RePresent

Tara Okeke is a writer, artist and aspiring anthropologist from London. Following her appointment as the Horniman Museum and Gardens' Museum Futures Trainee in January 2020 — a role that has built upon the foundations laid by a life-long love of cultural spaces and sustained engagement with cultural production — Tara has strived to connect the dots between artefacts, infrastructures and agents of positive change.

Guided by an interest in the intersection between culture and care, Tara has co-facilitated dementia-friendly reminiscence workshops for seniors and others afflicted by degenerative conditions; contributed to foundational research concerning BAME heritage spaces and conservation praxes for the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust's `Connecting People and Places' report; and conducted fieldwork centred on spatial equity, refuge and ecologies of respite in Athens with UCL's Development Planning Unit (DPU).

With a practice that melds social-spatial endeavour (in 2017, she was selected as the youngest member of the h100 award-nominated programme, New Architecture Writers) with socio-political analysis (in 2014, she was shortlisted in the top ten of the country for Amnesty International's Young Reporter Competition), Tara now hopes to develop relevant, resonant and robust frameworks for civic-led change as a member of the inaugural cohort of the UK Creative Community Fellowship.