Professor Ben Walmsley is currently Dean of Cultural Engagement and Director of the Centre for Cultural Value at the University of Leeds.
His research interests cohere around theories and practices of cultural leadership and audience engagement, and are therefore broadly located within the fields of arts marketing and management and cultural policy. His other research interests include cultural leadership (especially charismatic and quiet leadership); arts fundraising and philanthropy; organizational behaviour and change management in the arts; and strategic arts management and evaluation.

Professor Anita Taylor is Dean of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design at the University of Dundee.
Anita is the founding Director of the foremost annual drawing exhibition in the UK, the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize (since 1994), and Drawing Projects UK, a public-facing initiative dedicated to drawing (since 2009).
She has extensive teaching, research, peer and expert review, and her academic leadership experience includes: Executive Dean of Bath School of Art and Design at Bath Spa University; Director & Chief Executive Officer, National Art School in Sydney, Australia; Dean of Wimbledon College of Art, University of the Arts London (UAL); Director, The Research Centre for Drawing at UAL; and Vice Principal of Wimbledon School of Art.

Dr Vishalakshi Roy is Assistant Professor in Creative Industries at the University of Warwick.
Vishalakshi is fascinated by the tension between creativity and entrepreneurial behaviour that manifests itself in the running and management of creative and cultural enterprises. Her research explores entrepreneurial activity, taking the form of the identification and exploitation of opportunities for new economic, social and cultural value creation, at the level of the individual. Her research interests also include leadership, strategic planning and management of creative businesses and cultural organisations, their markets and audiences.

Dr David Wright is Director of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor in the Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies, University of Warwick.

His current research focusses on three primary interests cutting across different areas of cultural policy and the cultural/creative industries. First, his project on 'memorialising popular culture' concerns statues to comedians and musicians from the commercial cultures of the 20th and 21st century and contributes to the Centre's research theme on Memories, Histories and Futures. Second, David is interested in how digital technologies are transforming the 'problem' of culture for policymakers. Finally, with colleagues Chris Bilton and Heidi Ashton, he is thinking about the future of cultural work.

Dr Jonathan Vickery is Reader in Cultural Policy Studies at the University of Warwick. His areas of specialisation include public culture and public policies for culture (cultural governance), cultural rights, democracy and political theories of culture, creative economy and sustainable development (local community, urban and global). His research usually emerges from an engagement with the public and cultural realm — cultural workers in arts organisations, or policy making — national and international.
He is currently working on multiple projects. The largest is a preparation for an EU Horizon bid on a decolonial research partnership between Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Dr John Wright is Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the Centre for Cultural Value, University of Leeds.
In his PhD, completed in 2020, John examined artist-led collectives through the lens of friendship to better understand the values art and locality.
John is co-founder of artist-led collective The Retro Bar at the End of the Universe and has a curatorial background in both museums, galleries and in artist-led activity. His research interests include collectivism in cultural and creative ecologies, the role of place in shaping artist-led activity and the intersections between policy and broader cultural and creative economies.

Anthony Noun is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Heseltine Institute, and currently undertaking a PhD at the University of Manchester focusing on organisational change and co-production in public services. He is also a senior communication and community engagement consultant, specialising in place-making working local government, the third sector and business.

Catherine Durose is Professor of Public Policy, Co-Director of the Heseltine Institute of Public Policy Practice and Place at the University of Liverpool.
She is recognised as a leading expert on urban governance and public policy, and has written widely on policy design and implementation, devolution, urban transformation, social and democratic innovation, and participation. Empirically, her work has been focused at urban, city-regional, local, and neighbourhood levels.
Catherine is particularly well-known for her work on co-production, how bringing together different forms of expertise can provide an innovative means of addressing complexity and uncertainty in governance and policy.

Professor Leila Jancovich is Professor in Cultural Policy and Participation at the University of Leeds.
Her main research interests are on participation, power and decision making in the arts, with a particular focus on the implications of policy on practice. She has a strong commitment to knowledge exchange between academia, policy and practice which is demonstrated by her leadership of a knowledge exchange network on cultural participation (www.culturalparticipation.co.uk).  
She has recently been Principle Investigator for an AHRC research project called Cultural Participation: stories of success, histories of failure (failspace), which seeks to examine the benefits of the cultural sector better identifying, acknowledging and learning from failure.

Chloe Street-Tarbatt is Head of the School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Kent.
She is interested in the psychology of space and how we can create environments that improve human interaction and quality of life through both their spatial organisation and material properties. She has a particular interest in working on architectural projects that bring communities together and play a larger social role in society and has been pursuing these objectives through the development of ‘Live Projects’ in the BA design studio, forging strategic links with local practice and regional authorities and mobilising a number of public exhibitions of student work.
Chloe is currently School Lead for a funded partnership project with Medway Council and Historic England, which is exploring the potential for new strategic relationships between academia and industry.

Dr Bethany Rex is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the Centre for Cultural & Media Policy Studies, University of Warwick.
Her main research interest is in how the austerity policies of central government have affected local governments across England, and the (uneven) impact this has had on the provision of cultural services. 
Within this context, she is particularly interested in the growth of different delivery models (trusts and community-led asset transfers, for example) and approaches to income generation as well as museum closures. In addition to understanding the cause/s of these changes, she is interested in the ways that prevailing ideas (especially dominant professional discourses and historical ideas) have shaped contemporary debate about the impact of austerity on publicly subsidized museums as well as how these changes are interpreted and experienced by cultural practitioners.

