9th November, 7:00pm at Dundee Rep Theatre
PechaKucha Night Dundee returned to Dundee Rep Theatre on Thu 9 November 2023 for another sold out event, where we also be celebrated our 15th year anniversary! Thanks to our wonderful audience for joining us and supporting each of our ten brilliant speakers.
Hosted by Creative Dundee in the city since 2011, PKN now runs in over 1,300 cities around the world. It’s a simple quick-fire format – speakers show 20 images, each for 20 seconds. You can watch all previous talks online, or use our randomiser if it’s too hard to choose!
Always different, entertaining and inspiring; there is something for everyone at this event which first started in Tokyo in 2003 and has now grown into a global phenomenon. Our regular Pass the Mic section also gives anyone the chance to shout out the events and opportunities they have coming up!
Creative Dundee centres creative communities as powerful catalysts for collective good. Since 2008 our work has been about better connecting the city and amplifying how creativity impacts our lives.
Thanks so much to Cara Rooney for our illustration and view from the Law!
#PKN_DND
Cara Rooney is an illustrator and plaything maker from Dundee, communicating a sense of child-like curiosity and fascination for nature through illustrations, picture books and activity trails. After graduating from DJCAD in 2020, she was awarded the Macmillan Prize for Illustration 2021, with an interactive illustrated book exploring the tiny world of ants.
Alongside working as an illustrator, Cara works as a Freelance Educator for V&A Dundee. Cara loves to fill sketchbooks with drawings from life and memory, and has created live drawings for organisations including Eden Project, Education Scotland and Bioregioning Tayside.
Twitter: @cararoooney / Instagram: @cararoooney
Kathryn Welch (she/her) is a freelance creative practitioner with particular interests in community arts, local activism and network-building. Most recently, she was Programme Lead for Creative Scotland’s Culture Collective Programme, building a network of hundreds of participatory arts practitioners and organisations across Scotland, and advocating for community arts to be recognised at the heart of our creative sector.
Kathryn was formerly Interim Director for Creative Lives (twice!), and Operations Director for Macrobert Arts Centre in Stirling. Outside these formal roles, though, she’s built a practice around community activism, exploring what it is to be a citizen, to take action, to hold power and to protest for change. Along the way, she’s built a community garden, installed a 10m protest banner on Linlithgow High Street, made 100 badges championing reproductive rights, given evidence at the Scottish Parliament, and created a model for communities to self-fund initiatives that matter to them.
Twitter: @Kathryn_welch_
Amadu Khan (PhD) is Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Officer at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. A refugee-background activist, trans-language art educator, and creative practitioner, he occasionally serves as visiting artist, lecturer, consultant, trainer and public speaker on diversity, decolonial and inclusive practice on the news media, performing arts, climate change, environmental justice, and social action.
He uses eco-poetry and storytelling as creative practice to centre individuals’ and communities’ voices, concerns, and aspirations for the refugee condition, climate change, conservation, and environmental justice. As Creative Practitioner to the CULTIVATE project of Creative Dundee, Amadu is exploring the role of traditional oral artforms in communities’ responses and actions to these issues.
For the past decades, he has read and performed his poetry and storytelling at national and international events including Refugee Week events, the Radical Book Fair, the StAnza Poetry Festival, the Scottish Borders Community Orchestra Celebration, the International Scottish Storytelling Festival and at international conferences.
Johanna Basford is an illustrator, ink evangelist and colouring book maker who prefers pens and pencils to pixels. A DJCAD graduate, Johanna began her career as a freelance illustrator creating hand drawn black and white artwork for clients like Absolut, Starbucks, Nike, Smart Car, Channel 4 and Chipotle. In 2013, the same year as her solo show ‘Wonderlands’ at DCA, she published her first book, Secret Garden and kicked off the worldwide adult colouring trend. 10 years on, she has now published 12 books and sold over 25 million copies. Johanna has broken a Guinness World Record, received an OBE, is an Ambassador for the Centre for Entrepreneurship at University of Dundee and is a Patron of The Archie Foundation.
Instagram: @johannabasford
Ben Douglas is a documentary photographer and youth worker.
Having displayed his work in V&A Dundee, the McManus, and Scottish Arts Club, he won the 2020 title of Young Photographer in the Scottish Portrait Award.
