Realisation 2025

Indra Adnan
Speaker

Indra Adnan is Founder and Co-initator of The Alternative UK, a socio-political platform serving systemic transformation. AUK publishes a Daily Alternative news blog, develops cosmolocal agency networks (CANs) and connects planetary regeneration projects. Indra is concurrently a socio-psychotherapist, writer and consultant on soft power. She is also Visiting Director of Poiesis at Perspectiva. Clients have included the Danish and Brazilian governments, World Economic Forum and NATO. Her book The Politics of Waking Up: Power and Possibility in the Fractal Age was a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year in 2021.

Vanessa Andreotti
Speaker

Vanessa Andreotti is a Brazilian educator, author, philosopher, and activist, as well as Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria. For decades, she has been at the forefront of rethinking education, questioning the dominant assumptions that shape our understanding of progress, knowledge, and change. 

Deeply influenced by the wisdom of Indigenous traditions, Vanessa urges us to see clearly the fractures within modernity and to wake up to the deep truths of interconnection and entanglement. She invites us to meet this time of endings with wisdom, discernment, and compassion. Of Guarani and German ancestry, Vanessa moves fluidly between worlds—trained in the Western academic tradition while also learning from Brazilian Indigenous communities. This unique perspective allows her to integrate multiple ways of knowing, offering rare clarity in a time of uncertainty and planetary transition. At this year’s festival, she will share her most recent workexploring our relationship with artificial intelligence and what it means for the future of humanity and our planet.

Dominique Savitri Bonarjee
Speaker

Dominique is an artist and a dancer. Her research focuses on embodied knowing in ancient Sufi, Daoist and Vedic wisdom traditions. Through an unconventional art practice combining living matter, sound, song, sculptures and drawing, she contemplates notions of time, energy, transformation, and impermanence, both in her body and the materials she works with. Her Art PhD (Goldsmiths University, 2024) entitled Space of the Nameless is presented as a game, involving meditations, koan riddles and dances, for improvising across disciplinary boundaries. In her current work with handcrafted electronics she is creating an ‘instrument as installation’, to hone less visual and more holistically sensuous states of attention. Her monograph, Butoh, as Heard by a Dancer (Routledge, 2024) is an oral account of Butoh’s postwar Japanese origins and legacies, told from a practitioner’s perspective. www.dominiquebb.com   Instagram: @dominique_savitri

Juliette Otterburn Hall
Speaker

Juliette Otterburn Hall is a passionate advocate for meaningful work, purposeful leadership, and creating impact beyond profit. As Co-founder and Managing Partner at consultancy Value Squared, she helps individuals and organisations align their own purpose to a greater vision that unlocks potential and increases value for stakeholders, fostering collaboration, and driving change in a way that is deeply human and emotionally intelligent. Juliette’s career began as a programme maker and storyteller, working across multiple genres and territories. Her passion for innovation, imagination and purpose led her to work in transformative business leadership, digital / innovation, and cultural change – turning challenges into opportunities. She has led groundbreaking ventures at the intersection of tech, data, and creativity, helping teams and leaders cultivate cultures of trust, clarity, and shared purpose. A firm believer in the power of communication and connection, she empowers people to step into their fullest potential – creating work that not only succeeds but truly matters. At the heart of her work is a simple yet profound mission: to inspire individuals and organisations to think beyond conventional success and build something that leaves a lasting, positive impact on the world.

Elizabeth Oldfield
Speaker

Elizabeth Oldfield is an experienced leader, speaker, writer and podcast host with a passion for intelligent public engagement on issues of faith, identity, and healing our common life. She appears regularly in the media, including BBC One, Sky News, the World Service, and writing in Prospect Magazine, UnHerd and The Financial Times.

She also hosts The Sacred, a podcast, events and visual content brand which creates space for a wide range of guests to reflect on their deepest values. For ten years she was Director of Theos, the UK’s leading religion and society think tank. She spent the first part of her career working at the BBC in television and radio, contributing to programmes including Beyond Belief and the Moral Maze, as well as Radio 3 and 4 documentaries. She is motivated by the dearth of real wisdom in public life, by a desire to increase empathy across our deep differences and the way spirituality can help individuals and societies flourish. She has a masters in Theology and the Arts and lives in an intentional community in south london.  Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times is now available to preorder. More on her coaching and consultancy practice at elizabetholdfield.com. You can find her regular writing at morefullyalive.substack.com.

Benedict Pollard
Speaker

Roc Sandford
Speaker

Roc Sandford is a writer, artist, and activist, as well as a founding member of Extinction Rebellion and a member of the artists’ collective Ocean Rebellion. Living on the remote island of Gometra in the Hebrides, Roc has embraced an off-grid, low-impact existence deeply attuned to the natural world. In the recent book Burnt Rain, Roc explores a personal connection to the natural world in one of the UK’s most remote landscapes, offering an unflinching reckoning with the unfolding climate crisis.

Martin Shaw
Speaker

Martin Shaw is a writer, mythographer and storyteller. Author of seventeen books, Dr Shaw is the director of the Westcountry School of Myth and founder of the Oral Tradition and Mythic Life courses at Stanford University. His book Bardskull was described as “rich and transgressive” by Erica Wagner in The Sunday Times and was Book of the Day in The Guardian. A hugely respected oral storyteller, Shaw has toured internationally numerous times, and led symposiums at both Oxford and Cambridge University. Robert Bly described him as “a true master, one of the very greatest storytellers we have.” His more recent work is what he speaks of as developing “Christian mythopoetics”—a reminder of the depth and mysticism latent in this middle-eastern mystery religion.

