Introducing The Team Behind Arts Derbyshire – Studio Flourish

Arts Derbyshire is supported by a team whose sole aim is to enrich the community through art and creativity. Although you may already have heard about and partaken in Arts Derbyshire projects, we would like to introduce you to the arts team behind Arts Derbyshire and learn about their work in their own words.

In this article, we are profiling Emily Bradfield and Helen Shearn, who are part of the Studio Flourish Consultancy Team who are supporting Arts Derbyshire’s Creatives In Place programme.             

Studio Flourish Consultancy

Studio Flourish CIC is a Community Interest Company which aims to cultivate care through creativity, supporting adults living with physical and / or mental health challenges. They imagine communities where care and creativity are part of everyday life – where people grow stronger through connection and creative expression.

Their Culture and Care Consultancy supports organisations from project conception to ending, using playful, participatory, person-centred, and rigorous approaches. Through their collective expertise and experience, they facilitate meaningful connections to provide evidence-based organisational and programme development and evaluation frameworks. This work contributes to community programmes lead by Studio Flourish CIC, via a thoughtful contribution from their consultancy income.

The Studio Flourish Consultancy team, working with Arts Derbyshire to support the evaluation and development of Creatives in Place comprises:

• Helen Shearn – consultant, producer, and evaluator with over 25 years’ cross-sector experience in arts, heritage, health, and wellbeing. Helen works at the interface of practice, research, evaluation, and systems change and brings significant expertise in advising, reviewing and synthesising policies, cultural strategies, and creative health research and practice.

• Dr Emily Bradfield – a practitioner researcher and independent consultant working at the intersection of arts, public health, ageing, and wellbeing. Her PhD explored creative ageing, participation and flourishing, and her practice is based around equitable, ethical practice within creative health / ageing. Emily is the Founder of Studio Flourish CIC.

Arts Derbyshire are delighted to be working alongside Helen and Emily to help us to capture the learning, share and reflect on Creatives in Place, an innovative pilot project at the heart of our current creative health work.

Stay tuned for the rest of our Introducing Our Team series to find out more about the team behind Arts Derbyshire and read about each individual’s relationship to the creative sector.

Other articles in this series

Meet the rest of the team:

• Hannah Barker
• Debbie Porter
• Stephen Munn
• Nicola Middler
• Nick Davis
• Bethany Sheldon
• Evie O’Neal
• Morgan Stockton
• Matilda Rowland