Artists

Welsh artists/performers/directors and writers. If you wish to be included in this list post your details on the Queer Cymru Facebook group:
www.facebook.com

Performers

Marc Rees

Marc Rees is one of Wales’s leading exponents of contemporary performance and installation. His innovative interdisciplinary artworks are known for their flamboyant, humorous and often extreme interpretations of history, culture and personal experience. In addition to working with some of Britain’s foremost physical theatre companies (Brith Gof, Earthfall and DV8) and Germany’s premiere choreographers (Angela Guerreiro, Thomas Lehmen and Tanz Compagnie Rubato) his own extensive body of work includes the solo stage works Iddo Ef/Caligula Disco, the installation/performances The House Project /RevolUn/Shed*light and the BBC film A Very Gladys night.

He has lived and worked in Amsterdam, Montreal and Berlin and has initiated under his company R.I.P.E (Rees International Projects Enterprise) several highly successful artistic alliances with furniture designers, film makers, authors, composers and choreographers across Europe and North America.

Marc Rees' most recent international commissions and site specific events include 'Casgliad Gwydr Cambrian a Chabinet/Cambrian Glass Collection and Cabinet' for the National History Museum at St Fagans, Cardiff, March - September 2007; 'Comfort Zone' for Recontres Internationales, Paris, December 2006; 'Sx3 duet' for SINOPALE, Sinop, Turkey, August 2006; 'Vaseline Machine' for VERBO, Galeria Vermehlo, Sao Paulo, May 2006; 'Adagietto Ara Deg' for the 51st Venice Bienale, 2005 and Shed*light: 'Norman Behaviour' for ARCO 05, Madrid.
www.r-i-p-e.co.uk

Sean Tuan John

Sean Tuan John is on of Wales most successful independent choreographers who over the last 15 years has been creating dance/theatre and film projects that have been screened and performed in festivals around the world. His work fuses idiosyncratic dance, dark humour and excessive acting. It focuses on themes of social commentary, the trash aesthetics of pop culture, psychology and in depth investigation into character based dance exploration.

Sean has a long history of international collaborations, in particular, with the Flemish choreographer Bert Van Gorp. Since 1993 they have collaborated on work for stage and television. Their first collaboration 'FREDRICK'S FIRST KISS' was performed over 90 times in Europe and their highly successful television programme 'THE BOY WHO NEVER CAME BACK' has been screened and broadcast regularly in Belgium, Holland and Italy and was nominated for several prestigious awards and international prizes.
www.seantuanjohn.com

Writers

Roger Williams

Dramatist, living in Cardiff. Has worked for The Made in Wales Theatre Company, The Sherman Theatre Company, BBC Wales, HTV and BBC Radio Cymru. Recent work includes Gulp for Made in Wales and a community theatre project Love in Aberdare at the Aberdare Coliseum.

Selected Publications:
Surfing, Carmarthen Bay (Drama Association of Wales)

John Sam Jones

John Sam Jones’s family have lived on the banks of the Mawddach for more than two hundred years. A fluent Welsh speaker who writes only in English, John was educated at Ysgol Ardudwy in Harlech, the University of Wales, Aberystwyth and Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. After periods of work as a teacher, a hospital and prison chaplain and a sexual health worker, John currently works as a Schools Advisor in Denbighshire. He lives in an old farmhouse in Llandecwyn with his Civil Partner and two sheepdogs.

Parthian Books have published two collections of John’s short stories: Welsh Boys Too (2000), which won an Honour Book Award from the American Library Association in 2002, and Fishboys of Vernazza (2003), which was long listed for Welsh book of the year. The Gay Men’s Press published John’s first novel, With Angels and Furies, in 2005. John is a member of Academi.

