Team and board
Our team
Meet the Metroland Cultures team. You can contact us on the details below.
Lizzie Graham
Programmes Curator
elizabeth@metrolandcultures.com
Annie Jael Kwan
Curator – Brent Biennial 2025
annie@metrolandcultures.com
Dan Mitchell
Programme Coordinator, Studio and Residencies
dan@metrolandcultures.com
Christy O’Beirne
Assistant Curator
christy@metrolandcultures.com
Louise Shelley
Deputy Director
louise@metrolandcultures.com
Lois Stonock
Director
lois@metrolandcultures.com
Metroland Cultures is a registered charity. As a charity, we are governed by a board of trustees. Our trustees are all from Brent or meaningfully connected to the borough through home, upbringing or work.
The Board and team work closely together. The Board bring invaluable knowledge and lived experience of Brent.
They also oversee all our work in line with our charitable objectives and strategy.
Our trustees
Adam Farah-Saad
Adam Farah-Saad is a London based artist. Adam was commissioned artist for the 2020 Biennial ‘On the Side of the Future’, and was part of the Curatorial Committee for the 2022 Brent Biennial ‘In the House of My Love’. Since 2021, he has been a resident at Metroland Studios.
Chris Prempeh
Chris is a North London based creative who has extensive experience in scenic design and construction. With experience spanning live events, art fabrication, marketing and community based arts. Chris first came into contact with Metroland during the 2022 Brent Biennial and has since become a part of the Metroland community.
Eamonn Maxwell
Eamonn Maxwell is a renowned curator and advisor in the visual arts with over two decades of experience. He notably curated the Irish Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011 and significantly transformed Lismore Castle Arts, serving as its director from 2009 to 2016. There, he established a second project space, curated major international exhibitions, and integrated education into programming. In recent years, he has served as a collection adviser to the Arts Council of Ireland, Goldsmiths College London, and private collectors. Maxwell also frequently lectures at institutions such as Crawford College of Art and Design, Ulster University, and University College Dublin.
Elizabeth Aderonke Johnstone
Elizabeth Aderonke Johnstone is a social research professional with seven years of experience in research, monitoring and evaluation across various sectors, including the arts and cultural fields. She played a key role in evaluating the 2022 Brent Biennial, conducting in-depth interviews with local artists, young people, and audiences, and analysing the resulting data. Specialising in mixed methods research, Elizabeth supports learning at beneficiary, organisational, and sectoral levels. In 2023, Elizabeth launched her own consultancy, expanding her expertise to a wider range of projects. Her work has been published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, showcasing her contributions to the field of research.
Jacob Barnes
Jacob Barnes works at the intersection of art and publishing in London, UK. His ventures include Minor Attractions fair, Season 4 Episode 6 Gallery, and Curatorial Affairs magazine. Having begun his career in publishing with a magazine titled Soft Punk, Jacob has consistently sought out entrepreneurial modes of participation in the art world, often creating small communities directed towards broader systemic change. Believing firmly in small groups’ ability to affect macro-level discourse, much of his work is devoted to achieving a sustainable and equitable future for the art world and its constituents.
Matthew Bennett
Matthew Bennett is a senior solicitor with extensive experience in Intellectual Property, Information Technology, Commercial Contracts, and Data Protection. Having trained and qualified into commercial and technology law, he has since built a career as a senior business advisor, working in both private practice and in-house roles.
Melissa Gronlund
Melissa Gronlund is an art writer and editor whose work spans journalism, academic writing, and cultural preservation. She co-edited Afterall while lecturing at Oxford University’s Ruskin School of Art and Central Saint Martins. She wrote the influential book Contemporary Art and Digital Culture (Routledge, 2016), exploring the intersection of art and digital technologies. Her writing—found in publications like The National, Artforum, The Guardian, The London Review of Books, The Art Newspaper, The New Yorker, and The Financial Times—focuses heavily on the SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) region and digital culture. She also scripted the film Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s–1980s, produced by the Barjeel Art Foundation. Currently based in North-west, London, she remains a board member of The Elephant Trust and LUX.
