About 2025-6 Showcase Artists
Screen South’s 2025-6 Showcase Artists are a cohort of ten creatives receiving bespoke support to bring their projects to completion. Their projects span art forms, from visual to auditory to immersive, and beyond.
This year’s artists are: Laura Burns, Emma Critchley, Liam Francis & Maya Carroll, Richie Moment, Jane Pitt & Matt Rowe
Laura Burns
Laura’s project, working title Dreamers of the Wild Beyond, began as an exploration of neuroqueer relations to land and nature, and has expanded into a “multi-chapter” constellation artwork, a filmic mapping through dialogue, performance, future fiction and ceremony, of the less visible aspects of land. Spanning multiple geographies, it is made in dialogue with people and place. The work will consist of separate films within an installation of large scale textiles and foraged clay sculptures. An exhibition, Dreamers of the Wild Beyond, took place at Strange Cargo, Folkestone from 8-11 October 2026.
Laura is an interdisciplinary artist and facilitator, working with textile, performance, writing, dance and film. Their work seeks to attend the impact of colonial capitalism’s enclosures of land, bodies and practices. They ask how land-emergent knowledges give rise to transformative justice and abolitionist futures. They are a member of transdisciplinary artist collective Decolonising Botany.
Emma Critchley, Liam Francis & Maya Carroll
Emma, Liam and Maya have collaborated on HOLD, a new film commissioned by Sadlers’ Wells for their Dance Digital Programme.
Two strangers, who must navigate a submerged landscape, share a remnant from a world lost.
Emma Critchley is an artist/filmmaker working predominantly underwater, exploring ecological themes and the human relationship to the environment through dance, sound and film. Her practice spans 20 years and has involved collaborations with dancers, scientists and environmental organisations. The team for this project consists of Emma and two experienced collaborators, Maya Carroll and Liam Francis — who have started to explore a unique in-water movement practice, which began in Emma’s recent film piece Soundings.
Liam Francis is an international dance artist working across theatre, musical theatre, film, and television. He began his career with ZooNation Dance Company before becoming a leading dancer with Rambert Dance Company from 2014 to 2021. Here he performed repertoire by renowned choreographers, including Christopher Bruce, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Merce Cunningham, Ben Duke, Sharon Eyal, Wayne McGregor, and Hofesh Shechter. He has been nominated in Dance Europe’s ‘Dancer of the Year’ and Tanz magazine’s ‘Best Male Dancer’.
Alongside his performance career, Liam is an award-winning choreographer whose work has been commissioned by Rambert, Skånes Dansteater, Ballet Theater Trier, SALLY Dansgezelschap Maastricht, Salt Dance, Shechter2, and Yorke Dance Project. He is also the Artistic Director of Liam Francis Dance Company, through which he presents his choreographic work nationally and internationally.
Maya Carroll is a dance artist based in West Yorkshire. She trained at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, obtaining a first class BPA (Hons) degree. She then joined the Postgraduate Performance Company Verve, where she performed works by Maxine Doyle, Noa Zuk, Ben Wright and Joan Clevillé. Maya graduated with a distinction for her MA, and was awarded the ‘Achievement in Professional Practice Award’ for her time in the company.
As a professional, Maya’s work spans performing, choreography, teaching, rehearsal direction, and movement direction, with a strong emphasis on improvisational and collaborative processes. She has been a collaborator for an eclectic mix of projects, working with artists including Lost Dog Dance, Extended Play Dance, Amy Voris, Wilhelmina Ojanen, Ruby Portus, Matthew Robinson, Bridie Gane and Liam Francis Dance Company. In 2023 and 2024, Maya was a guest dancer with National Dance Company Wales, performing work my Marcos Morau and SAY Dance. Maya has been developing her work as a movement director with director and writer Andrea Heaton, and for the past two years she has worked in close collaboration with artist Emma Critchley on her project, Soundings, with the choreographic support of Siobhan Davies.
HOLD (2026) – Video Still.
Susanna Howard
Susanna’s project began life when she and her friend Kathryn Gilfoy decided to capture Kath’s words, before her ability to speak was halted due to the terminal neurodegenerative condition, MSA (Multiple System Atrophy). Not intending to make a film, Susanna subsequently began shooting moments of the two of them together, merely for posterity. She went on to shoot for 4 years and the unexpected result is now a short hybrid documentary MSA? You’re Fu*ked!, with an accompanying impact campaign exploring the subjectivity of quality of life and consciousness.
Working with an animator, AI voice specialists Eleven Labs, a neurologist and a mainly local team, Susanna has had to wrestle with her own desires for the work and what it means to her, in parallel with the film representing part of her friend’s legacy. The plan is for the film to tour galleries, cinemas, festivals and medical institutions in 2026/27. Susanna is delighted to have been permission to use music by Self Esteem in the project.
