Who We Are
Amalia Restrepo
Project Manager
Raj Bhari
Community Dialogue Facilitator
Chuck Blue Lowry
Digital Artist
Sue Mayo
Project Lead – Creative Approaches, Podcast and Research
Amanda Mascarenhas
Visual Artist
Mo Sumah
Facilities Co-ordinator
Amalia Restrepo
Amalia is a researcher and project manager specialising in creative health and community engagement. As the Research Lead at London Arts and Health, she helped deliver the London Creative Health City Unconference at Battersea Arts Centre and contributed to the Understanding Creative Health in London: The Scale, Character and Maturity of the Sector report for the GLA Culture and Creative Industries team. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Environment with a focus on Ecological Determinants of Health from McGill University and a Master’s in Creative Health from University College London.
Raj Bhari
Raj Bhari has worked in conflict transformation and peacebuilding internationally and in the UK for over 25 years. His practice focuses on the nexus between conflict transformation, peacebuilding, applied arts and social cohesion. Raj is a Senior Peacebuilding Adviser with expertise in peacebuilding programming in Libya, Ukraine the Black Sea Region and Syria. As a senior adviser to the UK government Raj has contributed to the development of national community cohesion policy and practice in the UK. As well as designing and delivering large-scale peacebuilding programmes, Raj is also currently a senior associate with Belong, Cohesion & Faith Network UK and mentors/ supports community-facing peacebuilders, operating in challenging and hostile environments. He teaches at Goldsmiths, Rose Bruford and RADA.
Chuck Blue Lowry
Chuck specialises in art as social practice, with a particular focus on intergenerational exchange and storytelling. Her primary art form is film, and she directs, shoots and edits. She platforms the voices of those who are often under or misrepresented and has worked nationally and internationally. Chuck’s work has been presented at galleries and festivals including Tate Modern, British Film Institute, Women of the World Festival, London Short Film Festival, Battersea Arts Centre, Whitechapel Gallery and Charcoal in Hong Kong. She has been awarded ‘Best Music Video Director’ at Canned Film. Chuck lectures in Film and Performance at Central St Martin’s
Sue Mayo
Sue Mayo is an artist who works collaboratively with communities. She has worked as a performer, writer, director, teacher and facilitator, and has taught at Rose Bruford College, Queen Mary, University of London, Central School of Speech and Drama and Goldsmiths, University of London, where she lectured for 17 years, including 10 years as Director of the Masters in Applied Theatre.
She trained at Birmingham University in Drama and additionally with Leap Confronting Conflict in dealing creatively with conflict. She is associate artist with Magic Me, the leading intergenerational arts charity, where she designed and led the Women’s Project that ran from 2004 to 2022. With an intergenerational group of women she created a resource on activism and two campaigning films, as part of a climate justice project Generation Rebellion.
Her publications include “We know”: Collective Care in Participatory Arts; chapters A Marvelous Experiment and The Artist in Collaboration in Performance and Community edited by Dr Caoimhe McAvinchey (Methuen 2012); Detail and Daring: the Art and Craft
of Intergenerational Arts Work, published online November 2012 on Magic Me; In the Company of Others: Entelechy’s work with older people in Performances of Age: United Kingdom, volume 2, part 5 of The Routledge Companion to Applied Performance, edited by Ananda Breed and Tim Prentki (London and New York: Routledge, 2020).
Amanda Mascarenhas
Amanda Mascarenhas is a designer and visual artist. She designs in a variety of styles including, touring, musicals, opera and immersive work. Amanda prides herself in creating bold spaces that encapsulate the audience from every aspect, she creates sensory spaces that engage the viewer even before the performance has started.
As part of her visual arts work, Amanda is community artist. She facilitates workshops for a wide variety of groups, such as young migrants, intergenerational and PMLD groups. Her workshops are
art-based with a focus towards connection and exploration of different art forms. Her practice is also informed by trauma awareness.
She graduated from Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance gaining BA(Hons) in Theatre Design. She grew up in London and is based in London. She is Associate Artist to Kazzum Arts and The Kings Head Theatre.
Mo Sumah
Morlai Sumah is Telegraph Hill Centre’s Facilities Co-ordinator, and he runs Mend it with Mo, a monthly repair café. He’s an expert at making all sorts of toys and household gadgets work again – proof that recycling and reusing can work, and he is passionate about resisting the throwaway society. Originally from Sierra Leone, where he began mending and repurposing, he now uses those skills to help the local community avoid ditching things that no longer work properly, and giving them new life.