StoryWorks Team

Staff

Karen started her career as a teacher of English, Drama and Media before moving into the voluntary sector, where she worked as a Senior Practitioner for Barnardos and  Training and Communications Manager for the Special Needs Advisory Project (Wales). She spent some time as a freelance trainer and consultant, undertaking work for a range of organisations including Save the Children, Torfaen Council, Clybiau Plant Cymru, Cardiff Council and Children in Wales.

Karen then joined the BBC in 1999, where she stayed for ten years. During this period she worked in radio, television and new media and was the founder producer of the Bafta Cymru award-winning digital storytelling project, Capture Wales. Her final position at BBC Wales was as Partnerships Manager, with responsibility for relationships with external organisations and BBC Wales’ charities broadcasts.

Karen joined WIHSC in January 2009, to lead the development of StoryWorks, which has been established to support public service organisations interested in using people’s stories to improve what they do.

Lisa Heledd Jones is a Digital Storytelling Producer who has spent the last eight years involved in the creation and development of Digital Storytelling in Wales. Much of this time was spent working on the BBC's award winning Capture Wales project which facilitated over 800 stories in both English and Welsh and has helped foster over 50 new digital storytelling community based projects. 

Lisa is now working with the University of Glamorgan's StoryWorks project and has been developing storytelling endeavours with many different organisations and individuals; foster children and carers, cancer patients and people with dementia to name but a few of the groups she has worked with in the last twelve months. No matter what the organisation or project Lisa's passion is in facilitating and unlocking people's unheard voices and stories in the most relevant and sensitive way.

StoryWorks is supported by the Business and Administration team at WIHSC: Lisa Griffiths, Marina Roberts and Ceri Jenkins.

Associates

Gilly Adams is a workshop leader, director and editor who specialises in the development of text and scripts for story telling and performance. She pioneered and led the story circle element of Capture Wales, the BBC’s digital storytelling project which collected more than 800 stories from the community in Wales. Whilst working for BBC Wales she also produced radio plays and was Director of the Writers’ Unit. Previously she was the Artistic Director of the Made in Wales Stage Company for more than a decade.

Currently Gilly is working freelance in the areas of story telling and creative writing for radio and stage.

Carwyn Evans is a digital storytelling facilitator who's worked on many digital storytelling and participatory media projects, predominantly through BBC Capture Wales where he left as Assistant Producer in 2008. This award-winning bilingual social media project travelled across the length and breadth of Wales, for six years, facilitating active media participation through the form of workshops - the outcome of which being the production of over 800 two-minute digital stories created by storytellers of varying ages and backgrounds using their own personal testimony and archive. Carwyn's passion for social participation and personal narrative, its articulation and agency through various formats continues to develop through his work with StoryWorks.

Tracy Pallant is a digital storytelling facilitator and community filmmaker, working on Digital Storytelling Projects with Valley and Vale Community Arts, Breaking Barriers and StoryWorks. Having worked as an assistant editor and editor at the film unit at BBC Wales, she has since worked on a range of Wales-based community media projects for 15 years and has a strong involvement with with media projects abroad, such as Gem TV - a community film organisation in Ethiopia.

Tracy is passionate about working with groups and individuals to help enable them to tell and share their stories, and get their voices heard.

Georgie spent many years as an Occupational Therapist, the last 14 working with elderly people with mental health problems, mainly dementia. She took a career break to do a full time Art Foundation Course in Hereford where she began to make images of elderly people.

Georgie has always felt that the importance of how we interpret what we see when caring for people is a neglected subject. She now uses her images to encourage the practice of “looking” in a reflective manner in an attempt to get a more accurate story and therefore better care. Georgie has used her images to teach Occupational Therapy students from Cardiff University and has exhibited her pictures in galleries in Wales and London.

Drawing together many years of experience of working in the voluntary sector in Wales, a background in education, understanding of storytelling as performance and a strongly held belief in the power of story, Eirwen brings a very wide perspective to the use of story and narrative. Working with a number of local and all-Wales voluntary organisations, she has developed evidence based practice and policy across a range of issues and currently works part time for NIACE Dysgu Cymru (National Institute for Adult Continuing Education). Eirwen has an MSc in Social Science and a particular interest in qualitative research methods, her dissertation explored digital storytelling as a research method.

Eirwen’s freelance experience includes research, facilitation, and training, including the development of materials for use by others, and uses creative and narrative approaches in most of her work. Eirwen has worked with individuals, from varied backgrounds, and from many Anglophone countries around the world, to express their personal stories as digital stories, audio recordings and straightforward narrative. She is a fluent Welsh speaker.

Steve is  a Clinical Child Psychologist in the NHS and independently with interests in emotional literacy, positive psychology and creative approaches to therapy. He has a background in the performing arts and also works as a storyteller. He uses storytelling in his work as a psychologist and has written considerably on this subject.

His recent publications include ‘Telling Tales: Storytelling as Emotional Literacy’, written with Taffy Thomas,  and 'Emotional Literacy at the Heart of the School Ethos. He has also written and produced several training video films on child development and mental health. He is currently working on a collection of Indian folk tales and some research projects involving storytelling.

Simon Turner is a composer, musician and audio specialist with a particular interest in real stories. His work has taken him across a variety of disciplines including radio, theatre, film, multi-media and the web. He has also written and produced many musical works for television, is a featured composer of the Cheltenham Music Festival, and co-wrote the Popular Music degree course at the University of Gloucestershire, on which he teaches audio and music production. He was a pivotal member of the BBC's Digital Storytelling team from their inception in 2001, which he worked on for 6 years, and continues to work as a composer and producer, as well as a continual involvement in storytelling projects both here and abroad.