Louis, a young man with Asperger’s, talks candidly with his older brother about the decade of bullying that nearly ended his life. For the first time, he shares the details of his harrowing journey from the depths of depression, to finding hope through his dog best friend and renewed passion for Lego, in the form of stop-motion.

Matthew Reese directed his first feature film before the age of 21 and has since worked on multiple award-winning shorts. His latest documentary has garnered two wins and five official selections at BIFA-qualifying festivals, alongside an official selection at 2024’s BAFTA-qualifying Reel Abilities Film Festival in New York.

ROZSA is a genre-blurring artist weaving hypnotic hip-hop, neo-soul, and jazz with a signature twist: live electric harp. Her lyrics dance between desire, femininity, and personal transformation, while her sound remains dark, ethereal, and defiantly original.

Her emotionally raw 2023 EP Songs For Myself gained national attention, landing on Spotify’s New Music Friday and Fresh Finds playlists, and earning airplay on BBC Music Introducing, 6 Music, Jazz FM, Global Soul Radio, and more.

On stage, ROZSA has captivated audiences with two sold-out performances at The Jazz Cafe, a sold-out headline at The Forge, The Lower Third, and Powerhaus (Dingwalls), along with standout sets at the Royal Albert Hall’s Exhibition Road Festival. Now signed to Earth Agency, she recently played three shows at Glastonbury Festival 2025, and performed at Ealing Jazz Festival, Amsterdam’s Landjuweel Festival, Germany’s Tapefabrik Festival, The Next Stage at Shambhala, and her first international headline show in Germany.

With a bold, boundary-pushing sound and a fast-growing cult following, ROZSA is carving out a space all her own — a dark fairy with a harp, casting spells in 808s and distortion.

jodY Nolan-Greenwood is a performance poet and playwright from Shepherd’s Bush whose work navigates the raw edges of class, mental health, masculinity, and neurodiversity, sometimes with a wink, laugh, and a sharp comedic twist. Equally at home unpacking the weight of lived experience or the absurdities of modern life, his performances are alive with rhythm, wit, and emotional clarity. jodY has sold out The Lyric Theatre, BOXPARK Wembley, and The Hackney Empire, and has been featured on Sky Arts’ Life & Rhymes, BT Sport’s Sports in Words, and BBC Radio London. Each appearance is an invitation to witness the truth told boldly, sometimes humorously, sometimes devastatingly, always unforgettable.

Veronica Adaeze is a 22 year old multi genre artist from Birmingham. She has been a lover of music since a young girl, and started professionally performing her own music at age 16. Since then Veronica has performed on various stages with audiences stemming from 30 – 10,000 people. With this experience Veronica found herself moving to London in 2022 and recently graduated uni with a scholarship degree in Music, she intends to use this knowledge to expand her music horizons.

Veronica now manages her own open mic and networking events aiming to share a platform with other emerging artists.

Inspired by her Rastafarian and dual heritage upbringing she draws from different parts of the world which is reflected in her music. Blending reggae, neo soul and Afrobeats, Veronica strives to bring a fresh energy to the London music scene, and aims to bring people of all cultural backgrounds together to enjoy the universal language of music.

Mia Merridew is an eclectic genre bending artist originally from London, completing her BA in fine art with contemporary cultural theory at University of Leeds.

Merridew calls herself a ‘Remembrance Artist.’ A fashion designer, song writer, producer, creative directress and multi-media artist, Merridew fuzes mediums, creating gritty conceptual experiences.

Her works are fuelled by documenting cathartic encounters with the natural world, and the people around her, a deep desire to connect and grow.

Merridew is performing her original music and exhibiting some of her most recent works at Friday Night Lights (FNL) on the 19th of September.

Natalia Chorna is a multimedia artist based in London. For her, making art is a process of visually translating the intangible – where emotion, feeling, warmth of a memory, silence and time become form. Seeing the surrounding world through abstract lens, her practice seeks to evoke personal resonance, embracing the idea that each viewer experiences art through their own internal landscape.

By weaving together intricate details, inspired by the infinite patterns found in nature – its textures and formations, these motifs crystallize in her imagination and are reimagined through a layered, meditative process. She works with a wide range of mediums – including fine liner, painting, collage and etching. Some works include digital manipulation to further immerse the viewer into its experience.

Ultimately, her practice reflects a belief in the deeply personal nature of perception.

Natalia’s artworks serve as metaphors for how we piece together our own understanding of the world, uniting its duality, complexity and beauty. Rooted in presence and subtle observation, her art explores what slips through language: the softness of becoming, the ache of growing, the warmth of recall.

@mildsanity

Daniela Cezara Nikola is a London based artist and educator whose practice fuses classical oil painting techniques with a deeply intuitive, contemporary voice. For Daniela, painting is a visceral experience each pigment becomes an extension of her being, each brushstroke a vessel for memory, emotion, and energetic resonance.

Her work weaves together painting and poetry, creating emotional landscapes where silence carries weight and colour pulses with meaning. Rooted in attentive presence, Daniela’s art explores the often unseen corners of the human experience the moments we rush past, the emotions we avoid, the quiet shifts of feeling that shape us. From grief to joy, discomfort to hope, her pieces hold space for what is raw, real, and universally felt.

