. His curatorial, artist and research practice in contemporary art often centres on identity, activism and the sociopolitical.

Jess Murray is a dance artist interested in the relationship between dance and music and improvised performance. She is currently undertaking a practice research PhD funded by Midland4Cities at De Montfort University researching ‘Improvisational Dramaturgy for Dance and Music Collaboration’.

Jess works collaboratively with musicians to create original performance work such as the Arts Council England funded projects SoundMoves and Sound Catchers. She is known for her works a professional rhythm tap performer, teacher and tap jam host (Tap Rhythm Jam Nottingham, London Tap Jam, Tap Dance Festival UK), and also runs the Tap Rhythm Project.

Jess is a QuestLab Network dance artist 2019/20 with Studio Wayne McGregor which explores the uses of creative technologies in dance and performance. She is interested in the potential of creative technologies to facilitate and provoke improvisation and audience participation in dance and music performances.

Kerryn Wise is a movement-based artist, researcher and performer based in the East Midlands, making work across dance, physical theatre, contemporary performance and digital technologies. Her performance practice explores the relationship between the live and digital body through choreography and the visual layering of images. She is interested in interrogating the audience/spectator relationship and how virtual environments can affect audience perception.

Kerryn is currently exploring the potentials of using 360-degree video within live, immersive performance practices, and has recently begun a PhD furthering this research funded by Midlands3Cities/AHRC. Kerryn is a QuestLab Digital Dance Artist at Studio Wayne McGregor for 2018/19.

Matt Woodham is an artist, designer and technologist. He creates interactive installations, experimental websites, moving image and graphic design. His practice and research explores system dynamics, informed by his background studying psychology and neuroscience. He investigates the common dynamics between systems of various scales, from quantum mechanics, to human behavior. He uses hardware and software to harness behaviour such as feedback loops and randomness, to create organic generative visuals. He is particularly focussed on building entertaining, interactive and playful experiences which have underlying theory. He feels that harnessing nature’s mechanisms has the power to delight an audience, acting as a Trojan horse to ignite interest in the laws, rules and biases which govern us.

Melanie Wheeler is an interdisciplinary artist, based in Nottingham. Her practice moves across the mediums of installation, sound, film, research and social practice. Science fiction and folklore narratives often run through her work and she uses these as a means to explore uncertain territories where different realities might meet and intermingle. Melanie is interested in creative methods of skills exchange, encouraging collaboration across disciplines and communities, and testing the functions of creative practices to see how different methods affect the way subject and audience interact.

Melanie is currently the curator of community engagement projects for Arts Melbourne, was previously part of the programming team at CRATE Studios and is an alumni of Open School East. Recent exhibitions and projects include; Nottingham Festival of Science and Curiosity, Margate NOW, INDEX Festival, Superposition at Well Projects, Feedback at Turf Projects, Contemporary Exorcism at Whitstable Biennial, 10th Anniversary at Guest Projects and Strong Currents with OSE & Marguerite Humeau.

Mo is a multi-disciplinary practitioner using social art to explore being human on a shared planet, broadening traditional Western science and knowledge-making systems to create ecological futures. Informed by a background in environmental biology, her practise foregrounds process. Mo uses open-source citizen science methodologies to research hyper-local ecologies with communities, observing the interconnected nature of the total environment and the multiplicity of source, including landscape, folklore, lived experience, sampling, written word, museology, music, sound. Mo’s artistic practise is rooted in behavioural research to maximise connection and campaign strategy to maximise impact.

Mo has won support from Akademie Schloss Solitude, Arts Council England, Climate Art, DEFRA, Makerversity, Broadway's Near Now, University of Nottingham and The Institute for Art and Innovation. Past collaborations include Chaos Magic, Ignite Futures!, FOSAC [Festival of Science and Curiosity], NGFP [Nottingham Good Food Partnership], Public Lab for Open Technology and Science, Rye’s Own, Sussex Wildlife Trust and The Urban Room.

Rachel Parry is an award-winning, internationally renowned interdisciplinary artist, specialising in Performance and Live Art practices, based in Nottingham.

Rachel created performance platform Little Wolf Parade (2012 – present) and ran artist-led project space and gallery Guerilla Art Lab (2013 - 2017) in Nottingham: out of which they formed the GAL Collective (2014 – present).

Rachel's artwork is subversive, often visceral and feminist, queer and political. It takes over space, often unapologetically thrusting audiences into new areas of experiencing the ideas. Compelled and driven by exploring identity out of her malfunctioning body, mind and layered identity. Making art (that includes but) is beyond aesthetics and the ritual, as it is concerned with the psychology and sociology surrounding the horrors of the failing body, how we process trauma and the lived body experience.

Rachel studied and graduated from Northumbria University (2005) Newcastle upon Tyne, with a BA (hons) in Fine Art. Rachel did their teacher training (2006) at Nottingham Trent University and later gained an MA in Performance Practices from DE Montfort University, Leicester (2015).

Instagram: @rachelparryartist | @littlewolfparade_art | @guerillartlab

Roma is a theatre artist and maker designing for performances and immersive installations. Her work and research focuses on the points of intersection between scenography and interactive technologies.

She is particularly interested in the spatial and design aspects of responsive environments with natural, embedded playful interfaces. Her current work explores the opportunities for mixed reality spaces that merge electronic and wearable technologies with traditional theatre craft to create sensory playful performance installations for young audiences.

Ryan Heath is a visual artist based in Nottingham, making work across painting, sculpture, and multimedia installation. His work focuses on themes encompassing semiotics, geography, and speculative futures. He has exhibited in the UK and internationally, receiving commissions and awards from established organizations including BACKLIT Gallery, UK New Artists, and the University of Nottingham.

A strong advocate for socially-engaged art, Ryan often works with young people as a workshop facilitator. Clients include Nottingham Refugee Forum, Pending Collective, Harris Museum, and Tate Exchange. Ryan has given guest lectures and panel discussions at leading universities and institutions such as Nottingham Trent University and The British Library.

He is also a BACKLIT studio artist and former member of Chaos Magic.

Multidisciplinary designer and studio. Creator of branding, motion graphics, print and events.

Trevor Woolery is a Digital Media Artist whose work incorporates animation, photography, film, installation art and participatory arts.

Trevor leads Create Animate, a creative force for fun, exciting and life changing projects, collaborations and commissions.

Hope is Marketing Co-ordinator for Broadway's Arts and Tech projects since 2023.

Previously Hope completed her Bachelors in Film Studies and Screenwriting at Sheffield Hallam University and was Project Manager for The Ticket Bank and Film Programmer for Showroom Cinema.

Lee is our Creative Producer. He joined Broadway in 2015 as Studio Producer, supporting the Arts Council England and Innovate UK sponsored Near Now Studio. In December 2016 he took on the role of Creative Producer, continuing to develop, lead and manage the Near Now programme.

Lee has 14 years experience of producing projects, events and experiences that explore arts, design, technology and play.