Syllabus IX
Syllabus is an alternative and independent learning programme supporting ten artists across ten months through collective learning, critical exchange, and community-building. Now entering its ninth year, the programme continues to evolve collaboratively in response to each cohort of artists.
The programme offers time for artists from across the UK to discuss ideas, work, life and approaches to practice, while building community and taking risks. Syllabus IX is jointly delivered by Wysing Arts Centre, Eastside Projects, Live Art Development Agency (LADA), PS², Site Gallery and Studio Voltaire (Associate partner).
The Syllabus partners are delighted to welcome artists Jessica Ashman, Alex Billingham, romane courdacher, George Gibson, Umama Hamido, Natalie Mitchell, Betty / Chaoying Rao 饶超颖 / Femme Castratrice, Korallia Stergides, Symoné and Jonny Walker to Syllabus IX!
Beginning in September 2026, Syllabus IX will be built around a series of intensive in-person weekend gatherings. The ten selected artists will collaboratively develop the curriculum with curators and artists from partner organisations, Syllabus Coordinator Freya Yeates and Syllabus IX Artist Lead, Harun Morrison.
Syllabus is funded by Freelands Foundation and Arts Council England.
Jessica Ashman
Jessica Ashman (she/her) is a Jamaican black British interdisciplinary artist, working across painting, natural dye, animation, textiles, music and performance, which culminate in immersive installations. Ashman’s practice is rooted in the black Caribbean and working-class diaspora archive –both personal and institutional –aiming to dismantle the archive as a gatekeeper of knowledge. Ashman is particularly interested in the blurred space between fact and folklore, archival absence and cultural inheritance.
Recent projects include Chimera Island at Modern Painters, New Decorators (2025) and Those that do not smile will kill me: Decolonising Jamaican Flora, Bristol Museum & Art Gallery (2025).
More informationBetty / Chaoying Rao 饶超颖 / Femme Castratrice
Betty / Chaoying Rao 饶超颖 / Femme Castratrice (she/her/any) is a Glasgow-based visual artist. Her creative practice investigates the weaponisation of desire under patriarchy and western myth-making structures about the orient. Rao’s research materialises in photography, live art, moving image, sculpture, and installation.
Recent projects include House of Tolerance at the Bundeskunsthalle (2026), ReQOL-10 performed at Glasgow Women’s Library (2025) and Narratives and Counternarratives screened at Queer East (2025).
More informationAlex Billingham
Alex Billingham (she/her) is an artist working across live art, film, and other visual art and media. She is currently developing WAYFINDER, a five-year research project investigating memory loss and our connection to time through intergalactic ley lines. Blending bubble-gum aesthetics with ethereal post-human landscapes, she imagines better ways for us all to survive.
Recent projects include Neon Caverns, a solo show commissioned and exhibited by Level Centre. Her work has been acquired by The New Art Gallery Walsall, and she has performed at Tate St Ives. She has also undertaken residencies with Ugly Duck, Hospitalfield, The Herbert, Live Art Ireland and others.
More informationromane courdacher
romane courdacher (they/them/she/her) is a French multidisciplinary artist based in London, working across sculpture, installation, performance, image-making and writing. Their practice emerges from a fascination with the uncanny and the spectral, focusing on ruins, abandoned artefacts and discarded belongings. Through immersive, multi-sensory environments, their work looks at hauntology, liminality, world-building and theatricality in relation to memory, traumas, and affects. Collaborations with curators, sound designers, artists and writers play an essential role in shaping how their work comes to life.
Recent projects include: Zerri3a, a collective of artists, ecologists, academics and students working together with local villagers and labourers to regenerate 1.7 hectares of dry land near the Al-Wahda dam in Northern Morocco. They also co-curate Unit 2 Project Space, an artist-run space in North London supporting queer practices through exhibitions and workshops.
More informationGeorge Gibson
George Gibson (they/them) is an artist operating between research and craft, utilising zine making, lo-fi print processes, and book arts to document personal fixations and the communities that are created as a result. Through regularly run public workshops, they delve into themes of cultural memory, fandom, and unofficial histories: from contemporary bird divination and queer retellings of Godzilla to the psychological impact of early 2000s TV phenomena LOST.
