Team

Angela is our Operations Manager. Angela has 30 years of experience supporting talented entrepreneurs and professionals to deliver their vision and objectives.   

Working across diverse sectors, from construction and manufacturing to housing and scientific research, Angela has assisted senior executives and sales teams in organisations undergoing rapid growth, change, restructuring and recovery.  

Common threads throughout Angela’s career include management of bids, projects and installations.  Successful major bids include exhibition fit-outs for the British Museum, National Trust and the Shard. Project management includes multi-million pound interior fit-outs for blue chip corporates.  Arriving at Cement Fields after working with a national charity, Angela is excited to bring her skills to areas of strong personal affinity; art and the communities of North Kent.

Elizabeth Tophill is our Schools and Education Curator. Elizabeth was about to leave the arts and become a full-time gardener, before Cement Fields lured her back with their exciting schools programme. She has worked within the cultural sector for over ten years, as Production Manager for Whitstable Biennale, leading school workshops with Strange Cargo, researching the Circular Economy with Future Foundry, and delivering Turner Contemporary’s education programme. 

Elizabeth is a practical and playful maker and artist, working with nature to create balanced, beautiful, closed-loop landscapes. She loves to experience, facilitate and invent art in surprising places, where anybody may happen upon it. 

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.

Michaela is our Curator and Project Manager for This Must Be the Place. She’s developing a programme of opportunities for young people to influence the urban design of Ebbsfleet Garden City, in collaboration with Ebbsfleet Development Corporation. This three-year project brings together creative practitioners, artists, researchers, writers and academics to work with local young people.

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.

Samuel Taylor is our Marketing and Communications Manager.

Sam joined us in 2020 from Parallax Photographic Coop, a Brixton-based photography cooperative he co-founded in 2016. Alongside working with a variety of cultural organisations on communications and digital projects, Sam is also a practicing artist, having studied Print at the Royal College of Art and Photographic Art at the University of Westminster.

Sue Jones is our Director. For the last 30 years she has worked closely with early-career visual artists to enable and support the making of more than 500 experimental new artworks. 

Sue was previously Curator and then Director of Chisenhale Gallery in London, before joining Whitstable Biennale as Director in 2005. The next Whitstable Biennale will be the tenth edition, and more recently Sue has worked on the organisation’s organic evolution into our new organisation, Cement Fields.

 Sue comes from a working class East London background and is neurodivergent (autistic). 

Dzifa Benson is one of our Associate Curators, working on Estuary 2021 and Whitstable Biennale.

Dzifa recently completed an MA at Birkbeck and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) and has worked as a freelance writer and creative for organisations as diverse as the Chineke! Foundation, Southbank Centre, The Royal Geographic Society, The Poetry School and the British Library. 

Dzifa, who is a poet, playwright, journalist and workshop facilitator, has had many years of experience working as an artist in schools and other organisations and is based in London. As an arts journalist, Dzifa has contributed articles and essays to publications such as the Financial Times, the Guardian and The Telegraph. She is currently working on a commissioned play and her debut poetry collection.

Emma Leach is one of our Associate Curators, working on Whitstable Biennale and other projects.

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.

Keira Greene is one of our Associate Curators, working on Whitstable Biennale.

Keira is an artist, curator and researcher, and she has programmed exhibitions, screenings, residencies, and events, with and for; The Photographers Gallery, London; Diaspore, London; Inland Studios, London; Supernormal Festival, Oxfordshire; and Pegs, Brussels.

She co-organises events focussed on ‘performance as publishing’ with the collectives Altai and Co—, is co-editor of the journal Metaphor as Metamorphosis and guest editor with the journal Fieldnotes. She is also a founding trustee of the Stuart Croft Foundation. 

Keira’s curatorial and research interests include the social and organic life and landscape of specific environments, and the body explored through performance and embodied practice.

Working with Cement Fields since 2017, she curated the performance programme for Whitstable Biennale 2018 and is currently working on plans for Whitstable Biennale 2022.

Andy is an artist, and lives and works in Whitstable. He is Course Leader and Associate Head of School at the University for the Creative Arts and previously taught at Wimbledon School of Art after studying Sculpture at Central Saint Martins in the 1980s. He has been involved in the Whitstable Biennale since its inception.

