Naomi Lord is an interdisciplinary artist, producer and researcher working across Greater Manchester (UK) and Northeast Ohio (USA). Spanning participatory art, performance, cultural education and community development, her practice explores cultural democracy: who produces culture, whose knowledge is recognised and how people can exercise greater authorship within the places they inhabit. Through sustained relationships, situated observation and collective enquiry, she creates artworks, programmes and cultural infrastructures that build agency, belonging and shared cultural life—particularly in post-industrial places experiencing social and economic change.
Naomi Lord is an interdisciplinary artist and producer, cultural practitioner and researcher working across the UK and United States. Her practice moves between artistic production, cultural development, research and learning, spanning individual artworks and performances, long-term programmes, artist development and participatory cultural environments.
Central to her practice is an interest in cultural democracy: who produces culture, whose knowledge is recognised, and how people might exercise greater authorship within the places they inhabit. Developed through sustained relationships and collective approaches, her work considers creative practice as a means of building agency, belonging and shared cultural life, particularly within communities and places experiencing social and economic change.
Her artistic practice extends into the infrastructures that enable cultural participation: programmes, partnerships, learning environments and networks through which artists and communities can develop ideas, skills and relationships over time. Increasingly working between Greater Manchester and Northeast Ohio, she brings this experience into dialogue across post-industrial contexts, connecting artistic practice with education and wider cultural and civic development.
.jpg)
.jpeg)
ART, CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT & PLACE
Naomi's practice has developed through more than two decades of work across theatre, visual and participatory arts, cultural education and community development. Rather than treating these as separate disciplines, her work increasingly considers the relationships between them: how artistic processes can create conditions for learning, how cultural participation can develop individual and collective agency, and how sustained creative engagement might contribute to the ways communities understand and shape place.
Projects have ranged from participatory performance and temporary occupation of vacant buildings to large-scale installations, community filmmaking, public events and neighborhood cultural programmes. Works including Town of Children, A Paradise of Displacement and Making Room have created different structures through which participants move from audiences or recipients toward contributors, collaborators and cultural authors.
This has led to a particular interest in the developmental possibilities of artistic practice. Rather than approaching communities through predetermined ideas of need, Naomi's work begins through discovery: spending time in place, building depth networks, following introductions and existing relationships, and attending to the cultural activity already taking place. Creative processes can then become spaces in which knowledge is exchanged, relationships deepen, ideas are tested and new forms of collective activity become possible.
The work asks how capacities practiced culturally—curiosity, imagination, dialogue, negotiation, authorship and collective decision-making—might also strengthen people's capacity to participate in civic life.
.jpg)
Town of Children, department store takeover & action painting, Bolton, Greater Manchester · 2024
Forest of Imagination, Bath, Somerset · 2025
Are We Not Strangers?, Cleveland Public Theatre, Ohio · 2026. Photograph: Emmanuel Wallace.
A Paradise of Displacement, Ingenuity Cleveland, Ohio · 2026
Town of Children, action painting, Bolton, Greater Manchester · 2024
LEARNING AS CULTURAL PRACTICE
Learning has been a continuous strand of Naomi's work and a site through which questions of authorship, agency and cultural democracy can be explored in practice.
As Founder and Director of Creatives Now and through her wider work across arts and education, she develops creative environments in which children, young people, artists, educators and communities can experiment, make decisions and produce culture rather than simply receive it. This has included youth-led cultural programmes, artist residencies, interdisciplinary learning, professional development, creative health, community filmmaking and collaborations between schools, artists and cultural organizations.
Her work is particularly concerned with the conditions that make creative agency possible: permission to experiment and fail; access to artists, materials and cultural spaces; opportunities for ideas to move between disciplines; and structures through which participants can influence what happens next.
Projects such as Town of Children have extended these principles into public and civic space, asking what changes when young people are given meaningful responsibility not simply for participating in cultural activity, but for imagining and making the environments they want to inhabit.
