Three founders.
Interwoven Arts CIC was founded by three directors in April 2026. Between us: special educational needs and creative-arts practice, trauma-informed therapeutic work, and documentary film. Each of us signed the CIC36 incorporation form at Companies House. The CIC is asset-locked and regulated; the work below is what each director brings to the table.
Dan Gauden
Founder & Creative DirectorDan is the founder and creative director of Interwoven Arts. He leads artistic direction, technical design, and programme delivery — shaping how each installation is conceived, built, and experienced.
He holds a BA (Hons) in Music Informatics from the University of Sussex (2009) — a joint honours degree combining music with computer science and artificial intelligence — and an HND in Music for the Moving Image from the University of Worcester and Kidderminster College. His final-year dissertation research at Sussex focused on the interaction of light and sound within immersive installations — the direct technical and conceptual foundation for the work he is building now.
Dan has worked for over seven years as a Forest School leader, teaching children environmental respect through embodied, hands-on learning. Earlier in his career, at Beacon Employment — a pupil referral unit in Kidderminster serving children with disabilities, including non-speaking autistic young people — he designed and built a music technology studio from scratch. Working alongside autistic young people in sensory rooms, he saw directly how people who face barriers to verbal communication can express themselves powerfully through alternative creative pathways. That insight shapes the interactive model at the heart of Interwoven Arts.
Dan is also a board member of Grove Wellbeing CIC, giving him governance experience within the CIC structure.
Karenna “Kubi” May
Director, Wellbeing Advisor & Deputy Safeguarding LeadKubi is our wellbeing advisor and Deputy Safeguarding Lead at Interwoven Arts. She brings trauma-informed therapeutic knowledge into the design of each installation and each outreach programme, so that the spaces we create — whether a public walk through a garden or an adapted session in a respite unit — are grounded in genuine therapeutic understanding rather than assumption. As Deputy Safeguarding Lead she supports Dan, our Designated Safeguarding Lead, and takes the lead role when he is unavailable, across the company's work with children and vulnerable adults.
Kubi holds a BA (Hons) in Creative Expressive Therapies and a PGCE from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is a member of the National Council of Integrative Psychotherapists. She has worked as a trained therapist since 2013, with over ten years of art therapy practice, including five years with a Mental Health Intensive Intervention Team helping families and children on the edge of foster care to move through trauma. She has also worked internationally in humanitarian settings, including creative therapy with refugees in Calais.
In 2024 she founded Grove Wellbeing CIC in Glastonbury, which offers discounted therapy sessions and free community groups reconnecting people with folklore through creative art and eco-therapy. Her eco-therapy and nature-based practice aligns directly with our work in outdoor heritage settings; her trauma-informed and intensive-intervention experience is particularly relevant to our work with neurodivergent audiences and families whose lives are shaped by complex needs.
James Silvanus-Davis
Director & Creative Documentation LeadJames is the creative documentation lead at Interwoven Arts. His role covers two functions: documenting installations and live events to produce material for public audiences and funders, and contributing to installation development from a cinematic and spatial perspective — how light, movement, and composition read in person and on camera.
He holds a BA (Hons) in Film Production from the University of Gloucestershire (2015), where he received the Best Director award at the graduation screening. He works professionally as a self-shooting producer, director, and editor, based in the West Midlands, across documentary, promotional, and event projects.
His award-winning short documentary Worcester Voices documents the history of early South Asian communities who settled in Worcester — community-focused storytelling directly aligned with the values of the CIC. James is also a drone operator, anchoring the aerial capture and site-mapping work that feeds into installation planning at venues like Arley Arboretum.
A note on these profiles.
The profiles above summarise each director's publicly-available professional background. Each director signed the CIC36 incorporation form for Interwoven Arts at Companies House (filed 10 April 2026, Company No. 17148027).
Further information on any named qualifications, awards, or roles is available on request. Funders, venue partners, and academic collaborators can request the full founder pack — including financials, governance structure, theory of change, and the artistic and research proposals — by emailing info@interwovenartscic.org.