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Caroline Cole (MA Cantab, FRSA, Hon FRIBA) read architecture at the University of Cambridge and during her professional life has worked both as a design consultant and as a client commissioning design professionals for the built environment.

She is Founder and Director of Colander Associates Ltd, a business that helps many of the UK’s most acclaimed architectural practices with the development of their businesses, and works with building owners, developers and government agencies, helping to formulate their approach to architecture.

Caroline also has a proud track record of helping civic and private clients identify the most appropriate design teams for their projects. She worked with HS2 to develop the design challenge to identify architect-led teams for the Phase 1 stations and she helped the University of Cambridge find architects for a new district and extension to the City of Cambridge. She also helped find both acousticians and architects for a new world-class concert venue in the centre of Edinburgh’s World Heritage site; more recently, she worked with the Wellcome Trust to identify master planners for its world renown Genome Research Campus.

Caroline has published numerous articles and papers about the business of design and has spoken at many conferences and seminars to promote good design to clients, and good business to the professions.  She has been a judge for a number of design and architectural awards, including the Design Week Awards, the RIBA Regional Awards, the Manser Medal, the AJ Top 100 Awards and the Inspire Awards that recognise women in the built environment. Building on her commitment to both integrated design and gender diversity, Caroline established the Equilibrium Network in 2014: a group of senior and influential inter-disciplinary individuals who are working to redress the gender balance at senior level across the built environment.

She is Chair of the Industry Advisory Panel to the IDBE Masters Course at the University of Cambridge; a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts; a Trustee of the Ove Arup Foundation; a Trustee of the Horniman Museum; Chair of the Trustees of SPACE Studios and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects.  She is on the Design Review Panel for the UK’s most ambitious rail project, HS2 and, as a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Chartered Architects, has received the Freedom of the City of London.

In her spare time, she is a ceramicist.

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Lise Autogena is a Danish-born artist and Professor of Cross-Disciplinary Art at Sheffield Hallam University, who has lived in the UK since 1987. She was educated in Fine Art (BA) at West Surrey College of Art, Art and Architecture (MA) (University of East London) and Fine Art Curating (MA) at Goldsmiths College.

Autogena is a Fellow of the Arts Foundation and the National Endowment of Science, Technology and the Arts. She has worked in partnership with the artist Joshua Portway since the early 90s, developing large-scale performances and multimedia installations that have been exhibited around the world. In 2004 she co-founded the Christiania Researcher in Residence programme (CRIR), an international residency programme enabling cross-disciplinary research into the social living experiment, the free town Christiania in Copenhagen.

Autogena has served on advisory and management boards of Aarhus Kunsthal, The Arts Catalyst, O & I (APG), The Advisory Task Board for The Arts Council of England, Kunsthal Overgaden and The Danish Institute for Art and Architecture and is a co-founder of the co-operative harbour, Hermitage Moorings at Tower Bridge in London, where she currently lives and works on the Zeldenrust III.

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Philip is an audit partner at Moore Stephens LPP where he heads up their Culture, Entertainment & Media sector. He is also an audit partner for over 50 charities and has good knowledge of financial reporting under the Charity SORP/FRS102.

Philip is currently a treasurer with the International Performers Aid Trust (the charity supported by the late Alan Rickman). He has also worked with artist including Bridget Riley and Grayson Perry and has worked professionally with institutions such as Photographers Gallery, High House Production Park and has contacts with various museums and institutions.

Philip believes in good governance in charities, accountabilities and charities working together to achieve the goals that they set out.

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Chris Currell was the founder and Chairman of Currell, a chain of Estate Agents and Chartered Surveyors located in London. The company was acquired by Savills in December 2018.

His passion for contemporary culture has resulted in Chris becoming a collector of contemporary and 20th Century Art, as well as a keen promoter and supporter of local artistic talent in the communities within which he lives and works.

The “Currell Collection” now comprises around 150 works of art including paintings, sculpture, tapestry and photographs from emerging artists from the UK, Europe and Latin America.

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Appointed Dec 2017

Mary Evans is a Nigerian-born British installation artist. She studied at Goldsmiths College London and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Evans deploys a pictographic visual Esperanto to make site-based spatially dynamic installations using a variety of media, her signature medium being brown packing paper. Pattern is a strong leitmotif in Evans’s practice, however, the work is rarely pure ornament but often reveals the historical, architectural or social threads of its source. Evans’ primary research interests are the social, political and historical frameworks of Diaspora, migration, global mobility and exchange. Evans investigates how the social, cultural and political dynamics of modern Britain are in many respects the bitter/sweet legacy of Britain’s imperial past. This cross-cultural discourse is paralleled by a secondary discourse that links methods of image production, ‘fine art’ and ‘craft’, decoration and ornament.

Evans has taken part in several exhibitions in the UK and Internationally, including group and solo exhibitions in Mexico, the USA, The Netherlands, China, South Africa, Belgium, Ireland and Brazil. Evans will represent the UK at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Women to Watch exhibition Paper Routes in Washington DC in Summer 2020.

Evans is also the recipient of several residencies, awards and commissions, including the Floor Commission at the Evelina Children’s Hospital London (2005), The Arts Council Grants for the Arts (2005 and 2015); Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, National Museum of African Art, Washington DC, USA (2010) and The Arts & Literary Arts Residency, Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio Italy (2014).

Mary Evans was a gallery artist educator for many years engaging with groups at the National Gallery, V&A, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Creative Partnerships and the NHS. Evans also has an active teaching practice and teaches as an Associate Lecturer on the BA Fine Art course at Central Saint Martins her particular passions in education being academic support, widening participation, attainment and retention.

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Dr Omar Kholeif, CF FRSA, writer, curator, and cultural historian, is Director of Collections and Senior Curator at Sharjah Art Foundation, Government of Sharjah, UAE. Trained as a political scientist, Kholeif’s career began as a journalist and documentary filmmaker before entering into the realm of the visual arts as a curator. They have served in the public sector for over fifteen years, organising over 100 exhibitions on six continents, and have lead institutional development and capital projects across the UK, USA and the Middle East. Concerned with the intersections of queer, post-colonial, and critical race theory, Kholeif’s research has explored histories of performance art; the experience of mental illness; the interstices of social justice, as well as the aesthetics of the digital. Recent publications include, Goodbye, World! Looking at Art in the Digital Age (2018) and Art in the Age of Anxiety (2021). They are currently at work on a number of publications including a monograph, Internet Art: The First Thirty Years (Phaidon, 2022) and an essay anthology, Code-Switchers: The Art of Being Invisible (2023). At SPACE, Kholeif is Chair of the Trustee subgroup for Diversity, Equality and Inclusion.

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