Image (Left-Right): Amy Crighton, Meg Fozzard, Suki Chan, Felicity Chen (Jiaxin Chen), Maisha Wester, Michael van der Put, Ben Glover, Humira Imtiaz, Jamila Kabir, Nga Shu Rita Hui
We are proud to announce the 2025 cohort of Alternate Realities Artists, who have been selected to take part in this year’s edition of the Alternate Realities XR Artists Forum.
The initiative exists to promote collaborations between artists, collectives, creatives and organisations focused on using digital technologies to experiment and play with non-fiction boundaries, as well as foster connections between selected artists and representatives in new media to give them an opportunity to create a network in the field and ask advice and feedback on projects they may be working on.
Meet the cohort:
Amy Crighton
Amy is a director and dramaturg from the Midlands with a particular focus on developing new work in conjunction with writers and working with new technologies. Amy spent 2 years as Literary Assistant at the Bush Theatre and reads for the George Devine Award and Royal Shakespeare Company. In 2023 they were supported by the Jerwood New Work Fund and Barrel Organ to direct CHOOSE YOUR FIGHTER in a sold-out run at Camden People's Theatre.
Amy was the recipient of Rose Theatre's 2023 Peter Hall Emerging Artists Fellowship where they assisted directors Jeff James (Shooting Hedda Gabler) and Monique Touko (The Boy at the Back of the Class – UK tour). In 2025 Amy will run the Bush Theatre’s Emerging Writer’s Group. They are currently developing the VR immersive experience Cripping Up in collaboration with Meg Fozzard, supported by the BFI Documentary RAD Fund and CPH:DOX Lab.
Meg Fozzard
Meg is a South London based disabled freelance producer. Her career as a producer began back in 2018 when she studied Creative Producing for Digital Platforms at the National Film and Television School. There, she learnt how to produce for AR, VR, podcasts, smart home devices and social media. She graduated in February 2019 and became disabled in April 2019, drastically altering her career.
Her career as an XR Producer began in 2021 when she worked as a Producer on the Museum of Austerity XR experience with director Sacha Wares, the National Theatre and the English Touring Theatre.
She is now one half of the duo creating Cripping Up with Director Amy Crighton. Cripping Up is an interactive VR experience that invites the audience to embody her as a wheelchair user, making what would be a simple journey for someone able bodied, but for her feels like an odyssey.
Suki Chan
Suki is an artist and film director. She uses film, new media, installation and sound to explore our subjective perception of reality. She creates immersive experiences that explore cognitive decline, sight loss, identity and belonging. Her passion is to change perception and build empathy for other people’s realities.
Her practice intersects art and science, incorporating dialogues with diverse communities, from people living with dementia and those with visual impairments to neuroscientists. She seeks out narratives that explore alternative ways of looking at the world and stories that challenge and destabilise our understanding of perception and reality.
Her works are acquired by international major collections including The UK Government Art Collection, Museum of London, David Roberts Art Foundation, The Celebrity Art Collection on The Solstice ship (US) and the Asia Culture Centre (South Korea). Her work has been exhibited internationally at the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art (China), Frost Science Museum (Miami, US) and Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art (Japan).
Felicity Chen (Jiaxin Chen)
Felicity is a filmmaker exploring stories at the in-between spaces of fiction and reality. With a degree in Drama and Film and a Master’s in Immersive Factual Storytelling, her filmmaking journey began in China, was nurtured in the UK, then ventured into the realms of virtual imagination. Her work delves into female experiences and shared spaces, blending the embodiment of games with the intimacy of audio storytelling.
She directed and wrote ‘Persona’, an immersive documentary exploring self-liberation in virtual spaces, inspired by real-life experiences from users of the VR social game VRChat. The project highlights how digital spaces provide liberating alternatives to restrictive real-world conditions. Through an embodied journey of transforming, losing and becoming one’s true self, 'Persona' aims to offer a glimpse of what it means to feel truly free, delving deep into the essence of femininity, queerness, and human connection beyond societal norms.
Maisha Wester
Maisha is a dedicated public scholar in Gothic Literature and Horror Film Studies. She specialises in Black Diasporic Gothic and Horror, racial representation in Gothic Literature and Horror Film, and socio-political uses of Gothic and Horror tropes in discussions about race. In simpler words, she specialises in how fiction and society reduce real people to figures of monstrosity. An African American, she has witnessed the return and insidious spread of violent anti-Blackness across the US; she has seen firsthand the nightmare that arises when a portion of the population is deemed lesser (be it lesser citizen, lesser intellect, or lesser human). She has written and directed one short film and, most recently, has designed and co-written Coded Black, a game recording and challenging anti-Blackness in the US and UK. For information about her, please see maishawester.info or codedblack.info.