Andy has exhibited at The London Art Book Fair at the ICA in 2007 and the Whitechapel as well as at Book Art Fairs and events in the UK, Hungary, Minnesota, Russia and Denmark, Turner Contemporary in Margate and at the Whitstable Biennale and Sheffield Artists Book Prize. He has work in the Tate Britain Library and in Artists Book collections around the world and has exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum shop and with Marc Jacobs ‘Bookmarc’. He currently has work at the Book Art Bookshop in London, Boekie Woekie in Amsterdam and galleries in Whitstable and Norfolk. He has recently completed a large commission for The Grand Scotland Yard Hotel in London.

Mel has a strong personal interest in continuing to champion opportunity for visual arts within the wider creative community. After a long and senior career in Film & TV he lives in Whitstable and brings to Cement Fields a wealth of experience in making ‘content’ commercially viable for diverse audiences.

Currently Chair of the British Board of Film Classification, Mel most recently restructured Curzon, the UK’s oldest exhibitor of Independent Film. He pioneered the day and date release strategy, creating the online video on demand service Curzon Home Cinema and in Feb 2017 received a BAFTA for its “Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema”. Curzon was later sold to the US company the Cohen Media Group in Dec 2019.

Mel also sits as a mentor for the venture capitalist firm Ascension Ventures which focuses on early stage Media Tech companies. He was also Chair of London’s oldest Cinema, the Rio Dalston.

Mel has also held senior management roles at Fremantle (one of the world’s biggest producers of Television), Sky, Disney and digital agency i-Crossing.

Amanda spent her professional career working in arts management, including media relations, regional theatres and then for The Royal Ballet and Royal Opera House. She held senior management roles at the Barbican, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation (where she was Director of Arts and Heritage), Crafts Council, and The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. She has served on the boards of Central School of Ballet, Hampstead Theatre and the institute of International Visual Arts. She is highly engaged with both performing and visual arts, with a particular interest in interdisciplinary and immersive work. She has recently completed an MA in Creative Writing. Amanda lives in Whitstable, where she also serves on the board of an infants’ school.

Rachel started her career in the arts after achieving her BA in Performing Arts at Middlesex University. She worked as an artist and actor for the first 10 years of her career. In the 1990s Rachel pioneered the arts initiative Creative Block, a charity funded by the London Arts Board and the Arts Council. The project was housed in spectacular unused offices buildings in the City and West End at the time with the full co-operation of the owners who benefitted from the rates relief. The group built white and black cubes in which to present arts and theatre shows and installations.

Rachel served on the board of Clean Break Theatre Company for 10 years and held the chair for the 3 years during which the major lottery funding was won and spent. She has also worked with the board of the Estorick Foundation. In 1994 Rachel had a change of direction and re-trained as an accountant. She has worked in one of the top 5 accountancy firms as well as a number of small private practices. She set up her own private practice in 2009 which has grown steadily from personal recommendation. She now looks after 200 clients and has a team of 8 staff. The firm earned a Financial Times business award, and the Small Accounting Firm of the Year from Finance Monthly in 2021. The practice focuses on creative clients looking after artists, art galleries, designers and architects and is fast becoming one of the prominent accountants for artists in London. 

Jane Pitt is an artist based in North Kent. She makes installations that include sound, performance and text. Often sited in unusual public spaces, on land, water and in moving vehicles. Her work evokes a heightened awareness of environment and encourages curiosity in the topography and complexity of a place.

Running away with French Circus Archaos compounded her desire to make work across disciplines in non-traditional spaces for all audiences, including Wunderkammer, featured at The National Theatre and London Festival of Architecture; ‘Flüchtlingswelle’ commissioned by Wiesbaden Kunstsommer winning her the Curator’s Choice Prize for work which expresses global, social and political significance. Recent work includes: Fl-utter-ances (Tree Songs) audio-visual installation for Inside Out Dorset Festival; Maunder Maps for Ditchling Museum of Art & Craft and an international residency at Sura Medura, Sri Lanka