Akram Khan is one of the most celebrated and respected dance artists of today. In just over 19 years he has created a body of work that has contributed significantly to the arts in the UK and abroad. His reputation has been built on the success of imaginative, highly accessible and relevant productions such as XENOS, Until the Lions, Kaash, iTMOi (in the mind of igor), DESH, Vertical Road, Gnosis and zero degrees.

As an instinctive and natural collaborator, Khan has been a magnet to world-class artists from other cultures and disciplines. His previous collaborators include the National Ballet of China, actress Juliette Binoche, ballerina Sylvie Guillem, choreographers/dancers Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Israel Galván, singer Kylie Minogue, indie rock band Florence and the Machine, visual artists Anish Kapoor, Antony Gormley and Tim Yip, writer Hanif Kureishi and composers Steve Reich, Nitin Sawhney, Jocelyn Pook and Ben Frost.

Khan’s work is recognised as being profoundly moving, in which his intelligently crafted storytelling is effortlessly intimate and epic. Described by the Financial Times as an artist “who speaks tremendously of tremendous things”, a highlight of his career was the creation of a section of the London 2012 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony that was received with unanimous acclaim.

As a choreographer, Khan has developed a close collaboration with English National Ballet and its Artistic Director Tamara Rojo. He created the short piece Dust, part of the Lest We Forget programme, which led to an invitation to create his own critically acclaimed version of the iconic romantic ballet Giselle. This received its world premiere in Manchester, presented by MIF as a pre-Factory Event.

Naaman Azhari is a British/Lebanese animator and film director.

His latest film, The Magic Boat, tells the story of a mother and son fleeing the conflict in Syria; it uses rotoscoping, an animation technique involving hand-drawing over live-action footage, to explore this familiar tale from a humane perspective. It was nominated for Best British Short Animation at the BAFTA Film Awards 2020 and selected for inclusion in the Aesthetica Short Film Festival and Encounters Short Film Festival in 2019. Azhari used the same techniques in his earlier film The Sunshine Boy to show the gulf in understanding between a parent and child.

Azhari is a graduate of Goldsmiths, University of London.