With an interest focused on the mundane side of life, and looking to show how interesting the everyday really is and with his draw to people these elements have merged into a healthy mix of self identity pondering whilst helping teenagers today do the same.
Instagram: @burnt_bongo
Sandy Greene is a passionate advocate of the people and social justice rebel, excited about the possibilities of the change we can create as a community. Sandy is the founder and Managing Director of ScrapAntics, a rapidly growing social enterprise with four core impacts of: Education, Recycling, Community and Arts.
Twitter: @scrapantics / Instagram: @scrapantics
Tom Bird (they/them) is a Dundee-based spoken word poet, writer, and artist. After a life-time of visual art and ‘writing to themselves’, they began performing poetry in 2019. Tom quickly found collaboration and friendship with musician Johnny Threshold, and formed 2 Stoned Birds, a spoken word band which celebrates the fusion of poetry and music.
Tom values authentic self-expression as a means of communication, getting serious and silly in equal measure. In their spoken word poetry they delve into neurodivergence and transgender identity, as well as living with mental illness and being a big daydreamer.
In 2022, Tom was overall prize-winner for the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival’s Writing Awards for their creative non-fiction essay on growing up as an undiagnosed autistic person, and this year, won the title of Slam Champion at the Loud Poets’ Dundee heat.
Twitter: @tombirdwords / Instagram: @tombirdwords
Sahdia Khurshid is a design enthusiast. Born in Copenhagen, and grew up in a small backward town in Pakistan that came with many challenges. Since a young age, she has been a keen observer, always thinking outside of the box. She embarked on her creative journey with a Master’s degree in Fashion Design, which instilled artistic thinking and a design mindset.
As an adult, moving to the UK, a married life, and having her child, took up all her time. Lockdown gave her the opportunity to reconnect with her creative side again. Since then she has participated in different projects by UNESCO City of Design Dundee, and most recently the CULTIVATE project by Creative Dundee. She was engulfed by the whole new world of design in Dundee and fell in love with it. She finds these creative projects a medium of self-discovery and values their influence on every aspect of her life.
Hannah Hegarty is a young maker from Dundee. She runs her own creative business, is part of Hot Chocolate Trust’s young people’s community, and is super-passionate about the art of crochet.
Facebook: @HannahsCreationsDundee / Instagram: @hannahs_creations_dundee
Chris Kelly is a Fine Art and a Masters graduate from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee. He worked from 1989–2012 as part of Site Insite Ltd, a Dundee based Public Art company which completed over 80 public commissions. Chris was also a founding member of the Scottish Artists Union, and sat on the National Executive for 17 years.
From 1996 Chris has became increasingly engaged in arts in healthcare work. He became Artist to the Centre Brain Injury Rehabilitation in 1999 and helped establish Tayside Healthcare Arts Trust (THAT) in 2002. He secured funding for ST/ART, a Tayside-wide Art and Stroke project and has been THAT’s Projects Coordinator since 2004. THAT has successfully developed a wide range of Creative Engagement programmes in inpatient, community and mainstream settings working with a wide range of artists and mediums across Tayside. Chris also worked with the University of Dundee to secure Chief Scientists Office funding for significant research in Creative Engagement with Stroke. He continues to work for THAT, with a variety of responsibilities. He is also a founding Board member of Arts Culture Health & Wellbeing Scotland.
Throughout his public art career Chris continued a fine art practice, exhibiting regularly in the 80’s and 90’s at the RSA, SSA and other group exhibitions. This was however set aside for a large part of his time spent working in Arts & Health. It is only in the past few years that Chris has returned to a fine art practice, inspired during lockdown, painting local landscapes in watercolours.
THAT Website / Facebook: @THAT – Tayside Healthcare Arts Trust
Join our Amps network for discount ticket entry alongside other benefits.
This event was BSL interpreted by Linda Duncan and Leigh Anderson.
This event was filmed, photographed and shared on Creative Dundee’s social media platforms. If you do not wish to appear in any of the images that are made public, please let us know at news@creativedundee.com.
PechaKucha was devised and shared by Klein Dytham architecture. The PKN Dundee event is organised and hosted by Creative Dundee.
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