Meet Our Team

Lora Aziz

Project Lead

Lora Aziz is a cultural producer and project lead whose work explores the relationships between walking, water, ecology, and cultural practice. She develops research led, collaborative projects that bring together artists, communities, environmental organisations, and public sector partners to explore how places are shaped by lived experience, access, and care.

Lora’s work is rooted in listening and slow, place based research, often using walking, mapping, and storytelling as tools for collective enquiry. She is the lead producer of Blue Steps Along the Saffron Trail, a cultural and environmental research and development project focused on narrative building, ecological and cultural mapping, and laying the groundwork for future feasibility studies, ecological surveys, and public commissions. Her practice is driven by a commitment to equity, climate justice, and creating shared cultural value in public landscapes.

Saira Niazi

Artist Researcher

Saira Niazi is a writer, renegade guide, and founder of the Living London project. She has over ten years of experience in community engagement, project management, and creative communications. In her recent role as Community Stories Lead at Slow Ways, Saira walked over 500 miles, capturing stories of people and places across the UK, with her first journey taking her from Canvey Island to Southend-on-Sea.

Over the years, she has been commissioned to create, deliver, and capture exploratory wanderings for various community groups, working with organisations including London Museum, Tate, Bloomsbury Festival, Thames 21, UCL, Campaign for National Parks, and the Creative Society.

More recently, she has produced a non-fiction handbook, “Renegade Guides: The Places We Go and The Stories We Share,” as part of her Churchill Fellowship research project on guiding, best practice, and community allyship.

Ali Pretty

Project Mentor

Ali Pretty is a cultural activist and internationally recognised artist who uses walking, talking, and collaborative making as radical tools for connection and change. Her work transforms public environments into a shared platform where communities can address challenging issues such as climate action, peace, reconciliation, and inclusivity. Through artist-led walks, she mobilises people, landscapes, and stories into living artworks that spark dialogue, celebrate identity, and inspire action. These journeys are shared on an international stage, connecting local experiences to global conversations.

Ali is building on three decades of leading Kinetika (1997 – 2027) – the internationally renowned arts organisation she founded to unite communities through silk-based designs and large-scale public spectacles. 

Since 2012, Ali has developed transformative walking arts projects in collaboration with diverse communities. Her innovative approach combines walking, talking, and creative making to foster connection and bring people together. She has led impactful walks across Wiltshire, the Isle of Wight, Lincolnshire, Essex, and Thurrock. In Thurrock, Ali established T100, a dynamic year-round programme of walking, talking, and making activities. This innovative place-making model has been successfully replicated in India, Ethiopia, Chile, Costa Rica, and Lebanon. She served as the Artistic Director of Silk River, a project commissioned by the British Council as part of the UK/India Year of Culture in 2017.  Ali is the Artistic Director of Beach of Dreams, a UK-wide coastal arts festival supported by Arts Council England and Historic England. This creative programme initiated in 2021, culminated in the 2025 festival, explored and activated the unique heritage, cultures, communities, and climate futures of the UK’s coastlines.

Leela Keshav

Spatial Mapper

Leela Keshav is an artist-researcher and writer with a master’s in architecture from the Architectural Association (AA) in London. Her storytelling-based projects weave political ecology and critical cartography to consider colonial histories and their afterlives, and to imagine liberatory futures beyond the nature-culture dichotomy. She works as Programme Coordinator with New Architecture Writers, and facilitates workshops on counter-mapping and speculative worldbuilding. In 2024, Leela was the inaugural writer-in-residence at Hauser & Wirth Somerset. Her work has been exhibited at the London Festival of Architecture, House of Annetta and Create Gallery Bristol, and her writing has been published in ArtReview, The Architectural Review and ROOM Magazine, among others.

Farah Ahmed

Climate Justice Workshop Lead

Farah Ahmed is an organiser, facilitator, creative producer and curator, working to build powerful movements for climate justice through culture and creativity. 

They were formally the Climate Justice Lead at Julie’s Bicycle, and co-founded Our Diaspora Futures collective. She has worked across the UK and internationally to develop place-based strategies, training for marginalised communities, climate leadership programmes, toolkits and guides, and narrative change towards climate justice. She is currently undertaking a Clore Leadership Fellowship, exploring how we can build new organisational practice and infrastructures which actively build the worlds we need to thrive.

She believes we need to strengthen our cultural movements in ways that are accessible, radical, imaginative, and grounded in deep care for the human and more-than-human world. Farah is a trustee of Platform and is on multiple advisory boards focusing on grassroots-led collective action for climate justice.

Marley Karazimba

Videographer

Marley Karazimba is a land-based artist, filmmaker and photographer using visual storytelling to amplify voices from community-led initiatives, grassroots movements and creative projects. 

Alongside his creative practice, he is a permaculture design consultant, tenant farmer in community supported agriculture and community cooperative co-founder. His life's work explores the relationship between community resilience, access to land, food sovereignty and collective ownership as alternative solutions to extractive economic models. 

Nikki Wilson

Evaluation and Learning

Nikki Wilson is a researcher and evaluator with a deep interest in participatory and collective approaches to social and environmental justice. She has worked in social purpose for over 25 years, largely with social enterprises and charities, and now across sectors, holding a range of strategic, operational, governance, and financial roles.

Nikki has lived in Essex for most of her life, much of it just a few steps from the Saffron Trail. When not working, she can often be found walking pavements and paths with her dog, developing her writing practice, or learning as an enthusiastic novice in the garden.

She is excited to be part of Blue Steps Along the Saffron Trail, particularly to be involved at an early stage of an ambitious project rooted in her home county. Nikki values the opportunity to work alongside a talented team that will stretch her thinking creatively, and from whom she looks forward to learning as the project develops.

Jessica Twyman

Volunteer

Jess Twyman is a visual arts curator and project manager with over 30 years’ experience working across galleries, museums, and higher education. Having recently stepped back from full time work, she now values spending as much time as possible outdoors.

Jess’s practice was shaped early on through walking ethnographic collections, where questions of classification, power, and colonial legacy first informed her critical approach. This led to curatorial work at the V&A and the Museum of London, before a shift into contemporary art curation and outreach at the University of Essex.

At the University of Essex’s gallery, Art Exchange, Jess worked as a curator and outreach project manager, developing creative projects with schools and communities across Essex, particularly in Clacton, Jaywick, and Walton on the Naze. The gallery’s exhibitions explored the world around us with an international community of students and academics, encouraging critical and reflective ways of thinking.

Jess volunteers with Blue Steps Along the Saffron Trail, bringing her curatorial experience, community focused practice, and critical perspective into the project. She is keen to continue exploring these ways of thinking in the context of walking, landscape, and shared cultural enquiry.

Anisha Thampy

Visual Designer

Anisha Thampy is an interdisciplinary artist and maker based in Colchester, UK. My practice brings together design, ceramics, and technology to explore how people learn, live, and relate to everyday systems and materials.

Anisha come from a background in graphic design and UX/UI, with experience working in research-driven design environments that deepened my interest in design, material practice, and storytelling.

Anisha hold a Master’s in Communication Design from NID Ahmedabad and a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts from the College of Fine Arts, Thiruvananthapuram.