Elaine Samantha Mitchener MBE is a British-Caribbean experimental vocalist, composer, and movement artist A member of the avant-garde group Apartment House and the electroacoustic act Rolling Calf. [1] She attended the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London [2] and was later mentored by opera singer Jacqueline Straubinger-Bremar. [1] Her 2017 "cross-disciplinary music piece" Sweet Tooth debuted at St George's, Bloomsbury. Commissioned by the Bluecoat Arts Centre, the International Slavery Museum, and the Stuart Hall Foundation, it pertains to slavery in the British Empire, with a focus on the sugar industry. [3] In 2021, she performed NAMES II—a "roll-call of the 2,000 enslaved African people owned by an 18th century Jamaican sugar planter"—at the British Art Show. [4] Mitchener is an associate artist at Wigmore Hall until 2026. [1]
Mitchener was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2022 Birthday Honours for services to music. [5]
Joan Anita Barbara Armatrading, is a Kittitian-English singer-songwriter and guitarist.
Caron Melina Wheeler is an English singer, songwriter, record producer and musician. Born and raised in London, she performed in various singing competitions as a teenager and began her recording career as one of the founding members of Brown Sugar. She was also one of the founding members of the female backing vocalist group Afrodiziak. She officially rose to fame in the late 1980s as lead singer of R&B group Soul II Soul. Managed by her bandmate, Jazzie B, the group became one of the London's best-selling groups in the 1990s. Their debut album, Club Classics Vol. One (1989), which established them as a global success worldwide, earned two Grammy Awards and featured the UK and Billboard number-one singles "Keep on Movin'" and "Back to Life ".
Dame Sonia Dawn Boyce is a British Afro-Caribbean artist and educator, living and working in London. She is a Professor of Black Art and Design at University of the Arts London. Boyce's research interests explore art as a social practice and the critical and contextual debates that arise from this area of study. Boyce has been closely collaborating with other artists since 1990 with a focus on collaborative work, frequently involving improvisation and unplanned performative actions on the part of her collaborators. Boyce's work involves a variety of media, such as drawing, print, photography, video, and sound. Her art explores "the relationship between sound and memory, the dynamics of space, and incorporating the spectator". To date, Boyce has taught Fine Art studio practice for more than 30 years in several art colleges across the UK.
Debbie Wiseman, OBE is a British composer for film and television, known also as a conductor and a radio and television presenter.
Hackney Empire is a theatre on Mare Street, in Hackney in the London Borough of Hackney. Originally designed by Frank Matcham it was built in 1901 as a music hall, and expanded in 2001. Described by The Guardian as "the most beautiful theatre in London" it is an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation.
Gugulethu Sophia Mbatha-Raw is an English actress. She began acting at the National Youth Theatre and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and gained acclaim for her roles as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet and Octavia in Anthony and Cleopatra in 2005 at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester. She made her West End and Broadway debut portraying Ophelia in Hamlet in 2009. For her role as the titular character in Jessica Swale's 2015 play Nell Gwynn, she received an Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Actress nomination.
Janet Kay Bogle is an English actress and vocalist, best known for her 1979 lovers rock hit "Silly Games".
Timothy Campbell is an English businessman best known as the winner of the first series of the British version of The Apprentice, a BBC TV reality show in which contestants competed to win a £100,000-a-year job working for businessman Alan Sugar.
Cleveland Watkiss,, is a British vocalist, actor, and composer.
Jacqueline Caryl Dankworth is a British jazz singer. She is the daughter of jazz singer Cleo Laine and musician John Dankworth.
Lubaina Himid is a British artist and curator. She is a professor of contemporary art at the University of Central Lancashire. Her art focuses on themes of cultural history and reclaiming identities.
Ella Spira MBE is a Grammy-nominated composer, visual artist and an award-winning theatre producer based in London, England. Spira co-founded the production company Sisters Grimm alongside ex Royal Ballet ballerina Pietra De Mello-Pittman in 2009. Spira writes and composes music for ballet and film, and works as an arranger making dance remixes for popular UK artists, but her main focus remains Sisters Grimm productions. She was born in Gloucester, and was mentored by film composer David Arnold. As a painter, Spira captured landscapes in situ of countries like China, Indonesia, Lapland, France, Albania, UAE, Brazil, Russia, the UK, and Portugal. Her artworks promote respect and appreciation for nature and raise awareness of environmental issues.
Chila Kumari Singh Burman is a British artist, celebrated for her radical feminist practice, which examines representation, gender and cultural identity. She works across a wide range of mediums including printmaking, drawing, painting, installation and film.
Claudette Elaine Johnson is a British visual artist. She is known for her large-scale drawings of Black women and her involvement with the BLK Art Group, of which she was a founder member. She was described by Modern Art Oxford as "one of the most accomplished figurative artists working in Britain today".
Margaret Benyon,, was a British artist. Trained as a painter, she was one of the first artists to use holography as a medium and had her first solo show of holograms in 1969. She was appointed to the Order of the British Empire in 2000 for her service to art and has been called "the mother of British holography".
Lurine Lilian Cato, British gospel singer, songwriter and session vocalist, won the MOBO Award for Best Gospel Act in 2013 and was nominated in the same category in 2017. She was a finalist on the 12th Season of Britain's Got Talent 2018 with the B Positive Choir. She has a 5-octave vocal range.
Janine Mireille Irons is a British music educator, artist manager and producer, who in 1991 co-founded with her partner Gary Crosby the music education and professional development organisation Tomorrow's Warriors, of which she is Chief Executive. In 1997 she and Crosby also initiated the Dune Records label, which has a focus on Black British jazz musicians and musicians from Tomorrow's Warriors. She has also worked as a photographer and musician.
Grace Wales Bonner is an English fashion designer, whose work "proposes a distinct notion of cultural luxury that infuses European heritage with an Afro Atlantic spirit". Her designs are characterized by a blend of sportswear and tailoring, as well as her interest in infusing everyday wardrobe essentials with a refined elegance. In 2014, she founded the London-based label Wales Bonner, originally specializing in menswear.
Anna Ruth Ella Lapwood is a British organist, choir director and television and radio presenter. In 2016 she was appointed Director of Music at Pembroke College, Cambridge, one of the youngest people ever to have directed an Oxford or Cambridge university college choir, and in 2018 she established a girls' choir at the College. As an associate artist at the Royal Albert Hall in London since 2022, her recordings have reached a wide audience on social media.
Pietra-Marie de Mello-Pittman MBE is a Brazilian-British retired Royal Ballet dancer and co-founder and co-director of Sisters Grimm Ltd. She founded the company with composer Ella Spira in 2009 while still in the corps de ballet. A former First Artist of The Royal Ballet, she graduated into the Company in 2002 and trained at The Royal Ballet Upper School. She was promoted to First Artist in 2008 and retired from the Company in 2015. In 2021 she received an MBE for services to International Trade and the Creative Industry in the New Year Honours.