.jpg)
.jpg)
Open Doors, a youth-led cultural access event, Bolton, Greater Manchester · 2026
Creatives Now youth film production for National Saturday Club, Somerset House, London · 2025
RESEARCH, PLACE & TRANSLOCAL PRACTICE
Naomi's research develops through practice: through making, observation, conversation, documentation and sustained presence within particular places. Her ongoing Situated Observation practice combines photography with discovery and depth networking, following relationships, introductions, local knowledge and cultural networks as a means of understanding what already exists before determining what an artistic or developmental intervention might become.
Since 2025, this enquiry has increasingly developed between Greater Manchester and Northeast Ohio, including work in Cleveland and East Cleveland. Through Ear to the Ground, Naomi works as an artist-researcher within a translocal enquiry into creativity, community and place across post-industrial contexts.
Central to this research is a refusal to understand the effects of economic and institutional disinvestment as evidence of cultural deficit. Where dominant narratives of post-industrial places are often articulated through what has been lost, withdrawn or is perceived to be absent, Naomi's work attends instead to cultural production as it is already articulated through the particularities of people and place: through relationships, knowledge, memory, informal networks, creative activity and everyday forms of cultural authorship that may sit beyond institutional accounts of a locality.
Movement between places therefore does not seek to transfer a fixed model from one context to another. Instead, it asks what might be learned through sustained attention to both similarity and difference, and what may be transferable at the level of method—attention, listening, co-production and collective enquiry—while understanding cultural development as something continually produced through relationships specific to place.
Elderwood Interior, East Cleveland, Ohio · 2026
The Julia and Ulysses S. Grant Home, Eastern Market, Detroit · 2026
Rooted in Place, a panel discussion hosted by Bradford City of Culture · 2026
The Michigan Theatre parking lot, Detroit, Michigan · 2026
_2400x3200.png)
BUILDING CULTURAL INFRASTRUCTURE
Creatives Now Youth Concept Lab. This work forms part of a three-year international research project, funded by DfFE Wales and the Arts Council of Wales, bringing young people’s recommendations on social-emotional wellbeing into teacher education · 2025
Alongside individual artworks, Naomi develops programmes, partnerships and organizational structures intended to enable cultural activity to continue beyond a single encounter.
This work includes artist development, programme design, partnership building, fundraising, commissioning, evaluation and the development of collaborative frameworks across arts, education and community contexts. Naomi is particularly interested in how organizations can create conditions for artists and communities to develop knowledge through practice: participating across processes of research, conceptualization, production and reflection rather than encountering only a finished cultural product.
BUILDING CULTURAL INFRASTRUCTURE
Alongside individual artworks, Naomi develops programmes, partnerships and organizational structures intended to enable cultural activity to continue beyond a single encounter.
This work includes artist development, programme design, partnership building, fundraising, commissioning, evaluation and the development of collaborative frameworks across arts, education and community contexts. Naomi is particularly interested in how organizations can create conditions for artists and communities to develop knowledge through practice: participating across processes of research, conceptualization, production and reflection rather than encountering only a finished cultural product.
Current Positions & Affiliations
Founder & Director · Creatives Now, Greater Manchester
Artist-Researcher · Ear to the Ground, UK / USA
Arts MBA Cohort 2026–27 · Global Leaders Institute
Director of Creative Learning & Partnerships · Bolton School Foundation
National Saturday Club Tutors' Advisory Group
Steering Member · GM Freelance Network, Greater Manchester
Fellow · Royal Society of Arts
Selected Partnerships & Professional Practice
Naomi has developed work with and contributed to programmes involving organizations including the Royal Society of Arts, National Saturday Club, Curious Minds, Forest of Imagination, Global Institute of Creative Thinking, Leeds Beckett University, Bolton International Film Festival, Loiter (East Cleveland), Cleveland Public Theatre, Riff Mechanics, Neighborhood Connections (Cleveland) and Ingenuity Cleveland, alongside schools, artists, and many other community organisations and independent cultural spaces in the UK and United States.
