Matt Bayford

With over 40 years of experience in the performing arts industry, I work as a theatre consultant, offering tailored solutions in the fields of interim management, artistic programming, leadership and team development, business planning and delivery, and project management. In 2024, I completed a five-year contract at Reliance Industries Limited, where I leveraged my expertise in performing arts development and management to support one of India’s largest corporations in the further operation and growth of the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre.

I am a theatre performer, movement practitioner, educator, and parent artist. I trained in the UK, Malta, and Greece, and have worked on performance projects and interdisciplinary collaborations in Europe and the UK for the past 15 years. My creative practice is informed by contemporary performance devising. The work is physical, visual and poetic; it shifts between presence and representation, layers mythologies with true stories and looks for surprising uses of movement, sound and objects. My current creative work focuses on the natural world, ecology and outdoor arts. In my research and projects, I look for meaningful ways to weave the natural world into my movement language, choreographies and performance artworks.

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.