Meet The Judges
All submissions we receive will be seen by our panel of expert judges, made up of professionals working in different areas of the art world.
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Tanya Raabe Webber
Tanya Raabe-Webber is an acclaimed disabled/visual artist challenging the notion of identity within contemporary portraiture, often creating portraits of high profile disabled and diverse people during live sittings in high profile public art galleries and venues.
Tanya is also an established leader and mentor to other artists and a specialist in supporting neurodivergent and learning disability artists. In 2022 she was a judge for the Finland International Outsider Arts Festival and is presently the visual arts Artistic Director for Sense.
She’s also an ambassador of Outside In and The Big Draw, and a trustee of leading disability arts organisations Venture Arts and DASH.
Kirstie Hamilton
Kirstie Hamilton is Director of Programmes at Sheffield Museums with over 20 years of experience in the museum sector, specialising in visual art and exhibitions. Kirstie leads the Collections, Exhibitions, Historic Engineering and Learning and Participation teams and is responsible for Sheffield Museums creative programme and the city’s museum collections.
Emily Rose Uttley
Emily Rose Uttley is an artist based in Leeds who uses drawing, painting and digital drawing to portray her fascination with the depth, range and ambiguity of human emotion.
Having been diagnosed with autism from a young age, Emily is drawn to creating art as it helps her to channel her symptoms and share her perspective of the world. She explores her interest in human expression by creating emotive and highly detailed work, through using a sensitive approach to colour, composition, form and movement. Through exploring the ambiguity of human emotion, she likes to play between the boundaries of melancholy and mindfulness, and is interested in creating a mood of romance or nostalgia within her paintings.
In 2021, she was awarded first prize for Artworks Together for her painting ‘Sleeping boy’ and has since exhibited at The Holy Art Gallery in London. In 2022, Emily created her first large scale commission for The University of Leeds, a 6m x 2m mural titled ‘Peace of Mind’, located in the Students Union.
Alongside her art, Emily currently works as a Studio Assistant and Archivist for the Environmental Artist / Printmaker Cecile Elstein in Manchester.