Susanna Howard is an actor, director and writer who has run the creative health charity Living Words for over 15 years. Susanna honed Living Words’ flagship Listen out Loud co-creative practice to support creative expression in project members, which has resulted in books, performance, film and song, as well as individualised project members’ books. While running Living Words Susanna accidentally became an award winning director and producer working on adverts, corporates and socially engaged short form documentaries to subsidise – and latterly be part of – her work for the charity.
Running Living Words necessarily sidelined Susanna’s personal practice, and autumn 2026 marks a significant shift as Susanna deepens her performance and film work following an ACE DYCP award in which she has explored breathwork, movement and film methodologies. 2027 sees Susanna developing this practice further to lead an artistic enquiry into breathwork and voice as entry to character and narrative. She hopes to also have time to document her work online…watch this space.
Richie Moment
TEN is a multi-screen installation by Richie Moment, featuring seven new works made during his time as a Screen South Showcase Artist alongside earlier work from a decade of his video practice. Using digital and analogue imagery, found footage and layered narratives, the exhibition reflects on cultural and technological change, progress, mortality and modernity, inviting audiences to consider our relationship with the past and imagine what might come next. The new works will be shown in 2026 at Somers Gallery, London and Strange Cargo, Folkestone and Unlimited Gallery, Edinburgh.
Richie Moment is an artist whose work exists at the intersection of pop culture, satire, and self-reflection. Known for his vibrant and unapologetically chaotic aesthetic, Richie challenges conventional artistic norms through a multidisciplinary approach that spans printing, sculpture, video, light works and installation. A graduate of London’s Royal Academy Schools and UWE Bristol, Richie has exhibited his work internationally in institutions, galleries and festivals, including MoMa Taipei, Museum of Modern Art Las Vegas, The Bluecoat Liverpool, the ICA and Royal Academy London.
Jane Pitt
Jane’s project Wild Polyphonies is a new body of wordless vocal work that she has been developing since April 2025. Its methodology has evolved through her solo & participatory practice of 360 listening & vocalising in the landscape to devise layered interpretations of site-specific sound, recorded and performed live. This will be developed as a new polyphonic work presented within the Sound Rig.
Jane Pitt’s work evokes a heightened awareness and connection with our environment through sound. She has a reputation for sensitivity to both the environment and the people she makes work with. Jane is always evolving her practice to embrace new approaches to making thoughtful, stimulating work that is accessible for audiences in non-traditional arts spaces. Jane will work with the Screen South Immersive Sound Rig. Jane has been based in Medway for 20 years making work locally, nationally and internationally.
Matt Rowe
Matt will be developing Side Quest: Virtual Folk Rituals in an Augmented Landscape, a transmedia artwork merging greenscreen performance, Unreal Engine environments, and digitised folklore artefacts to explore local myth, ritual, and regional identity in virtual space. The project reinterprets Kent’s coastal folklore through immersive digital storytelling. Costumed performers are filmed in green-screen studio conditions and composited into surreal diorama-like sets built using AI-assisted tools and photogrammetry. The scenes are part theatre, part ritual, and part digital folklore reconstruction for exhibition in Autumn 26.
Matt Rowe’s work is focused on vernacular symbols and the language of folklore. His creative projects often combine various disciplines, ceramics, model making and textiles to produce sculptural costumes, props and environments that play with notions of regional and local identity. He uses his costumes and props as a means to create unexpected structures in the landscape that echo with associations of storybook narratives and ancient legend that blur the real and the imaginary.
Nick Vivian & Gazelle Twin
Thenix Sound Foundation: Sound First
Gazelle Twin (aka Elizabeth Bernholz) and Nick Vivian are collaborating to create the prototype sound world for a future live immersive performance inspired by JG Ballard’s visionary The Unlimited Dream Company.
Music and soundscape will meld to become the primary narrative force of the work (before words/visuals/performers come into play) cocooning an in-the-round audience within a sonic dome of spatial sound, object-based audio and extreme low frequencies. Alongside producer Nick Sweeting (co-founder, Improbable) and CPP organisation Ideas Test, they will be working with young people from Medway to create an inescapable group sound dream.
Nick Vivian is an Oscar and BAFTA nominated screenwriter, and co-creator of Cotton Panic! for Manchester International Festival, 2017: the site-specific piece used live performance, dance, film and modern Industrial (electronic) music to tell the historic industrial story of the cotton famine in 1850s Lancashire.
Immersive Arts
@thenex.sound.foundation
Gazelle Twin (AKA Elizabeth Bernholz) is a musician and producer whose work ranges from dark electronica and collaborations with drone choir NYX, to soundtracks for film, TV and installation. Her score for Channel 4’s drama Summerwater: has recently been nominated for an Ivor Novello award.
Supported by:
