Pip Jamieson - Founder & CEO, The Dots

Pip Jamieson is the Founder & CEO of The Dots the UK’s leading professional networking platform for the creative industries. Born out of a genuine passion to make the creative industries more productive, open and diverse, Pip launched the platform in the UK in 2014.

A secular trend is underway where whole waves of traditional service industries will disappear or radically change as they become increasingly automated. But there is no algorithm for creativity - creators are critical part of the future workforce. So if we want our children and grandchildren to have jobs and our economies to thrive, we need to support the people that bring creative ideas to life. That is what The Dots is all about; connecting, supporting and championing the people, teams and companies that make ideas happen.

An entrepreneur with a distinctive marmite laugh (you either love it or you hate it) Pip is a native Brit who has spent the last 13 years immersed in the creative industries, including executive roles at MTV Australia and New Zealand.  Pip is on a mission to connect 1 million creatives and freelancers to commercial opportunities by 2018, helping build a stronger, more profitable and diverse creative sector. Pip lives on a houseboat with her husband in Kings Cross, London.

David O'Brien - Chancellor's Fellow in Cultural and Creative Industries, University of Edinburgh

Dave O’Brien is Chancellor’s Fellow in Cultural and Creative Industries at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Cultural Policy: Management, Value and Modernity in the Creative Industries (2014) and the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Global Cultural Policy (2017), Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies: Cultural Policy (2017) and After Urban Regeneration (2015). He was an AHRC/ESRC policy fellow at the UK’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport, writing the Measuring the Value of Culture report, and has worked on projects investigating communities in the creative economy; dementia and imagination; cultural events for urban regeneration; and cultural value and inequality. He has published a range of papers on these issues. Currently he is lead investigator on Who is missing from the picture? an AHRC funded creative economy project examining inequality in cultural and creative jobs, audiences, and wider British society. He tweets @drdaveobrien and he is the host of the New Books in Critical Theory podcast.

Nene Parsotam - Co-Founder, VINE Creatives & Founding Member, We Are Stripes

Kai Lutterodt - Founder, Diversity Matters

Kai Lutterodt set up Diversity Matters is an awareness platform with a focus on race matters and BAME (Black, Asian and minority ethnic) representation in the Arts and Media, Education and Work Environments. A graduate of University of the Arts London, she was inspired to advocate on behalf of marginalised students using her platforms as former Students’ Union LCC Officer, University of the Arts London (UAL) Culture & Travel Society co-founder and winner of SUARTS’ “Creative Contribution to the Student Community” award 2016.

Formally the President of UAL African Caribbean Society, since 2014 Kai has passionately engaged African, Caribbean and non-BAME students, as well as industry creatives, in termly events. She has organised an award-winning Film & Literature Festival, and successfully won a campaign to ensure guest lecturers speaking at ACS/Diversity Matters events at UAL are paid AL (associate lecturer) rates.

Kai Lutterodt is an avid blogger, cultural explorer and diversity activist. It’s through her travels around the world that she gained first hand experience “on the field”, exercising her attainments in photography and journalism to advance into documenting stories through the medium of video.

Emma Blake Morsi - Founding Editor-in-Chief, Nocturnal

Featured by the BBC, Emma Blake Morsi is the Founding Editor-in-Chief of Nocturnal, an interactive magazine using the Arts to creatively address and share first person stories on social and cultural issues. The biannual publication is a collection of digital stories as an authentic voice for young Creatives to showcase their obsessions and creatively express themselves through the Arts. Juggling her undergraduate studies at University of Manchester, Emma is also the Assistant Lifestyle Editor for gal-dem and a freelance design consultant for Saffron Records. She has recently been awarded 2017 UK Apprentice Of The Year for her work with the Bristol record label as well as taking on invaluable opportunities within Rising Arts Agency, Situations, and Watershed.

Particularly interested in everything, Emma loves to take on new endeavours and has recently published Nocturnal Issue V (www.nctrnl.co.uk/issues/issue-v). By being part of Young Arnolfini Emma has worked with international artists and co-lead creative workshops for Arts Council England. She was part of the Situations and Rising Arts Agency collaboration as a Situations Rising digital storyteller for the Theaster Gates: Sanctum project, working with illustrations, photography and live digital reporting.

She has been awarded Rife Magazine's 2015 24 Influential Bristolians Under 24 title as well as nominated for Babbasa's EMPOWERED 2016 Award for her Nocturnal work.