Lunchbox Session: Emily Williams

About

What does it mean to be making and producing new work in these times? Particularly as a w/oman and in Devon.

Join Emily Williams for a lunchtime session to explore this question further, hear the findings of her recent action research project Invisible Threads (reviewing the producing culture of the Southwest), listen to how others might be finding solutions, and connect over navigating the same challenges.

To make or produce new work right now means navigating an ecology that is structurally uneven. Funding remains competitive and inconsistent; institutions are still reckoning – often slowly – with entrenched inequities, and the labour of care, both visible and invisible, continues to shape who gets to create and how. For many w/omen, making work is not a singular act of authorship but a negotiation with time, access, and sustainability.

It means working inside a contradiction. Urgency sits alongside exhaustion; visibility coexists with precarity. For women making theatre and live performance in the UK, this moment is defined as much by constraint as it is by possibility.

And yet, beautiful work is being made and produced — boldly and in spite of, on its own terms.

There is a refusal to wait for permission. Female artists are building alternative structures, forming collectives, and redefining what constitutes "theatre" itself: hybrid forms, interdisciplinary practices, performances that unfold across digital and physical spaces, that centre lived experience without apology.

How do we continue to take up space in an industry that has not always made room? To tell stories that have been consistently sidelined. To experiment, to fail, to begin again; not as an exception, but as part of a wider, ongoing reshaping of our sector and the communities that contribute to the stories we tell.

Making and producing new work now is not just about production; it is about reimagining the conditions under which work is made. It is a practice of persistence, of care, and of collective redefinition.

Emily Williams is a Creative Consultant, Executive Producer, Coach & Facilitator based in Devon working across the cultural sector to support the development of extraordinary ideas and ambitious organisations in the U.K.

She has 16 years' experience and over the last 9 years has held leadership roles including most recently CEO of Theatre Bristol. Emily has built a reputation for values-led leadership; she holds skills in ambitious and considered strategic and organisational development, business planning, fundraising, sector-facing development along with the producing of internationally renowned work often in non-traditional theatre spaces. Emily is a non-exec director of Rising Arts Agency and part of the Clore Alumni.

Clients include; Action Hero, Alibi, Beyond Face, Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, Creative UK, Fotonow, Gloucester Culture Trust, o-region, Super Culture, Radical Ritual, Goldsmiths, & Libraries Unlimited.

This event is part of Reclaim Festival, our yearly celebration of women in the arts. Featuring brilliant new writing, not-so-new-but-also-brilliant writing, workshops, music and more, immerse yourself in locally sourced female greatness, to be enjoyed by everyone.