Team

Jon Davis is our Director. He has extensive experience as a creative commissioner, programmer and executive producer creating large-scale projects and place-based programmes that enable bold and inclusive storytelling. 

He has delivered extraordinary projects for the UK’s most significant cultural events including Coventry City of Culture, London 2012 Festival and 14-18 NOW on behalf of LIFT, and has most recently Executive Produced ‘Galwad’, an UNBOXED commission.

Jon’s work is driven by a commitment to genuine co-creation, collaboration, and a curiosity to understand place and community, responding to important social issues to create real civic change through art and culture.

John Hartley is our Deputy Director and comes to Cement Fields with wide experience from across the arts in the UK and internationally.

John co-founded an international agency managing artist commission and research residencies, working with partners and artists from across Europe and Asia. He previously worked at Arts Council England in visual and interdisciplinary arts and helped develop a new environmental strategy and art-in-industry placements. Between 2016 and 2018, he project managed the development and launch of a new Arts and Culture Strategy for the University of Exeter, and he also has experience working in university operations, strategy and knowledge exchange. 

John has a background in research-based arts practice and is interested in the complex weave of matter and imagination that makes places come alive.

Sam is our Curator and contributes to the development and delivery of Cement Fields’ artistic programme, with a focus on commissions and artists development.

He has a background as a visual artist, having studied Print at the Royal College of Art and Photographic Art at the University of Westminster, and experience working with multiple UK-based arts organisations in across production, communications, and research.

Since joining Cement Fields in 2020, Sam has operated across the programme, supporting projects with artists such as Phil Coy, Lou Lou Sainsbury, and Caroline Bergvall, as well as on the delivery of major programmes, including Estuary 2021, England’s Creative Coast, and Whitstable Biennale 2022.

Dan is our Curator, with a particular focus on participatory projects co-created alongside artists, educators, and young people. He was previously Creative Learning Producer at Arts Education Exchange, where he led on flagship learning projects with Turner Contemporary as well as in local schools. 

He also works as a freelance film programmer with a specific interest in diasporic Jewish cinema. This has seen him produce events with organisations such as ARK and JW3, where he served on the advisory board for their youth engagement programme, Young JW3. 

Alongside his role at Cement Fields, Dan is a student on the Culture, Diaspora, Ethnicity MA programme at Birkbeck, University of London, where he is supported by a scholarship from the Bonnart Trust.

Amelia is our Communications and Audiences Manager, developing and overseeing Cement Fields’ Communications and Audience strategies and executing our communications activity in order to grow and deepen our engagement across North Kent and beyond.

Amelia’s decade-long background working in community-lead arts action for several of London’s most accomplished and respected grassroots arts institutions – NTS, Brainchild, Rhythm Section – has shaped her approach to engaging communities with care, cultivating collaboration and connecting audiences with practitioners for joyful and enlightening encounters with envelope-pushing art.

Emma Leach is one of our Associate Curators and is currently working with artist Andrew Merritt on Intertidal Allotment.

She has a background as a visual artist, having studied at Kent Institute of Art & Design in Canterbury. For over 15 years she has been helping artists realise their ideas. She enjoys inhabiting other conceptual frameworks, using curiosity, sensitivity and humour to deliver works that are in tune with each artist’s ideas. Projects have included performance, sound, dance, film, sculpture and installation as well as the productive spaces where these disciplines meet.

Working with Cement Fields, she has curated programmes for five editions of Whitstable Biennale and has developed projects for North Kent with artists Esther Collins, Andy Merritt and Kieren Reed.

Michaela is one of our Associate Curators and has led our This Must Be the Place and Ebbsfleet Citizens Archive projects in Ebbsfleet.

Through This Must Be the Place she has developed a programme of opportunities for young people to influence the urban design of Ebbsfleet Garden City, in collaboration with Ebbsfleet Development Corporation and a range of creative practitioners, artists, researchers, writers and academics.

Michaela has over 25 years of experience in the arts and has in the past worked for National Gallery in Prague, Flowers Gallery in London, Metal and Kinetika art charities, Southend-on-Sea Borough Council, and with multidisciplinary artist Caroline Bergvall. 

Michaela’s also written reviews, edited State magazine and curated her own exhibitions, film screenings and events, with particular interest in the public space, digital realm possibilities and experimental film.

CJ Mitchell is a freelance producer, working in the performing arts. He manages Haranczak/Navarre Performance Projects; the residency programme at South House, a studio space in Faversham, Kent; and the False Walls music label. 

