Miles-Wildin & Ng Productions
Using the Swiss Army Knife as a metaphor to describe the story of our partnership as co-leaders: each equipment serves a unique purpose to accomplish a job efficiently, so do our unique expertise: Nickie possessing artistic vision and creative leadership, and Grace possessing entrepreneurial spirit and strategic leadership. Together, our partnership stems from a common and connected social justice ethos and vision that becomes a passionate and resource-laden fit for purpose tool of combined skills, experience and values.
Together we can challenge the arts world, create high quality work, and inspire the next generation of D/deaf, disabled and neurodiverse leaders to be change makers in the cultural tapestry of the arts. As joint leaders, we are both unafraid to be curious, liminal and critical thinkers. Nickie as a disabled woman having to negotiate the world around her, and Grace as a Singaporean woman of Chinese ethnicity facing attitudinal barriers when working in the UK. Our combined lived experiences have forged a partnership based on our understanding of social injustice and how the arts can play a major part in challenging the white, non-disabled narrative.
How our Swiss Army Knife partnership would work
As a partnership, we are curious. Our curiosity is built on a solid foundation of vulnerability and courage practiced over years from our lived experiences. This type of leadership inspires people to be freer to identify as underground, punky, underbelly-esque proud outliers who are giving the mainstream time to catch up to what disability arts can do. Making us new thinkers unafraid to challenge and question “what do we want the arts world to look like in the next twenty years?”
We can successfully hold the tension of paradoxes that are inherent in social entrepreneurship: letting chaos reign (the act of building) and reining in chaos (the act of scaling); ambition and attention to detail; optimism and paranoia; velocity and quality when building new things; and finally, thinking global, acting local.
As a leadership partnership we seek to become a disability-led and passionate diverse intersectional advocacy organisation working towards an ambitious artistic and organisational developmental journey that will champion and empower others.
Artistic development leadership
Nickie is a Director and Theatre maker who has been involved with disability arts for over twenty years in a variety of ways. She knows the importance of being part of a creative community that challenges the preconceptions society has about disability, and that through art we can navigate the judgements and demonisation to create high quality work. Her artistic vision pushes people to think who can make art, what high quality means, and places the disabled narrative centre stage. She excels as a leader when she is making work and enabling others to do so from young people to artists both regionally and internationally. Nickie is always looking for the opportunity to initiate conversations with venues, broker creative partnerships, and take artists to the next stage.
Grace is a highly skilled producer with a track record in artist development and multi-disciplinary programming and projects. She is consistently excited by artists. As a leader, she has the emotional courage to be a relationship holder for artists: guiding them with creative provocations to realise what they want to make, who they are and to harness that energy. She has a tremendous ability to turn an artist’s idea into a real, living project and bring partners onboard to widen who accesses the work. Her quiet determination to create space and demonstrate care for underrepresented groups has had an impact in both The Lowry’s artist development strategy and the work of the wider programming team as well as her producing peers in the city.
We both share the artistic ethos of embedding creative access at the point of creation and this is not just the responsibility of the disabled artists. We encourage non-disabled makers, organisations and venues to develop and integrate creative access throughout their work as this will enrich their programming and audience development.
Organisational development leadership
When the arts industry closed in March, the inequality and disproportionately hard-hit disabled community that emerged sparked the We Shall Not Be Removed Disability Arts Alliance. The Black Lives Matter movement also sparked the awareness that the Disability Arts Movement needed to champion its intersectionality with race, gender and sexual identities when challenging ableism. As the wider cultural industries now begin the uncharted terrain of renewal in a post-Covid-19 world, there is now a brilliant opportunity for diverse cultural leaders to lead the sector towards a robust equal access approach to recovery.
As the next generation are not so binary and the edges are excitingly blurred we want to be an organisation that reflects that. We would build an organisational culture and structure that believes in trailblazing artists, champions high quality work, and holds social justice and the social model of disability in high regard. An intersectional group of people that say: we are not just a tick box; we mean business; we bring value to the table; we may not have all the answers immediately but we will think things through, collaborate and work out the best way forward.
To achieve this, our partnership holds our values of generosity and compassion close to our hearts, and these values emanate in our actions and behaviours. Being passionate about people accessing the arts we are unafraid to push expectations, break the glass ceiling and pull up everyone with us. Because we know it is lonely on your own.
Creative and Effective Partnerships
Through her role as Graeae’s Associate Director and Head of New Writing Nickie has been instrumental in curating an exciting programme of work for both alumni and emerging writers consisting of co-commissions leading to potential co-productions with venues, residencies, masterclasses and the digital season ‘Crips Without Constraints.’ Working closely with the Executive Director to secure continual funding Nickie has an annual departmental budget of £100k to allocate for projects feeding into the overall strategic development of the company and its place in the industry as a flagship organisation for Deaf and disabled theatre makers.
Within 6 months of joining The Lowry, Grace successfully brokered artist development partnerships with six other arts organisations (Royal Exchange Theatre, MIF, Contact, HOME, STUN and University of Manchester School of Theatre) to nurture the next generation of north west based BESEA writers and performers. These programmes have directly contributed to organisations engaging with early career BESEA artists when they previously did not. She also brought together partnerships with the University of Nottingham and Greater Manchester venues to explore training up both in-house technicians and artists to embed creative captioning within their work.
We share a passion in connecting and promoting great participatory art to local communities. We believe in empowering grassroots artists to realise their true potential and have sustainable livelihoods. And we want the communities to feed into and be proud of our programme.
Standing/Sitting in the Gap
Nickie and Grace aim to stand/sit in the breach, filling the gap, building bridges and pathways as one singular multi-tool Swiss Army Knife purpose built to lead the organisation, and whose success is measured by advocacy, solidarity and refusal to be quiet in a post-pandemic world. We hope there will be an opportunity to share our projects with you.