Lates: Creating with Pride [online]

We'll be opening the event with Brad Beau Cohen’s (he/him) poetry.

Brad is a queer writer from Guernsey based in London and has been published by Fourteen Poems & Elska Magazine, American literary journal Versification Zine, anthologised twice by Fincham Press, exhibited in The Hilbert Raum and SomosArt House.

His erotica ebook ‘Outside These Lines’ (Berlinable) debuted at No. 8 on Amazon’s gay erotica bestsellers list.

We will also be hearing from Luke, who is a design advocate at zeroheight, where he spends his time talking to the community about designops and design systems. When not talking about how great documentation is, Luke makes prints, sings in a DIY punk band and podcasts about beer and music.

Luke takes us through his journey of how he ended up as a design advocate, what it is that a design advocate actually does, and how it can be a force for positive change within the industry and the products we build.

Eriol has been working as a Designer for 10 years working in for-profits and then moving into NGO's and open source software organisations, working on complex problems like sustainable food systems, peacebuilding and crisis response technology. Eriol now contracts at various open source and tech projects including most recently the Open Food Network.

They are also part of the core teams at Open Source Design and Human Rights Centred Design working group and Sustain UX & Design working group.

Eriol is a part-time funded PhD researcher at Newcastle University's Open Lab looking at how designers participate in humanitarian focussed open source software projects.

Eriol is a non-binary, queer person who uses they/them pronouns.

We will also hear from Mei Mac (she/her) – an actor, theatre maker, puppeteer, movement and aerial artist, dramaturg and activist.

She is a co-founder of Rising Waves, a mentorship scheme for artists and live art practitioners of BESEA (British East and South East Asian) heritage.

In this talk Mei will explore what it means to be a Queer ESEA (East & South East Asian) person in Britain today, amidst systemic racism and the recent tripling in Asian Hate Crime. She will delve into queer imposter syndrome and Bi-Invisibility/ erasure; balancing taking up space and passing on the mic.

Mei will also geek out about her work: Physical storytelling that breathes humanity into the inanimate with the ability to cross language and class barriers.