Desk Scheme Users
We are currently taking applications for new Desk Scheme users.
Simone French
Simone French is a queer experimental performance artist and theatremaker originally from Naarm (Melbourne) with over a decade of international practice. Her work embraces her wacky sensibility, DIY methodology and inventive use of space with a focus on creating interactive performance that combines AV, film, music, dance and audience interactivity. Simone is the Co-Artistic Director of the company TomYumSim that aims to push the envelope of performance by devising outlandish interactive and sometimes site specific experiences that beckon audiences to question the world and their place within it. TomYumSim has devised 13 projects to date, including four for digital platforms. Highlights include Green Room Award winner A Suffocating Choking Feeling (Pleasance Theatre/La Mama), exploring influencer culture and the ethics of faking cancer online by mixing live performance with live streaming on Instagram; Hotline (Word of Warning/MIF), a subversive live one-to-one phone performance; String Lines (Royal Exchange Theatre), an immersive electronic pop opera where audience conducts the space; The Salon (Cambridge Junction/Bridgewater Hall), an interactive singing hair salon focusing on self-care for dementia patients and queer youth; Be My Embrace Now (Manchester Pride); Look At Us Now (Every Brain/Contact Theatre); Rebels of Extinction (Manchester International Festival); Trapped in the Museum (People’s History Museum); Rage Face (The Yard Theatre); Nothing Special (Camden People’s Theatre). Simone will be using LADA’s Desk Scheme to build her tour for A Suffocating Choking Feeling in Autumn 2025 and research for her new project Trainwreck – a satirical take on AI’s role in creativity – exploring whether it can enhance, rather than replace, artistic expression with residencies through Spill Festival, BOLD, Old Electric Theatre and Theatre Deli.
Simone French. Image Tom Halls
Delaine Le Bas
Delaine Le Bas is a cross disciplinary artist creating installations, performance, text works, photography and film. She was born in Worthing in 1965 and studied at Saint Martin’s School of Art. Delaine was one of the sixteen artists who were part of Paradise Lost: The First Roma Pavilion in Venice Biennale in 2007. She created the project Romani Embassy in 2015 as a response to the everyday exclusions, institutional racism and segregation that Roma, Gypsies and Travellers continue to face. In 2019 she was part of FutuRoma at Venice Biennale, designing costumes for Rewitching Europe and creating the installation and performance Witch Hunt III that included an 8-metre-tall goddess. Her work has been featured in the Gwangju Biennale (2012); Critical Contemplations in Tate Modern (2017); ANTI – Athens Biennale (2018); Berlin Biennale (2020); as well as in the solo exhibition Incipit Vita Nova. Here Begins The New Life/A New Life Is Beginning at Secession, Vienna (2023). Delaine has also worked with her late husband, the artist Damian Le Bas, on the series of installations Safe European Home? (2011-2017). In 2017 they produced the stage artworks and costumes for Roma Armee at Gorki Berlin, and in 2023 the objects relating to their shared life and experiences were presented in the House of Le Bas installation at the Whitechapel Gallery. One of Delaine’s most recent commissions was for Radical Landscapes for Tate Liverpool (2022). In 2023, she performed tHIS iS nOT vaLENCIA oRange oR caRmEN with Lincoln Cato at the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern as part of the exhibition popular, which also featured Delaine’s ongoing installations and performances Witch Hunt. Delaine was shortlisted for the Turner Prize 2024 for her presentation Incipit Vita Nova. Here Begins The New Life/A New Life Is Beginning at Secession, Vienna.
Delaine Le Bas. Image courtesy of the artist
Kate Mahony
Kate Mahony works in front of people. She is interested in performance and liveness, with themes spanning from inside-out methods to wrongness, alternative education, making noise and normative behaviours. Her practice has come out of framing performance within a ‘gig economy’ that is an artistically unrestricted and often unpaid platform. By catering to the ‘gig’ at hand, Mahony’s performances are quick, cheap and site responsive. For the past ten years Kate has been creating and curating live performance and moving image works that have embraced immediate/DIY ways of making, as well as fronting two bands, Rainham Sheds and Shake Chain. She is currently working and delivering workshops which consider and teach how to perform or ‘un-sing’ with a ‘hysterical voice’. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at intuitions such as SET, Nottingham Contemporary, SPILL Festival, Bluecoat Gallery, Goethe University and UICA (USA). Kate’s practice is cross-disciplinary in approach, from co-curating a performance programme out of a lock up single-car garage in Bethnal Green (LUPA), to creating a DIY crew of amateur filmmakers to capture a Live Action Roleplay (LARP). From 2019 – 2022 Kate has been the lead artist for City as Studio at Modern Art Oxford, a professional development programme for young artists creating lo-fi performance and moving image works. Kate graduated from Goldsmiths College with her BA in Art Practice in 2012; School of the Damned in 2016; and MFA from the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford in 2017. She is a Lecturer in Fine Art at Oxford Brookes University.
Kate Mahony performing in Shake Chain at Supernormal Festival, 2024
Ornela Novello
Ornela Novello (b. 1985, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is an artist and writer who works across installation, performance, text, photography and film. Rooted in the interplay of ideas, systems and experiences, her work examines how we perceive, navigate and interpret the world, and questions our place within it. Ornela holds an MA in Interior Architecture and Design from UC Berkeley and a postgraduate degree in Communal Arts and Art Therapy. She recently completed a two-year sculpture programme at MASS/Turps, expanding her exploration of form and materiality in contemporary practice. Ornela currently lives and works in London. Recent group shows include A.P.T. Studios (2024), Tremenheere Sculpture Garden (2024) and Thames Side Studio Gallery (2024).
Ornela Novello. Image Anna & Alice (In The Right Light)
Aaron Williamson
Over the last twenty-five years, Dr Aaron Williamson has created over 300 performances, videos and installations in Britain, Europe, Japan, China, Australia, Scandinavia, USA, South America, Canada and many other countries around the world. Aaron has a PhD in Critical Theory from the University of Sussex (1997) and has published widely (his monograph Performance / Video / Collaboration was co-published by LADA and KIOSK in 2007). He has been awarded, among others, the Helen Chadwick Fellowship at the British School at Rome (2000-2001); a three-year AHRC Fellowship in the Creative and Performing Arts at BIAD, University of Central England, (2004-2007); and the Stephen Cripps Studio Bursary, Acme Studios (2013-2014). Aaron’s work is informed by his experience of becoming deaf and by a politicised and progressive sensibility towards disability. At a University of California San Diego lecture in 1998, he coined the term ‘Deaf Gain’ as a counter-emphasis to ‘hearing loss’. In 2019 a retrospective of Aaron’s work was exhibited at the Attenborough Arts Centre, Leicester, featuring performance documentation, short and 15mm films, his work with the Disabled Avant Garde, and the large-scale commissioned installation work Inspiration Archives. Aaron was a Research Fellow in Fine Art at Oxford Brookes University (2019-2023) and is currently working on a full-scale exhibition and retrospective at the John Hansard Gallery, Southampton to open in October 2025.
Aaron Williamson. Image courtesy of the artist
Past Desk Scheme Users
Anelenea Toku│BULLYACHE│Gareth Llŷr Evans│Leyneuf Tines│Carrie Foulkes│Benjamin Ord│Emily Russell│Deborah Pearson│Sally Rose│Fox Irving│Sarah Wishart│ Tink Flaherty│Manuel Vason
