Selfridges x Women Supporting Women: Celebrating Creativity
June Sarpong is an internationally renowned broadcaster, writer and campaigner on diversity issues. She started her career as a DJ and presenter on MTV, Kiss FM and for ten years on Channel 4’s T4 youth strand. She has gone on to appear as a panellist on ITV’s Loose Women and now on Sky News’ The Pledge. Since 2010, she has built a reputation as a leading campaigner on a wide range of diversity and inclusion issues. She is a passionate advocate for change in the workplace and a champion for greater representation throughout the media. She has written two books on diversity issues - Diversify (2017) and The Power of Women (2018) - and co-founded the Women - Inspiration and Enterprise (WIE) Alliance in 2010, an international conference supporting female excellence and empowerment. She also co-founded the Decide Act Now (DNA) summit, promoting discussion and innovation. From 2019-2022, she was Director of Creative Diversity at the BBC.
Amelia Abraham is a writer and editor who also works as an editorial strategist, copywriter and brand consultant. She has written for The Guardian, Observer, Sunday Times, ES Magazine, British Vogue and American Vogue, and have previously worked as a commissioning editor at VICE, Refinery29 and Dazed Media. Amelia is also the authortwo books: Queer Intentions: A (Personal) Journey Through LGBTQ+ Culture (Picador, 2019) and We Can Do Better Than This (Vintage, 2021). She speaks on LGBTQ+ rights and diversity in the media, for cultural institutions and within brands and organisations.
Theresa Lola is a British Nigerian poet and writer. In 2018 she was awarded the Brunel International African Poetry Prize. Her debut poetry collection In Search of Equilibrium was longlisted for the 2021 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. In 2022 her poem ‘Equilibrium’ from her collection was added to OCR’s GCSE English Literature syllabus. Theresa Lola has been featured in British Vogue, PORTER magazine, Evening Standard, and Sunday Times Style Magazine. In 2019 she was a senior judge for The Queen’s Commonwealth Essay Competition. She has been commissioned by Tate, Selfridges, National Gallery, and Channel 4’s Random Acts. In 2021 she co-wrote a short film which premiered at the 2021 London Fashion Week. She has previously been writer-in-residence at Bethlem Museum of the Mind, and Wellcome Collection, teaching and writing in response to visual art. In 2021 she presented the audio documentary ‘Poems at Dusk’ for BBC Radio 4. She has read her work across the UK at Hay Festival, Cheltenham Literature Festival, Mansion House, Kensington Palace, Southbank Centre, and internationally in Germany, Brazil, and Singapore.
Rosh Mahtani is driven by telling stories through the universal language of jewellery that bring people together by unlocking narratives and embarking on adventures. Growing up in Zambia, Africa, she spent her childhood collecting “magical” stones and imbuing them with meaning. Tales of her grandparents leaving India in 1944 with not much more than the few pieces of jewellery they owned, left a lasting impression on the importance of jewellery as family heirlooms and protective talismans. An outsider in a big world, she fell in love with Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, a story of a poet lost in a dark wood. Alighieri Jewellery was born in 2014, inspired by this journey.