ISSN 2050-5337 - ISSUE 6 Find us in EBSCOhost Academic Search Ultimate Collection
Venu Dhupa
Venu Dhupa has just completed nearly three years work with Creative Scotland as Director of Creative Development as part of the senior start-up team. Her responsibilities included the Arts, a number of Investment Programmes and International Strategy and Engagement. Prior to working at Creative Scotland she was working as a consultant and had her own publishing company.
Former employment has been: World-wide Director of Arts for the British Council where she led and completed the first international consultation/review in 25 years on the Council's global arts strategy; Director of Creative Innovation at the Southbank Centre, London (Europe's largest cultural centre). The Creative Innovation unit was imagined as a tool for introducing new partners to the organisation as well as an organisational development tool; Fellowship Director at The UK's National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) where she managed a portfolio valued at £13million; Chief Executive at the Nottingham Playhouse; and Producer (Mobile Touring) at the Royal National Theatre.
She was the inaugural Chair of the East Midlands Cultural Consortium appointed by the Secretary of State at the Department of Culture Media and Sport. Her career history has always balanced creative exploration and strategy with implementation and delivery. This has been an important balance in developing a judgement for accountability with risk. Her motivation remains good customer service, good value and positive social change and these continue to drive her as an activist.
She is or has been a Trustee of the Theatres Trust, a Member of University College London's Heritage Committee, the external examiner for UEA MA in Creative Entrepreneurship; a Governor of Guildford Conservatoire, a Council Member of Loughborough University, a Member of the Institute of Ideas and a Member of the European Cultural Parliament. She is a patron of the Asha Foundation. She has been awarded the prestigious National Asian Woman of Achievement Award for her contribution to the Arts and Culture.
Partnership with Cumulus
We are delighted to announce a partnership with Cumulus, the global association which serves art and design education and research. It is a forum for partnership and transfer of knowledge and best practices. Cumulus consists currently of 257 members from 54 countries. The secretariat is located in Helsinki in Finland.
Cumulus aims at building and maintaining a dynamic and flexible academic forum which brings together top level educational institutions from all parts of the world. Cumulus collaborates not only with institutions and organizations from the field of art, design and media; the encouragement of co-operation with industry and business is important as well.
To stimulate design actions, projects and research leading to a more sustainable society, Cumulus representatives signed the Kyoto Design Declaration in March 2008. To implement the ideals of the Declaration, the Cumulus Green award was established. Cumulus Green is an international award focused on cultivating and leading global cultures, societies and industries towards more ecological and responsible solutions.
Following our Co-Editor’s involvement with In This Place, the Cumulus conference at Nottingham Trent University (UK) in 2016 and the review published by Sally Bassett in this journal, we met with Cumulus last year and agreed that we will work together over the coming few years. We will publish abstracts/papers from the next few bi-annual conferences. Given that there were five prize papers from the Nottingham conference we thought we would start with those and the abstracts below have links to the main conference report.
For members of Cumulus we have agreed special publication rates which you can find out either by emailing the Editors at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. when you have something you’d like to publish and letting us know you are a Cumulus member or by contacting Eija Salmi at the University of Aalto secretariat. The secretariat will also be publicising our partnership through the Cumulus online newsletter.
Dr Titus Leber - Africa Interactive
In the 1990s a courageous operator called Titus Leber, from Austria, spent two years working with IBM Europe on a visionary project, collecting digital reference material which reflected the many cultures within Europe. That project was the subject of global discussions at the time about the concept of ‘content-ware’ which was a conversation developing in parallel to the idea of software and hardware. It is now dormant with the intellectual property remaining with Titus.
Since then, Titus has travelled extensively, living in Asia for 17 years where he created two major interactive projects:
- One on the life and teaching of the Buddha based on the murals of the Emerald Buddha Temple in Bangkok - commissioned by the Mae Fah Luang Foundation under royal patronage
- The second bringing the Borobudur Temple in Java, the largest Buddhist Temple in the world, to cyberspace - commissioned by the Indonesian Government.
More recently his interest has shifted to the African continent, travelling and living there for months at a time. Still ahead of the curve in his thinking, his current passion is to work with key cultural figures in Africa to collect and preserve evidence of the multi-various cultures within different regions and/or tribal contexts, many of which are rapidly disappearing. Sometimes in this pursuit Titus finds himself in situations that you and I would find too risky or plain dangerous. He is not only a man of his convictions, which takes courage, but his activity also literally requires stamina and courage. Here Titus talks about this project for which he is constantly trying to raise enthusiasm and funds:
Priyanka Tewari
I am a contemporary artist who loves to play around and mingle with colour. This is what describes me these days. Painting for me is a way to express my deepest feelings and emotions which otherwise I find difficult to communicate. Life amazes me. Questions about our existence, our purpose in life and life beyond death often perplex me. Who are we humans? Why are we all so different? Why are we treated differently based on man-made falsities? These are some of the questions I seek answers to.
Johanna Suo - CUMEDIAE
I was recently at an invigorating gathering in Luxembourg called Trans-Atlantic Dialogues and was fortunate to run into a young woman called Johanna Suo. I have known Johanna for four years; we met in Berlin when she was speaking at the launch of the European Cultural Parliament Youth Network. Since then she has been involved with various European networks and I am always impressed by her clarity of vision and tenacity. She is young and energetic and, having worked at Innovation Culture Europe (www.ice-eu.net ), conceptualised a project about European identity for the Goethe-Institut Paris and is now working as Director of Development at Culture and Media Agency Europe (www.culture-media.eu). She has extensive European knowledge. Recently she was awarded the Marshall Memorial Fellowship (aiming to strengthen Trans-Atlantic relations and understanding). I'm pleased to include her in my Women of Influence series. I managed to get a few minutes of her time to hear about one of her latest initiatives.
Joost Röselaers
It gives me great pleasure to share a conversation with Joost whose innovative work was brought to my attention by Daphne Thissen, a smart operator for the Netherlands Embassy in London. Joost is the current Minister of the Dutch Church in London and also the Director of the Dutch Centre which is co-located with the Church. We met in the crypt .....