Amanda Bright (Founder / director)

“I trained at the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama, graduating from the BA Acting course in 2003. Since then I've spent over twenty years moving between stages, film sets, classrooms and community halls, working as an actor, facilitator, audio describer and teacher. Different rooms, same instinct: the arts are how people find their voice, and everyone deserves the chance to find theirs.

I devised and led education projects for the Tricycle Theatre (now the Kiln), the Orange Tree Theatre and several corporate role-play companies. From 2005 to 2011 I returned to Central as a Visiting Lecturer, and in 2008 became Artistic Director of Central's Jack Petchey Youth Theatre, watching young people discover what they were capable of, often for the first time.

I grew up in Tottenham, an area with high levels of poverty, as a Black British woman with no obvious route into the arts. I had to fight for every door that opened for me. That fight is the reason Arts Bridge Charity exists. I founded Arts Bridge Charity in 2014 because I wanted the next generation to spend less energy pushing against barriers and more energy creating. Creativity changed the course of my life. I've built a career making sure it can do the same for others.

Arts Bridge now runs programmes including Wellness Warriors, supporting children's mental health through creative practice, Root to Rise, celebrating intergenerational stories of resilience, and Pajoma/Collective, a company of emerging Deaf, disabled and neurodivergent Black and Asian performers making theatre with access built in from the start, not added on afterwards. We work through partnership, with schools, cultural organisations and community groups, and we hold ourselves to evidence, with evaluation and external review woven into everything.

I believe the arts can change lives because they changed mine, and because I've watched them change the lives of the children, families and communities Arts Bridge works with every day.”