Bee Schmid – Creative Practitioner & Artist

I’m an illustrator passionate about connecting people, especially children and families to culture and nature through engaging artwork. I’ve worked with the National Trust, creating illustrations for family trails and events that educate and inspire curiosity. I also create children’s book-style illustrations, crafting playful, imaginative visuals that spark learning and wonder. I also freelance as an artist Educator delivering workshops to children and the community for Pallant House Gallery.

I work for INTO, the International National Trusts Organisation, to protect cultural heritage and promote sustainable development globally. With a background in heritage advocacy and international collaboration, I bring a passion for connecting people and places. Living in Hampshire, I’m inspired by its rich cultural landscape and committed to ensuring that creativity and heritage are accessible, inclusive, future-facing (and occasionally muddy).

Katt is an artist-researcher-practitioner creating strange, playful work shaped by mischief, memory and nature, where reality and fiction blur through mythology and self-reflection. She is undertaking an AHRC-funded CDP PhD at the University of Portsmouth with Portsmouth Natural History Museum, exploring how regional museums can reimagine interactions with natural history collections through participatory creative methods and research-through-design, using emerging technologies within an attunement-led approach. Influenced by poetry, folklore and speculative practice, she brings stories to life through found, stolen and fabricated artefacts, prototypes and sensory encounters, and is drawn to the unreliable narrator as a form of mischief.