ABOUT

Kagiso Lesego Molope

Kagiso Lesego Molope is an Indigenous South African, an award-winning novelist and playwright. She writes post-apartheid, feminist and resistance literature. Her work centres the history and experiences of indigenous South Africans and tackles issues of race, class, sexuality and identity and her books are read in schools across Southern Africa as well as in parts of Europe. Her published novels are Dancing in the Dust, The Mending Season, This Book Betrays My Brother and Such a Lonely, Lovely Road. Her play, Maya Angelou: Black Woman Rising has been produced and staged at Oslo’s Nordic Black Theatre. She became the first indigenous South African writer to be on the IBBY List in 2006 and to win the Patrick Fitzpatrick Award for Young Adult Literature. In 2019 she won both the Ottawa Book Award and the Inaugural Pius Adesanmi Memorial award, for her third and fourth books respectively. She has been living in Canada for the past two decades.

Paminder Parbha

Paminder Parbha is a human rights worker, artist, and a keen advocate of culture as a driver for social change and cohesion. During a career spanning over 25 years which have included working for Amnesty International as well as Freemuse as the Research and Policy Advisor, her key focus has been on addressing systemic forms of discrimination. Paminder joined PEN International in November 2020 as the Head of International Programs.

Jan Lothe Eriksen

Jan Lothe Eriksen has served as General Manager for Safemuse since its creation: A former musician and cellist of the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, vice president of the Norwegian Musicians' Union (now Creo - Norwegian Union for Arts and Culture), administrative director of the Norwegian Traditional Music and Dance Association (NFD) & Norwegian Traditional Music Agency, and initiator and first director of Riksscenen (National Venue for Traditional Music and Dance, Norway). Jan initiated Safemuse together with Creo in 2011 in close cooperation with Freemuse. Safemuse was formally established in December 2013 as an independent membership organisation by musicians and composers in Norway, with the main purpose to facilitate safe places to work and stay for persecuted artists and artists at risk. Jan and Safemuse have followed and have had different assignments and positions in connection to Safe Havens since the very start of the initiative.

Photo: Even Finnsrud Musikkultur

Eleni Tsitsirikou

Eleni Tsitsirikou lives and works in Helsinki. Currently she is the Residency Manager at HIAP - Helsinki International Artists Programme, a non-profit artist residency organisation that offers artists and arts professionals based in Finland and abroad time and space for open-ended research and experimentation, as well as opportunities to undertake creative work and engage in an interdisciplinary dialogue with the local art scene. During her time at HIAP she has managed projects, events and exhibitions, and has worked with residency programmes that highlight a geographical area, an aspect of artistic practice or focus on specific topics such as freedom of artistic expression, as well as art and ecology. Before coming to Finland, Eleni worked as curator’s assistant in organising temporary exhibitions at the Teloglion Foundation of Art in Thessaloniki, Greece, and coordinated a team working with digitization of the Foundation’s archival materials. Born and raised in Greece, she holds a BA in Archaeology and Art History from the Aristoteles University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and a MA in Museum Studies from the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany. She complemented her studies with an international exchange at the Institute of Art History at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany.

Meriam Bousselmi

Meriam Bousselmi is a Tunisian lawyer, author, director, and researcher working at the intersection of justice, performance, and critical aesthetics. Her multilingual and transdisciplinary practice—across Arabic, French, English, and German—engages with questions of (in)justice, political subjectivity, and collective agency. Her play Alzheimer received the Best Arab Theatre Play Prize in 2012 from Sheikh Sultan Bin Mohammed Al Qasimi. In 2014, she was awarded the Prize for Best Conference at the conclusion of her legal internship at the National Order of Lawyers of Tunisia for her dissertation on the precarious financial conditions of dramatic artists and the limits of the application of Tunisian intellectual property law in practice. In 2015, she co-authored the Carthage Declaration for the Protection of Artists in Vulnerable Situations with Prof. Dr. Hamadi Redissi and Prof. Dr. Lassaad Jamoussi—a juridico-political manifesto defending artistic freedom and cultural rights. Since 2018, she has actively collaborated with Safe Havens and Freedom Talks (SH|FT), notably curating and moderating the 2021 Safe Havens Majlis. She is affiliated with the University of Hildesheim.

Mary Ann DeVlieg

Dr. Mary Ann DeVlieg is an independent consultant, project and policy evaluator, facilitator and speaker, presently working as an Expert to the Council of Europe’s initiative on artistic freedom : Free to Create/Create to be Free. Since 2010 she has been protecting and defending the human rights of artists-at-risk as a case worker and researcher. She founded the EU working group, Arts-Rights-Justice; was freeDimensional’s Director of Strategic Development (2013-2015) and was a co-founder of the Arts-Rights-Justice Academy, University of Hildesheim and IARA (International Artists rights Advisors). She is a former Secretary General of IETM (1994-2013), the largest international network for contemporary performing arts. She founded/co-founded www.on-the-move.org and Roberto Cimetta Fund for Mobility in the Mediterranean, is currently a Board member of Ettijahat-Independent Culture. Her PhD examined the rights of relocated artists in the EU cultural policy and practice landscape.

Sofia Carrillo

Sofia Carrillo is a cultural manager and curator of contemporary art. She
specializes in Cultural Management and Cultural Policies (UAM
Iztapalapa/OEI), has a master's degree in Art History in the area of
Curatorship, and was a fellow of the National Museum of Ethnology and
Lake Biwa Museum / Japan International Cooperation Agency to be part
of the seminar "Knowledge Co-Creation Program on Museums and
Community Development". She was Coordinator of Visual Arts in the
Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco, co-curator for SH/FT, a
Non-Governmental Organization that supports international artists at
risk, and Deputy Director of programming in Ex Teresa Arte Actual from
2014 to 2017. Currently, she works as Coordinator of Development and
Public Relations for the Museo Universitario del Chopo. Additionally,
she is dedicated to the analysis of archival practices and
contemporary art, focusing on the study of the complexity of
registration in specific community proposals. (Mexico City, 1978)