Selected Publications:
Welsh Boys Too (Parthian, 2000)
Fishboys of Vernazza (Parthian, 2003)
With Angels and Furies (The Gay Men’s Press, 2005)
Crawling Through Thorns (Parthian, 2008)

David Llewellyn
David was born in 1978 and grew up in Pontypool. He graduated from Dartington College of Arts in 2000 and now lives in Cardiff. David has had short stories published online, and has written some comedy sketches for the BBC. He collaborated on a feature–length film script ’Somewhere’, performed live at the Cardiff Screen Festival in 2003. Eleven (Seren, 2006) is his first novel.

Author of three novels: 'Eleven' (Seren, 2006), 'Torchwood: Trace Memory' (BBC Books, 2008) and 'Everything Is Sinister' (Seren, 2008).
"In offering a dark comedy, Llewellyn shows more taste than do many more earnest seekers of artistic relevance... Llewellyn's novel is a funny and disturbing view of a disaffected age." -Nicholas Clee, The Guardian... "Llewellyn skillfully and poignantly reveals the complications and evasions of the characters' relationships . . . Eleven is a compulsive read, and I devoured it in one sitting, unable to put it down . . . It's easy to imagine this becoming a cult book for the disillusioned younger generation." —Ray French... "A micro-mezze of human emotion, Eleven thrusts snippets of love, trust, and disappointment into the mix and proves that the knock-on effects of petty office politics can be disastrous." —Gay Times... "(Everything Is Sinister) is an adroit but powerful take on a society in which sex and violence have been commoditised, and in which the media can wreck or redeem an individual in an instant." -Ceri Radford, The Daily Telegraph... "His style is so engaging, his world so credible and unsettling, that I defy you not to reach the very bitter, bloody end of this engaging read" -Attitude Magazine.

Josie Henley-Einion
Josie Henley-Einion is author of the novel Silence, published in 2008 by Legend Press. Silence was Waterstone’s Welsh Book of the Month in August 2008. Josie’s short stories have also appeared in several anthologies. She was born in Birmingham in 1970, attended Bangor University and now lives in Cardiff with her civil partner and their son. She is currently studying for a PhD in Psychology in the University of Wales, Swansea.
www.josiehenley.net

Musicians

The Physicists

Female fronted Cardiff punk band.

"One of the finest one minute and forty four seconds of music that has ever been my pleasure to play on the radio." -Adam Walton, BBC Wales-

“Rock’ n roll stripped to the bones, all excess baggage discarded to aid maximising the velocity, which is then used to pump as much noise as possible out of the amps and send it crashing around the venue” –Peppermint Iguana-

The Physicists are all wrong - but in a good way. The quartet, who count ex Bikini Kill star Tobi Vail amongst those they've impressed, are purveyors of thrashing, brattish punk songs that snarl and bite and are about "homosexuals and crack and dogs". –Silent Words Speak Loudest-

“Hit the stage at 100 miles an hour a mix of psychobilly punk rockin not unlike Cardiff’s finest “Demented are Go” in their heyday of the early 80’s. This lot would definitely have been at home in the Clarendon, Hammersmith, during those psychobilly heydays. “I can honestly say that I have never, ever, seen a female vocalist give it some like “Sal”, she nearly made herself sick with effort!” –Guy Salvador, Southerndown Records
www.myspace.com/thephysicists

Blue Wall

All male trio from Cardiff.
"the pursed-lipped post-punk of new pups Blue Wall".NME
www.myspace.com/bluewallmusic

Applefish

Applefish is the electronica soundscape of music producer Nicola Davies from Bristol. Applefish performs vivid audio-vidual shows, and has been described as "warm, melodic, bubbling genius" by Adam Walton of BBC Radio Wales. Walton has been a huge supporter of Davies' music, going as far as to say, "Some of the best music I have ever played on the radio... incredibly musical and soulful electronica".
www.myspace.com/applefish

Andrew Craig Williams

I used to make hard house under the pseudonym DJ Joe King, terrible stuff, all crescendos and airhorns. Now I make avant-garde geekware shuffle-stamp electro under the name FFLWCS (which is Welsh for rubbishy sweets).

www.myspace.com/fflwcs