Michael van der Put
Michael is a Writer, Director, Producer, and Editor with a background in directing from Drama Centre London. His graduation short Callum screened at 26 festivals, won 15 awards, and was long-listed for a BAFTA. He went on to found Broken Hearted Youth, a film and theatre company for young people, offering free training in acting and technical production. He continues to teach weekly, support emerging creatives, and advocate for greater access to the arts.
In 2021, Michael was awarded funding from BFI/Film London to produce Independence, directed by Karl Jackson, which explores a care leaver’s first week outside the system. The film screened at Sky TV, BAFTA, and 10 Downing Street before its international premiere at the 2023 London Film Festival. Independence is now available to stream on Minute Shorts.
Michael is currently working as a producer on Underneath the Forest, an immersive VR project in development. Developed in collaboration with an interdisciplinary team, the piece explores storytelling through a multisensory lens, integrating accessibility measures for D/deaf and visually impaired audiences from the earliest design stages. A demo will be presented at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Festival of Ideas in July.
Ben Glover
Ben is a deaf video designer and creative captioner who uses interdisciplinary skills in both creative and technical fields producing innovative and often expressive creations typically informed by his background in theatre, film and computing. He is a recent Fellow of the Royal Shakespeare Company for his research on creative captioning.
His recent work includes video designs for: Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare Globe), Marx in London (Scottish Opera), Best of Enemies (Noël Coward Theatre), Tubular Bells 50th Anniversary Concert Tour, Run Rebel (Pilot Theatre), Wall (National Youth Dance Company), NOISE (The Place), The Paradis Files (Graeae Theatre), RED (Polka Theatre), Coventry City of Culture, Liverpool Arab Arts Festival, Pukkelpop and Burning Man Festival.
Other credits include projects for The Royal Opera House, FRAY Studio, Studio Moross, Spectroscope, Studio Flint, Nina Dunn, Coventry City of Culture, Liverpool Arab Arts Festival, UVA, Pukkelpop and Burning Man Festival.
Humira Imtiaz
Humira is a Salford-based theatremaker and digital experimenter working across XR, live performance & motion capture. Drawing on their Kashmiri heritage and working-class, Muslim upbringing in the North East, Humira creates immersive work that centres cultural dissonance, memory & mischief. Their current XR project, Kids Are Halal (But the Pub Isn’t), explores belonging and identity through the surreal lens of two British South Asian Muslim siblings confronting a pub across the street in the 1990s. Humira’s practice is shaped by over a decade in arts administration, access advocacy, and producing for digital stages. They’ve worked with organisations including ARC Stockton, Open Online Theatre, One Tenth Human and Mediale's Immersive Assembly, and are an Immersive Arts UK Experiment grantee. Humira is especially interested in how motion capture, real-time embodiment and playful world-building can centre global majority narratives in non-linear, accessible ways.
Jamila Kabir
Jamila is an immersive artist, filmmaker and creative director working across XR, sound, moving image and installation. Her practice blends sculptural and digital forms to explore language, memory and the politics of representation - often drawing on untold or misrepresented histories. Her latest VR project, Mother Tongue, began during her MA in Immersive Factual Storytelling and marks the start of a wider exploration into endangered languages. Focusing on the mislabelling of Sylheti, the piece uses narrative design, spatial sound and interaction to question cultural recognition and the impact of language loss. Jamila’s work has received international recognition, she won first prize at XR Hack London (Meta Utility Design) and the Digital Heritage Innovator Contest. Her XR project HabitSpace was showcased at AWE Vienna, while Chan Yun Nandu, a multi-sensory heritage installation, opens this September for a year-long exhibition at the Great Bao’en Temple Museum in Nanjing, China.
Nga Shu Rita Hui
Rita is an independent filmmaker and video artist based in Manchester, UK. Originally from Hong Kong, her work explores memory, displacement, and the traces of colonial history through experimental and immersive forms. She works across XR, multi-screen installations, and documentary hybrids, often using archival material and spatial storytelling.
Her current XR project, Eng-Kong, reimagines British urban spaces as sites where Hong Kong’s colonial past resurfaces through déjà vu. The project questions how empire persists in architecture, absence, and everyday environments.
Her practice combines formal experimentation with a quiet attention to place, time, and memory.
Alternate Realities XR Artists Forum is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.