Sarah Wilson
Speaker

Sarah Wilson is a bestselling author, journalist, podcaster, and philanthropist and founder of Australia’s largest health and wellness community, I Quit Sugar. As an advocate for a more intentional way of being, Sarah has spent years reckoning with what it means to live well, and has shared her personal explorations with honesty and vulnerability and living fully this This One Wild and Precious Life. Her work is both pragmatic and searching, driven by a deep curiosity about how we might break free from the patterns that diminish our humanity and inhibit our individual and planetary flourishing. In particular, she has been exploring these themes in real time through her writing on Substack.

Jonathan Ainscough
Realisation Player

Jonathan Ainscough is an actor, singer, multi-instrumentalist, director, writer, musical director and arranger. Alongside his work has an improviser with Showstopper and Austentatious, he has worked for the Royal Opera House, English National Opera, Welsh National Opera, Opera North, the Royal Exchange Theatre and the Leeds Playhouse, as well as the award-winning charity Streetwise Opera, leading music and drama workshops with people experiencing homelessness. Twitter: @JAinscough85

Chris Ash
Realisation Player

Chris is a composer, workshop leader, musical director, sound designer, and multi-instrumentalist. A founding member of Showstopper! and An Improbable Musical, he is sometimes found teaching Musical Theatre Writing at Goldsmiths or Royal Central School of Speech & Drama, or coaching Musical Theatre Improvisation at the Royal Academy of Music. As a composer, Chris created “Wasted” with Carl Miller; a “Live Rockumentary” about the Brontë siblings. Collaborating with digital media company Megaverse, Chris has created music & sound for Virtual Reality, and smartphone gameplay.

Chris has led creative workshops for International School students around the world, including on the “Unseen Stories” of asylum-seekers in Hong Kong, and on “Bayanihan” in Manila (ISTA). He has been a guest musical director for many of the London 50-hour Improvathons, and at festivals in Oslo, Rome, Edmonton, Hamburg, Canmore, Copenhagen, Birmingham, and beyond.

Chris Ash and Susan Harrison will be improvising a mini musical, exploring whichever themes rise to the surface during the festival. Using your suggestions they will conjure up a slice of spontaneous entertainment to delight and inspire.

Susan Harrison
Realisation Player

Susan is a member of Showstopper! The Improvised Musical. She has also improvised with Mischief Movie Night, Austentatious and her own company These Folk. She teaches improvisation for Hoopla & The Bridge and is passionate about creating a playful & supportive environment. As an actress she’s worked with numerous companies including; CBBC, The National Theatre & Radio 4.

Susan Harrison and Chris Ash will be improvising a mini musical, exploring whichever themes rise to the surface during the festival. Using your suggestions they will conjure up a slice of spontaneous entertainment to delight and inspire.

Nick Ashley-Cooper
Our Host

Nick Shaftesbury graduated from the London Business School with a Masters in Business Administration in 2008. After an early career as a DJ and music promoter in New York City, he returned to the UK in 2005 and has since overseen the restoration of his family home, St Giles House. The project has won several national awards, including the 2015 Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) Award for Building Conservation and the Historic England Angel Award, Best Rescue of a Historic Building or Site. The work has been documented in a book entitled, ‘The Rebirth of an English Country House’, which he co-wrote with Tim Knox, the current Director of the Royal Collection. He is the first Shaftesbury for 50 years to live in St Giles House, alongside his wife Dinah and their three children.

Pippa Evans
Realisation Player & Programme Co-ordinator

Pippa Evans is an award winning improviser, musical comedian and author of Improv Your Life: An Improviser’s Guide To Embracing Whatever Life Throws At You. In 2013 she and Sanderson Jones started Sunday Assembly, the church for people who don’t believe in God which became a global phenomenon. Though no longer involved in the Sunday Assembly project, Pippa finds herself drawn to the Venn Diagram of secular spirituality, improvisation and humour. How can we be fully ourselves in relation to others? Can we do serious work without taking ourselves too seriously?

Teaching improvisation has taken Pippa everywhere from Drama Schools to boardrooms, working with everyone from footballers to NHS workers. Pippa has been collaborating with Perspectiva since its early iterations and is looking forward to the Realisation Festival in 2025.

www.pippaevans.com

Ed Haddon
Festival Coordinator

Ed is a coach who specialises in working with entrepreneurs and those looking for a more autonomous meaningful life. He works with purpose led leaders to develop their own models of success in business and life. He is particularly interested in redirecting focus from shareholders to a broader set of beneficiaries. He uses coaching to generate honest conversations and change, working at the intersection of psychology and business. He is the author of The Modern Maverick, which helps readers unlock their potential for the benefit of all those around them and society as a whole. He holds degrees in Psychology from Oxford University and in Business from Harvard University and a Diploma in Performance Coaching from The Coaching Academy.

Jonathan Rowson
Director of Perspectiva

Jonathan Rowson is a writer, philosopher and chess Grandmaster who was British Chess Champion from 2004-2006. HE holds degrees from Oxford, Bristol, and Harvard universities, was former director of the Social Brain Center at the RSA and an Open Society Fellow. He is co-founder and director of Perspectiva, a research institute that examines the relationship between complex global challenges and the inner lives of human beings. His latest book is The Moves that Matter – A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life.

Mark Vernon
Programme Co-ordinator and Facilitator

Mark Vernon is a writer and psychotherapist. He contributes to and presents programmes on the radio, as well as writing for the national and religious press, and online publications. He also podcasts, in particular The Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues with Rupert Sheldrake, gives talks and leads workshops. He has a PhD in ancient Greek philosophy, and other degrees in physics and in theology, having studied at Durham, Oxford and Warwick universities. He is the author of several books, including his latest, Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Guide for the Spiritual Journey. He used to be an Anglican priest and lives in London, UK. For more information see www.markvernon.com.