She will be continuing her collaborative live painting project with Munchie Lunchie Productions (FNL), inviting everyone to leave their mark. Grab a brush, add a stroke, and become part of a living, evolving work of art during the event.

@dcnstudio

Iroha has been practicing shodō since the age of five, blending the traditional art of Japanese calligraphy with a modern, stylish sensibility. Curious to see how people unfamiliar with this art would react, she moved from Japan to London to experience it firsthand.

At this event, she will present a live calligraphy performance. Though brief, the performance brings the movement of ink to life, creating a fleeting yet unforgettable experience that words alone cannot convey.

Iroha invites you to experience calligraphy that fits seamlessly into everyday life, and to feel its beauty and emotion in person. Witnessing it live is not just seeing—it’s feeling the art in motion.

To hew is to make, sculpt or shape. It is the equivalent to prompting anew.

Chinda Smith (b. 2001, Vientiane, Lao) lives and works in London. She graduated with a First Class Honours from The University of the Arts London (UAL) in 2023, after completing her Foundation Year at The Royal Drawing School.

With oil painting being her primary medium, she also explores wider concepts through writing, and installation practices.

“I’ve been considering how I might restructure the way that I live and think in relation to the word hewn. As we grow, partnerships either strengthen or splinter. A natural process guided by a reliance on pattern. Viewing the conscience, a malleable singular, with room for trial and error, to realise our own capacity for change.

To hew implies contact. To observe repetition and forecast the depth of mutuality to come from what has been. In terms of craft, to hew is the first stage of creation. We can equate this with disruption. Borrowing from a natural resource. Paint hewn from powdered stones. What follows is to hone. To refine. This reconsiders specialisms with more significance as it encourages innovation, which in itself is a departure. In the sphere of the honing process, we can become more at ease with the streamlined nature of acceptance in specialisms. Diverting away from restlessness; which can spiral into attempts towards full occupancy; instead finding something more sustaining such as relief in focused expression.”

Instagram: @chindasmith_

Hey, I’m Chris. I used to be a nuclear engineer, but I dropped off my PhD out when I realised I was more drawn to the human scale of music and nightlife. Around that time I started making music and running events, and for the past five years I’ve been putting on SDC — a forest rave that’s become something of a local institution.

I see curating parties as a form of artistic expression. It’s not about the money — especially with SDC. It’s about the outcome: what does it look like, what does it feel like, what’s the memory people carry home? On the surface, most of it looks like admin: plugging in sound systems, promotion & endless logistics. But to me, that’s the same as any art form — all the unseen technical grind that makes the moment possible.

I’m diagnosed dyslexic and ADHD, and most certainly fall somewhere on the autistic spectrum. For me, hyperfocus is both a gift and a curse. It lets me obsess over the details that make art and events work, but it doesn’t always translate into the long-term, and I find myself falling in and out of love (or hyperfocus?) with my work. I’m still exploring that tension — between the technical and the artistic, between obsession and expression.

Fyi I’d like to call my talk – “Love and Hyperfocus”

Sara Cerovic is a French emerging artist navigating the ever-shifting terrain of abstraction. Her work is rooted in acrylic, but rarely in the traditional sense. Brushes are optional—more often replaced by palette knives, plastic, wire, cardboard, fabric scraps, or anything else that resists predictability. Drawn to chaos, texture, and the raw energy of misbehaving materials, she lets intuition guide the process.

Each painting begins as an experiment, a question rather than a statement. Sara embraces accident, layering, and even destruction as part of her visual language—often building surfaces only to partially erase them. Her work holds a tension between spontaneity and control, never aiming for resolution but always searching for something that feels alive.

Influenced by urban decay, soundscapes, and the poetry of the unnoticed, Sara transforms her studio into a kind of laboratory. She mixes, scrapes, pours, and pushes materials to their limit, allowing the canvas to evolve organically until it pushes back.

Though still at the beginning of her artistic path, Sara Cerovic’s practice is bold and exploratory. She is not chasing perfection, but presence, texture, and the thrill of the unexpected.

Leen Kay

Leen Kay is a Syrian-British multidisciplinary artist and designer working across visual arts, spatial design, architecture, cultural production, and site-specific projects. Her practice explores the intersections of cultural identity, the natural world, and the built environment, informed by personal and collective narratives shaped by migration and belonging.

Rooted in both the immediacy of place and the fluidity of memory, her work examines how urban and wild landscapes hold emotional and symbolic weight for diasporic communities. Through abstract mark-making, colour, and form, she maps shifting relationships between people, land, and history, tracing how environments evoke a sense of home beyond geography.

Combining art and storytelling, Leen creates spaces where creative expression and state of mind converge, fostering dialogue on diversity, displacement, and multiculturalism while inviting public engagement and multiple perspectives. In her practice, the process of layering functions as both visual language and conceptual framework: strata of paint, gesture, and material echo overlapping memories and identities.

Mike Obi Is the founder of Paint like a pro is the UK first ever projection painting platform!! We are providing an empowering experience where users can transform any image into a painting and have an art therapy session where you can be truly amazed by the results where you can paint like a pro!