Dr Paul Gault is Lecturer in Design and Making in the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design at the University of Dundee.
Prior to his current position, Paul spent almost four years working at Young Scot, the national youth information and citizenship charity for 11-26 year olds in Scotland. His work as a co-design manager involved empowering young people, particularly those whose voices who are seldom heard, to affect meaningful change to the policies, systems and services they use the most. Paul has recently built upon his practice of co-design with young people in the third sector by exploring other design research for change methods. He is continuing his engagement with the youth arts sector by helping to develop models and define pathways for progression in creative industries. Furthermore, he wishes to develop more international culture exchange activity and participatory dialogue through the use of digital platforms. Paul is also a member of Studio Ordinary which is the meeting place of design with disability studies.

Dr James Hickson is Post-doctoral Research Associate at the University of Liverpool.
James is a political theorist, and policy researcher, working at the interface of politics, philosophy, and economics.
- His research focuses on three interconnected themes:
Insecure work – exploring the significance, and implications of, a more precarious labour market and how the future of work can be made more just.
- Local economic development – in particular, seeking to critically analyse the political economy of post-industrial areas, and the ways that regeneration policy can address widening inequalities and deepening deprivation.
- Local democracy and the future of devolution – considering how local policymaking should be organised and governed, the democratic role of citizens within this, and what this suggests about the trajectories for future devolution of power in England (and beyond).
These themes are tied together by an overarching interest in understanding the significance of economic, social, and political precarity in contemporary urban life, how this is experienced, and what can be done to address it.

Catherine Richardson is Professor of Early Modern Studies and Director of the Institute of Cultural and Creative Industries at the University of Kent.

Catherine’s research is focused on the history of the creative industries in relation to social and cultural change, innovation and immigration. She works on the cultural life of towns, especially through the objects, people and ideas circulating within them and the entertainment on offer there. This work is increasingly in the fields of creative heritage and placemaking, with projects at the meeting point of GLAM and technology, looking at immersive engagement with lived experience.

She is responsible for the Docking Station project, a £15M regeneration project to deliver a world-leading centre of creative digital production, education and community engagement.

Susan Jarvis is Co-Director of the Heseltine Institute for Public Policy, Practice and Place at the University of Liverpool.
She has a professional background in local government practice and public policy. She has senior leadership experience of delivering public services, including complex programmes where activities are undertaken by partners across multiple agencies. A former director at Liverpool City Region (LCR) Combined Authority and Knowsley Council, Sue is a leading expert on public policy, employment and skills and local economic development strategies. Notably, Sue coordinated the strategic governance review to create LCR Combined Authority in 2014, negotiated the skills aspects of LCR’s Devolution Deal, led the Area Based Review of Further Education and successfully devolved £51m Adult Education Budget to the Combined Authority.
Sue’s research interests span English devolution, place-based economic development, skills strategies, and public service reform.

Dr Heidi Ashton is Associate Professor in Cultural and Creative Ecologies at the University of Warwick.
She has extensive experience in the creative industries having worked as a freelance dancer, choreographer and producer in a variety of settings including film, television, theatre and live events around the world.
Her scholarly activities centre around freelance workers and the conditions that shape cultural and creative work more broadly. This has included research on freelancers' employment status and welfare, pay and conditions, transitions, training and skills, arts and cultural education, work intensity, and the implications of social, political and economic structures that shape inter-relationships between organisations, institutions and freelancers.

Dr Anna Robb is Senior Lecturer in Education Studies at the University of Dundee.
In 2019 Anna completed a PhD focused on the relationship between visual art experiences in young children and identity, examining how schools can address this to create an inclusive primary art education classroom. Other areas of interest include children's voice and language and literacy. She has recently received a Carnegie Research Incentive Grant exploring the impact of a creative industries background on the practice of PGDE students in primary schools.

Dr Susan Mains is Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Dundee.
Her work explores transnational identities and media representations of mobility, borders, and security in the context of Caribbean migration, creative industries in Jamaica and Scotland, and heritage tourism. She is editor of 'Mediated Geographies and Geographies of Media' (co-editors Julie Cupples and Chris Lukinbeal), a book exploring contemporary research on space, media and identities (Springer, 2015).Currently she is a partner in the Leverhulme Trust funded project, 'Caribbean In/Securities: Creativity and Negotiation in the Caribbean.' She has also been a partner in a Royal Society of Edinburgh funded collaborative project exploring representations of place and landscape connections between the Scottish Highlands and the Caribbean.

Emma Preston is Cultural Projects Manager at the University of Dundee.
In her role, Emma is responsible for the development, curation and delivery of key cultural projects including Festival of the Future as part of the Research and Innovation Services Directorate. With particular emphasis on projects related to the University’s cultural, public engagement and wider impact agendas consistent with our vision and strategic goals Emma works closely with colleagues within the directorate as well as engaging with our academic and professional services staff, students, our wider community, and external stakeholders including other cultural organisations, the third sector, local authorities and both local and national networks and agencies
Emma brings together cultural organisations and artists and our researchers, staff and academics to work together, developing opportunities for collaboration, strengthening relationships and showcasing the wide variety of research and work that happens at the University of Dundee.