Vanessa Rawlings-Jackson started her career in the arts as the first General Manager at Perth Theatre and then held key marketing roles as Marketing Director and Consultant to major UK companies including Birmingham Rep, Nottingham Playhouse and Leicester Haymarket.

Since 1992 she has been working with the Arts Council of England specialising in marketing and audience development and business planning. During this period she gained experience in a wide range of art forms and undertook consultancy work for an extensive range of cultural organisations throughout the UK and abroad as well as for the Arts Councils of England and Wales.

Alicia Clyde joined Cultivate as Project Director from mid-November 2007, and has since moved to a Development Director role. Alicia worked in the Communications Team at East Midlands Development Agency for the past three and a half years. Prior to that she was Head of Press and Public Affairs at the British Embassy in Warsaw which followed ten years working freelance in the Scottish film and television industry. Her BA(Hons) degree is in European Audio Visual Production which included studying film in Toulouse for a year.

Alicia will be working on developing and managing the portfolio of projects which Cultivate will be undertaking with individual organisations, cultural agencies and networks.

Tiina joined the team in February 2007, with a strong knowledge and understanding of the creative industries sector, having worked for a number of festivals, local authorities and other not-for-profit organisations in the UK and abroad. Her most recent work was as the Festival Manager of Wirksworth Festival - a visual and performing arts festival in Derbyshire. She has been a Board member of the British Arts Festivals Association (BAFA) and is heavily involved in the development of the festivals sector. Tiina also holds an MA degree in Arts Management and a BA (Hons) degree in Marketing and Event Management. Outside her work at Cultivate Tiina pursues an active freelance career in arts consultancy and events management.

Keren has recently moved from Manchester, where she worked as a PA to the Director of a PR agency, to join the Cultivate Team. Keren has many years administrative and operational experience and has previously worked in both Recruitment and PR. She is also a keen art lover and has a MA in Art History which she completed in 2006 at the University of Manchester.

Matthew Blades began his career in stage and production management, working in a variety of regional theatres across the UK, after which Matthew joined the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, where he taught on the BA Stage Management degree programme.

Upon returning to the UK Matthew studied an MA degree in Arts Management at City University, before joining the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama as Programme Leader for their BA Technical Theatre Arts. In 2001 Matthew joined S4T; a workforce and organisational development agency for the performing arts across Scotland, where he managed a variety of professional and business development projects, which brought together practitioners from the arts, public funding agencies and the business support community. In 2005 Matthew become Programme Leader for the BA & Foundation degree, Arts and Events Management, at Bishop University College, in Lincoln before joining Cultivate in January 2008 as Project Director.