Essex Cultural Diversity Project works in partnership with many different organisations, bringing together artists, performers, writers and other cultural practitioners with arts and heritage organisations, museums, libraries and local authorities to significantly improve and enhance the artistic and cultural diversity of the area, ensure that excellence is thriving, and that cultural integration and understanding is supported and enhanced through arts and cultural activity. This is more important today than it has ever been since ECDP was established.

Our key strategy to achieve this is through a programme of exciting but challenging place-based commissions for artists to work in areas of Essex where there are opportunities to explore diversity through their practice.

For 2018-19 we focused on five towns/places where community engagement in the arts has been traditionally low – Canvey Island, Harlow, Basildon, Grays and Jaywick Sands. For 2019-22 we focused on more rural areas of Essex, as well as launching a new three year programme of commissions in Buckinghamshire in partnership with Farnham Maltings, Bucks County Council, and funded by the Rothschild Foundation. We have also been developing our international connections through our commission programe.

Pictured above: Lata Upadhyaya: Populate or Perish image (c) Essex Cultural Diversity Project

Read more about each commission:

• Lu Williams: Zine making in Basildon
• Arooj Khan: Remapping Grays
• Jack Cornell and Nicola Hutchison: Working with young people in Harlow
• Canvey Zingt! The Yiddish Song Project
• Close and Remote: Watercolour meets Virtual Reality in Jaywick Sands
• Mike Roberts: National Trust properties in Coggleshall
• Nicola Burrell and Lisa Temple-Cox: National Trust Bourne Mill, Colchester
• Sian Fan: Chelmsford and Essex2020
• Nabil Ali: Beach of Dreams
• Laura Malacart: Brentwood Dunton Hills Garden Village
• Laurence Harding and Liz Harrington: National Trust Flatford
• Fotis Begklis: Beach of Dreams
• Becky Vincer: A Gift For Dunton Hills
• Lata Upadhyaya: Populate or Perish
• Janetka Platun: Saffron Walden Museum
• Nabil Ali: Along the Salt Marsh, Bradwell-on-Sea
• INSTAR: Bourne to be Wild
• Anna Mudeka: World Music in Rural Norfolk
• Sam Williams: Dunton Hills
• Talia Randall: Epping Forest
• Kirsty Badenoch with Wayward: Hatfield Forest, National Trust

Buckinghamshire commissions, in partnership with Farnham Maltings:

• Tom Cross: Aylesbury Library (2019-2020)
• Lasana Shabazz: High Wycombe Libraries (2020-2021)
• Sri-Kartini Leet: Amersham Museum (2022)

International commissions:

• Nabil Ali: Echoes of the Sea – UK-Russia
• Time Will Tell Theatre: Ten Pound Poms Creative Estuary Co-commission – UK-Australia

ECDP is an Arts Council National Portfolio Organisation (NPO) with a key role to play across Essex and the East of England in continuing to support diversity in arts and cultural practice.