Moira Lascelles
Moira Lascelles is Executive Director & Head of Partnerships of UP Projects, a public art commissioning organisation that brings world-class artists out of the gallery to work with communities in public spaces across the UK. As well as overseeing the strategic direction of the organisation, Moira leads UP Projects partnership projects working to develop progressive public art strategies and commissions that foreground the needs of communities in their conception and development. Moira specialises in curating projects that harness creative practice to bring about social change and empower communities to connect with their built environment in new ways. She has been the curator of a number of flagship meanwhile projects including the Union Street Urban Orchard with the Wayward Plant Registry and South Kilburn Studios with Practice Architecture that transformed a vacant portacabin in Brent into a series of creative studio spaces offering rent-free studio space in return for offering training to local young people. Moira is an Arts Emergency Mentor and a member of the Curatorial Panel of Advisors for the London Festival of Architecture 2024.
Nicole Estlilo Kaiser
Nicole Estlilo Kaiser is the Director of Public Gallery London, a contemporary art gallery based in East London, dedicated to presenting innovative and ambitious exhibitions by emerging and established artists from around the world. Founded in 2020, the gallery has quickly developed a reputation as a dynamic platform for experimentation, dialogue, and cross-cultural exchange within London’s vibrant art scene. The gallery’s programme is characterised by a commitment to supporting new voices in contemporary art, while fostering critical conversations that connect local audiences with global artistic practices.
Nisha Matthew
Nisha Matthew has been working in the arts for over 18 years. She has been Residencies Curator at Camden Art Centre since 2014. Her work here has focused on developing non-outcome-based periods of research for artists and cultural thinkers as she continues to build on the gallery’s rich legacy of running residencies for emerging artists for over 30 years. Previously she worked as their Public Programme Curator between 2014–2018 and their Learning Coordinator between 2009–2014. Over the 16 years she has worked at Camden, she has worked closely with the local communities, young people, and schools in the boroughs of Brent and Camden to support the accessibility of the arts to artists and young people. Prior to working at the Centre, Nisha has worked with institutions including Tate Britain, Iniva, and The British Library. She originally trained as a printed textile designer at Edinburgh College of Art and is currently thinking through what non-extractive and inclusive arts ecosystems that centre environments of care and creativity can look like.
Roshni Hirani
Roshni is a Human Resources professional and has been working in the arts, culture and heritage sector for over ten years in a range of museums and galleries including Serpentine, Tate, Royal Museums Greenwich, and the National Portrait Gallery. Having studied a fine art degree at the University of East London, Roshni has a huge passion for arts and creativity. She has been a proud resident of Brent for four years and a frequent visitor of her close family who have lived in Brent her whole life. Roshni sees huge potential for communities in Brent to come together to build, share, and support arts and culture within the borough.
Sehr Sarwar
Sehr is the CEO and Founder of S&S Strategic Communications, a London- and Dubai-based consultancy she established in 2020. She leads high-impact communications and PR campaigns across the arts, education, charity, social justice, and corporate sectors, overseeing a cross-functional team and specialising in reputation management, profile raising, and media engagement in both traditional and digital platforms. Sehr began her career in media, reporting for City 7 TV in Dubai and contributing to cultural organisations such as the Arab British Centre and CAABU.
Turab Shah
Turab Shah is a filmmaker and director of photography who holds an MA in Cinematography from Met Film School. Turab grew up in Brent and attended schools in Queens Park and Wembley. He has a special interest in the legacies of colonialism and his films include Extradition, which followed Talha Ahsan and Babar Ahmad’s battle against extradition to the US, and Zones of Non-Being, a film which looks at Guantanamo through the lens of coloniality. He has produced a range of work from documentaries for AJE to moving image works for Humber Street Gallery, TfL/Art On The Underground, Brent Biennial ’22, as well as small independent fiction films.
Together with Arwa Aburawa, Turab co-founded Other Cinemas, which has its home at Metroland Studios. Other Cinemas is an award-winning project focused on showcasing the work of Black and non-white filmmakers through a free community screening programme and a year-long film school. Other Cinemas was recognised as a Film London Lodestar in 2022 and was awarded the ‘Support Structure for Support Structures’ fellowship by the Serpentine Gallery..