Previously, CJ was Co-Director at the Live Art Development Agency, London; Executive Director of the Links Hall performance space in Chicago; Managing Director of Performing Arts Chicago; Administrative Director of the Master of Arts in Arts Administration programme at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago; Company Manager of Goat Island Performance Group; and General Manager of the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow. CJ is a Member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland, and holds a Masters in Cultural Studies and a Bachelor of Accountancy, both from the University of Glasgow. 

Donald Hyslop is an urbanist working internationally across culture, architecture, business districts, food markets and museums. He advances the regeneration, reinvention, economic and social development of cities and communities.

His work begins with people, a human scale, and is shaped by a value and principles-based thinking and practice. Donald is a long-term advocate and practitioner of the importance of culture, public and open spaces, heritage, diversity, circularity, partnerships and co-production.

He has held long term leadership roles at Tate Modern, Borough Market and Better Bankside BID leading in the ongoing urban renewal and transformation of London’s Bankside, Borough and South Bank District into a global destination and one of the most vibrant cultural districts in the world. 

He is also Chair of Creative and Cultural Skills UK and a Trustee of Atlas Arts based on the Isle of Skye.

Jennifer Lewandowski is an artist, curator, and co-founder of French Riviera, London. Launched in 2011, the gallery curates a diverse programme of solo and group exhibitions and public events, supporting over 250 international emerging artists over the past 12 years. She also works with Glastonbury Festival in Somerset, creatively directing a diverse team of artists, architects, and creatives to realise the artistic vision, production, and build of the Interstage area. Her expanded practice includes film, food, installation, music, performance, and photography.

Over the past five years she has been connecting more deeply with coastal communities in the Southeast of England, the Isle of Mull, and Athens exploring holistic practices and thinking about the effects that living by the sea may have on our mental health and spiritual wellbeing. This includes gathering edible plants such coastal flora, seaweeds, marsh succulents and wild herbs, and documenting each varied yet connected landscape through drawings, photography, paintings, and experimental film and sound recordings. The resulting body of work, presented in environments where she cooks and serves food made with local foraged ingredients, and leads guided meditations, pays homage to the energy of the sea and the mountainous regions of the Scottish Highlands and Greece.

Based in London, she travels widely to inform her practice and has shown in exhibitions, festivals, performances, and screenings, in the UK, Europe, and the US.

Lydia Brockless is an artist originally from High Wycombe, and who lived in Gravesend between 2014 and 2021. She studied at Leeds College of Art and the Royal College of Art, and her work spans a variation of media and materials. She is interested in the materials of planet Earth, their movements, and the forces behind them. She makes work about the mysteries of time and change, and likes to observe and interpret relationships between the complicated spaces of our inner worlds, and the complicated spaces outside ourselves. 

Lydia won the Henry Moore Institute Dissertation Prize in 2020, and in 2021 was awarded a micro-commission as part of Cement Fields’ project ‘This Must Be The Place’, which resulted in a short film presentation as part of Estuary 2021 festival. She has exhibited her work in group shows across the UK since 2014.

Lydia now lives in Northumberland, where she is developing a project entitled Field Shelter; the Field Shelter is a derelict stable situated in a field next to Hadrian’s Wall, which is being restored and converted into a making/learning/doing/being space. Its aim is to welcome visiting artists, tourists and local people to engage with creativity and the landscape in new and different ways.

Nicola Triscott is a curator, researcher and writer, known for her expertise in the intersections between art, science, technology and society. She currently serves as Chief Executive of FACT Liverpool, a major UK arts centre specialising in the support and exhibition of art that embraces new technology and explores digital culture. Previously, she was founding Director of Arts Catalyst (1994-2019). Over 25 years, she built Arts Catalyst into an international arts and research organization, commissioning more than 170 artists’ projects and curating or co-curating numerous exhibitions as well as leading on research and strategic programmes. She was also Principal Research Fellow in Art/Science at the University of Westminster (2017-19). She lectures and publishes on several art/science specialisms.

Steffi Klenz is an artist and academic based in London. She has exhibited her work across the UK and internationally. Selected venues include The British Museum in London (2020), The Wellcome Collection London (2019), Camden Art Centre (2021), The Museum for Contemporary Art in Taipei (2021), The Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh (2019) and The Royal Academy in London (2006), The Museum of Contemporary Art Alicante (2023), The FotoMuseum Antwerp (2017), Los Angeles Centre for Digital Arts (2016), The Phoenix Art Museum (2017), The Fine Art Museum Luleå (2010), The Finish Museum of Photography (2014), The SeaCity Museum in Southampton (2014), The New Art Gallery Walsall (2011), Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin (2013), Kunstverein Ludwigshafen (2020) and Museum Künstlerkolonie in Darmstadt (2014) .