Our Artistic Team
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Eleanor Henderson
Artistic Director
As Artistic Director of Kestrel, Eleanor is responsible for artistic vision, strategy and leadership across the charity.
She also directs across multiple projects and streams of work, establishes new partnerships and maintains existing ones. She has been in post since September 2021, and was previously an Associate Artist with Kestrel.
Outside of Kestrel, she has worked as Associate Director, Director, dramaturg and senior consultant for organisations including Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, Battersea Arts Centre, University College London.
She trained originally as an actor, and as an actor has performed at venues including Shakespeare’s Globe, Hampstead Theatre, Salisbury Playhouse, Hammersmith Lyric and Leeds Playhouse.
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Jason York
Associate Artist
Jason is Kestrel’s core Associate Artist for Acting, working across multiple projects as co-director, associate director and artist support.
Jason York is a professional actor on both stage and screen, mostly recently seen in Passages: A Windrush Celebration at The Royal Court Theatre, The Home, an experiential entertainment about residential care, Mood (BBC 2), Red Flag (All 4), Live at the Moth Club (Dave).
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Simon Longman
Associate Artist
Simon Longman is a playwright from the West Midlands. He is an Associate Artist for Kestrel, operating across multiple projects as either playwright, workshop leader or dramaturg. These include both projects with The Royal Court Theatre and playwriting workshops in HMP Grendon.
His plays outside of Kestrel include Island Town (Paines Plough), Gundog (Royal Court), Rails (TBTL), White Sky (RWCMD/Royal Court), Sparks (Old Red Lion) and Milked (Pentabus Theatre Company). In 2018 he was awarded the 49th George Devine award for Most Promising Playwright.
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Dorothy Allen-Pickard
Associate Artist
Dorothy is a filmmaker and multidisciplinary theatre-maker from South-East London. In 2019, she received the BFI New Talent Award and was named as one of Broadcast’s Hotshots.
Her practice is grounded in a deep interest in other people and a will to bring about social and political change. It merges documentary, fictional and theatrical techniques and form, and she is a member of the award-winning theatre company Breach. Dorothy's films have been awarded with Best UK Short at Open City Doc Fest, shortlisted for Grierson Short Award and received multiple Vimeo Staff Picks. They have screened at festivals including Clermont Ferrand, Sheffield Doc Fest, Oberhausen, Doc NYC, Edinburgh International Film Festival, as well as on BBC3, Channel 4, Nowness, i-D and The Guardian.
We also work with a diverse and highly exciting group of industry professionals on a freelance basis.
Our Trustees
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Holly Race Roughan
Holly Race Roughan is a director of new work and was Associate Artistic Director at Headlong between 2019 and 2021, leading the company artistically from mid-2020.
Prior to becoming a trustee, for Kestrel Holly has made BROKEN DREAMS and BLOOD & WATER for the Royal Court, SKY FALL, JACK A LAD IN THE BEANSTALK at HMP Springhill and films THE 360 DEGREE MAN and NO GOING BACK at HMP Springhill and HMP Aylesbury. Holly has also worked for arts in prison charities Synergy and Unlock Drama.
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Mek Mesfin
Mek is a barrister specialising in domestic and international commercial dispute resolution. He practices from 4 Pump Court in London. Mek has been involved in prison-oriented initiatives for a number of years and has provided debating training and mentoring to inmates across London..
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Judith Ptaszynski
Judith Ptaszynski has been a Samaritan and Samaritan-trainer for over twenty years. For most of that time she has also co-run the Samaritans’ Listening project in Bullingdon Prison. She trained and worked as a nurse at St. Bart’s Hospital before spending a lot of time bringing up four children.
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Jim White
Chair
Jim White is a long-serving newspaper reporter, author and broadcaster who has been involved in Kestrel for the past 15 years. A passionate advocate of improving educational opportunities within the criminal justice system, through observing Kestrel’s work at close quarters, he has been ever more convinced of the particular educative power of drama and film.
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Peter Watson
Peter Watson’s career spanned both private and public sectors, in marketing, information systems and fundraising. He worked for many years in higher education fundraising and alumni relations for the universities of Oxford and Warwick and latterly for Lady Margaret Hall, one of the Oxford Colleges, where was elected to an Emeritus Fellowship on his retirement.
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Simon Tennant
Finance Director
Simon Tennant is a qualified accountant and management consultant and is our Charity’s Finance Director. Over the last thirty years, as a Director at Pricewaterhouse Coopers and Partner at PA Consulting Group, he has worked with Clients across Industry and Government to change ways of working and improve financial performance.
Our Patrons
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Michael Balogun
Patron
Star of Netflix’s Top Boy and You Don’t Know Me, Michael is a highly experienced actor for stage and screen. He is perhaps most known for his shattering performance in one-man-show Death of England: Delroy at the National Theatre, and other stage work includes Macbeth at Chichester Theatre and Barber Shop Chronicles at the Royal Exchange Theatre.
Michael was serving a jail sentence when he was allowed to work on licence in the kitchens at RADA, one of the UK’s leading drama schools, where his acting talents were discovered. He has extensive lived experience of the criminal justice system and this insight combined with his industry success makes him a hugely exciting patron for us. We know he will be an inspiration and guidance to many of the men we work with.
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Rob Clare
Founding Patron
Rob Clare was originally an actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company, then a Staff Director at the UK National Theatre, and Associate Artistic Director of the major UK touring company, Compass. Becoming increasingly interested in differing approaches to working with Shakespearean texts, and especially verse, he completed a doctorate in the subject at Oxford University, and has since become an internationally recognized Shakespeare specialist.
He founded Kestrel in 1998.
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In the theatre, during my working lifetime, I heard a lot spoken by my colleagues about the need to reach out to new audiences. In the late 1980s, I happened to get to know a man who had spent over twenty years in prison. He was intelligent, creative and articulate, and hugely enjoyed the theatre – which he was only just beginning to experience, having married an actress/writer friend of mine shortly after his release.
He had had no such outlet for his creative energies while in prison.
It was not hard to join the dots, and I began working in prisons then – which was good timing, as such work was just beginning to grow. I was glad to be part of that growth, and to help foster and encourage it.
With the help of a small group of dedicated and wonderfully supportive friends, some of whom are still on the board, I set up Kestrel almost twenty years ago now. The guiding principle behind the company was, and is, creatively to use drama within the prison system. But it was also to provide a company structure which could independently raise funds for prison work, rather than relying on the prisons themselves being able to afford it, from what tend always to be tight and overstretched budgets. We hoped this would ensure the independence of the work, and maximize the creative freedom of those involved, as we would not necessarily have to satisfy existing remedial or rehabilitative agendas. We were right.
Though no longer active at Kestrel, since I now live and work in the USA, I remain proud to see the company continuing to do work that is not only an outlet for the creative energies of those involved, but can in some cases be life-changing. We never claimed to be therapists, or social workers – indeed, we always took pains to point out that we were not. But the work can have a similarly profound impact.
Long may it continue. Long may the caring and enlightened continue to support it.”
Our Collaborators
We love partnership and working with others.
Some of our recent collaborators include the Royal Court Theatre, Old Vic Theatre, Headlong Theatre, National Literacy Trust and the Irene Taylor Trust.
Interested in teaming up with us on a project? Please get in touch via our contact page
Our Supporters
We are so grateful to our supporters.
These include Second Growth, Chiltern Railways, Rothschild Foundation, Hilden Charitable Fund, Button Moon, Rupert and Camilla Soames, The Diana Parker Foundation, East Midlands Railways and many other private donors.