Recent projects include Fake Fans commissioned by Site Gallery, Sheffield (2025), and The Forth Wall exhibited at HOME, Manchester (2024).
Gibson is a member of ABC (Artists’ Books Cooperative).
More informationUmama Hamido
Umama Hamido (she/her) is a Lebanese artist and filmmaker based in London. Working across moving image, installation, and performance, her practice examines sites of exile, borders, migration, and the realities of displacement.
Recent projects include THE SPIDER IS THE CLOCK with Stephen Lawrence Gallery (2022), and Artsadmin and Shubbak Festival (2021). Hamido is currently developing her first feature documentary, Stratford King (working title).
More informationNatalie Mitchell
Natalie Mitchell (they/them) is an artist and curator based in London. Working across moving image, photography, oral history, archives and sound, they draw on collaborative and research-led processes to consider questions of visibility, place and collective experience, with a particular interest in Black diasporic histories. They use documentary, poetic and speculative approaches.
Recent film projects include Matta Fancanta, Come Guard Yourself Against Self-Destruction (2026), this one goes out to The Dance (2024), and She climbed the Heath (2023).
More informationKorallia Stergides
Korallia Stergides (she/her) practice centres the embodiment of care between human and non-human, through abstracted notions of touch and shared vulnerabilities. She uses performance, film, installation, writing, sound, drawing, photography and printmaking, to construct autofictions grounded in ecofeminism and eco-crip theory. Stergides also performs improvised, theatrical personifications designed and directed in the form of Tours, Sales and Amusements to heighten awareness of localised political, ecological and mental health research.
Recent projects include A Tragical Romance, Wonnerth Dejaco (2024) and New Contemporaries, Camden Arts Centre (2023).
More informationSymoné
Symoné (she/they) is a Guinness World Record-holding queer interdisciplinary performer, director, and alternative game designer. She works across circus, cabaret, performance art, and game technologies. Blending pole dance, roller-skating, hula hoop and immersive design, her work thematically considers power, spectatorship, and the unconscious through form-driven performance.
Recent projects include founding the Live Art and Gaming Network during residency at Live Art Development Agency (2025). She is a current recipient of BAFTA’s Prince William Award and a trustee with The Posh Club by Duckie.
More informationJonny Walker
Jonny Walker (he/him) is an artist from Glasgow working in sculpture, installation and text. His work is led by an interest in sites of friction between objects, systems, language and the body: points of collision and permeability, and the ways in which systems function, hold together and fail to contain.
Recent projects include Will we ever get a good night sleep again?, 16 Collective, Glasgow (2025); A shard in my eye, Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, Edinburgh (2024) and Where a Castle Meets the Sky, Glasgow International, Glasgow (2024).
More informationBanner image credit:
Wysing
Also
Documenting Intimacy
Research initiative by Brian Lobel & Marisa Zanotti exploring the documentation of one-to-one performance
Read moreThrough the Looking Glass: performances to watch and be part of
Join some of the UK’s most original artists in performances and interactions across St Helens
Read moreSPILL Symposium
A two day gathering of influential international artists, producers and commentators.
Read moreEmergent Ties – Actioning Climate Justice (Accelerator Programme)
LADA is delighted to announce that our proposal on behalf of LADA & Live Art UK and Gasworks & Triangle Network has been accepted into the Accelerator Programme.
Read moreLADA at Venice International Performance Art Week
Live performances, exhibitions, installations, screenings and debates
Read moreThe Art of Noises: Where Live Art meets Music at Latitude
For Latitude LADA has curated an exciting line up of aurally fixated artists.
Read morePLAYING UP: A Live Art Game for Kids and Adults
An artwork taking the form of a game, exploring the potential of Live Art to bridge generations
Read moreFuture Kin
LADA is partnering with ANTI Festival, My Wild Flag, Theater Rosendahl and Warehouse9 to create a network dedicated to nurturing queer interdisciplinary performance practice across borders.
Read more