Three founding directors.
Interwoven Arts CIC was founded by three directors in April 2026, bringing together special-educational-needs and creative-arts practice, trauma-informed therapeutic work, and documentary film. Each signed the CIC36 incorporation form at Companies House; the company is asset-locked and regulated.
Dan Gauden — founder & creative director.
Dan leads artistic direction, technical design, and programme delivery — shaping how each installation is conceived, built, and experienced. The work is the integration of everything he’s done:
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 — where his final-year dissertation studied the interaction of light and sound within immersive installations: the direct technical and conceptual foundation for the work he is building now. He also holds an HND in Music for the Moving Image from the University of Worcester and Kidderminster College.
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, and saw directly how people who face barriers to spoken communication can express themselves powerfully through sound and light. With his drum-workshop company he watched, time and again, what happens when the bar to making music drops: everyone plays, and a room of strangers tightens into a group.
Then came ten years leading Forest School (2016–2026) — a decade of daily evidence that the same child who struggles in a classroom can thrive under trees, and that the environment, not the child, is the variable that changes.
He’s seen this from three sides — the child who couldn’t cope in the classroom, the teacher watching other children struggle, and the parent watching his own. It isn’t a hypothesis he brings abstractly; it’s a lived one.
Dan is also a board member of Grove Wellbeing CIC, giving him governance experience within the CIC structure.
Karenna “Kubi” May — wellbeing advisor.
Kubi is our wellbeing advisor and Deputy Safeguarding Lead. 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 autistic and disabled audiences and families whose lives are shaped by complex needs.
James Silvanus — creative documentation lead.
James’s 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 is a self-shooting producer, director and editor — someone who shoots, directs and cuts the same piece, so the person framing the shot already knows how it has to cut, and the person sitting with a room of nervous participants is the same one who decides which of their words survive. He holds a First Class BA (Hons) in Film Production from the University of Gloucestershire (2015), where he won the Best Director award.
His documentary Voices, made with Worcester Mela, records the history of the first South Asian communities to settle in the city; he filmed many of the community’s elders for the archive during the pandemic and shaped a very large body of footage into a single narrative. It won the RTS Midlands Creative Community Award. He works often in community settings and with sensitive subjects, and navigates that storytelling gently, to reveal the heart of a message rather than extract it.
From 2019 to 2023 he documented the Arches Festivals under Worcester’s Cultural Development Fund. One commission from it, In Memoriam, sits closest to what we are trying to do: three performances staged in an outdoor installation during COVID and deliberately left unpublicised so they would not draw a crowd — so the film was not a record of the work, it was the only way anyone experienced it.
He has documented co-creation directly, including a living willow sculpture memorial garden in Redditch and a co-created sculpture for the Alexandra Hospital. Other commissioners include Severn Arts, three local councils, the University of Worcester and Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, alongside international commercial work for Intel, DHL and JD Sports across ten countries.
James also teaches — community storytelling workshops for Malvern Hills District Council, and a Creative Identity series for art students in Worcester in June 2026, where he designed the closing exhibition. He is a drone operator, ready to anchor the aerial capture and site-mapping that feeds installation planning at sites such as 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 qualification, award, or role is available on request, and funders, venue partners and academic collaborators can request the full founder pack by emailing info@interwovenartscic.org.