Alex Leith Editor
ROSA’s editor Alex Leith has over 30 years’ experience in media as a writer, editor, public speaker and broadcaster. He is a highly respected professional with a vast network of contacts across the arts in Sussex and London.
As well as editing ROSA, Alex is the editor of British Art News for the British Art Fair and writes artists’ monographs for Unicorn Publishing. He is a member of the Critics’ Circle, until last year Chair of the Visual Arts section and Vice President of the Circle as a whole.
Until 2021 he was the director and founding editor of Viva Magazines, comprising Viva Lewes (2005-2021) and Viva Brighton (2012- 2021). His extensive work history as an arts writer, a travel writer and a sportswriter includes freelance contributions to The Times, The Guardian, The Independent and The European, and periods working on magazines for EMAP, Future, Zone and 21st-Century Publications.
Jessica Wood Publisher
Director, Sussex Craft Week
Jessica is an experienced publisher and Arts PR professional.
She was part of the founding team for Tate etc. and has worked on leading art and design and architecture titles such as Blueprint, Eye, and Design Review.
Jessica is the co-founder and director of Arts Media Contacts, a successful PR and media database software company. Her clients include British Art Fair, Women in Art Fair, UK City of Culture, Mayfair Art Weekend, Attenborough Art Centre, MADE London, MADE Brighton, Brighton Art Fair, London Design Biennale, De La Warr Pavilion and Royal Pavilion and Museums Trust . She has guest co-ordinated the Artwave Festival.
Rowena Easton Art Director
Rowena is an artist, writer, curator, art director and creative copywriter, with experience in marketing, communications and sponsorship.
She is an experienced freelance copywriter, with 13 years at Can Can Creative and recent work with Can Can Campaigns. Rowena has created content for Swarovski, Jude, Korean Art London, and the Arts & Minds campaign, including magazine editorial and advertorial, web content, social media, video scripts and executive speechwriting.
Rowena has also been a practising artist for 25 years, regularly exhibiting and performing across the UK and internationally, as well as project managing exhibitions, performance tours and arts events.
David Burke Technical Director
David is a senior software developer who manages the technical and digital development of ROSA’s online and digital platforms. David also manages ROSA’s accounts.
Amanda Meynell
Sales Director
Amanda has had extensive experience in advertising sales in national and local press including Associated Newspapers including The Evening Standard, Viva Group. Amanda is responsible for all areas of advertising for ROSA.
Oliver Collins Assistant Publisher
Oliver has worked in publishing for over two years. He works on the administrative side of ROSA, overseeing day-to-day operations. He manages digital and print marketing campaigns and online content, whilst also maintaining databases and coordinating the magazine’s distribution network.
Holly Finch
PR Executive Sussex Craft Week
Holly has over two years experience in PR for the arts. Accounts that she has worked on include British Art Fair, Women in Art Fair, Korean Art London, Artist Open Houses, MADE London, Brighton Art Fair and MADE Brighton.
She has handled accounts for Alternative Arts projects in 2023-25 including Covent Garden May Fayre and Puppet Festival, Women’s History Month and the Black History Month Photography Exhibition.
Alongside this, she manages the Arts Media Contacts PR software, an international journalist directory for arts PR professionals and a press release distribution service. Holly is a practising musician in her spare time.
ROSA Contributors
Tim Brown
Kingston resident Tim is co-founder and Artistic Director of CINECITY, which presents the annual Brighton Film Festival as well as a year-round programme of screenings and exhibitions. Tim also programmes the film strand of Brighton Festival. He has curated film seasons for a wide range of cinemas and festivals, and in 2008 he established the Moving Image degree at the University of Brighton. His academic research explores ideas around the ‘cinematic’, the space where film and artists’ moving image, music, visual arts, photography, storytelling, literature and new technologies can converge.
Lulah Ellender
Lulah is a writer based in Lewes. Her first book, Elisabeth’s Lists: A Life Between the Lines, was published by Granta in 2018 and named one of The Spectator magazine’s Books of the Year. Described as ‘hauntingly beautiful’ by The Guardian it was widely acclaimed in the press. The London Review of Books praised it as ‘A perceptive and original book. It is as much a meditation on the meaning of lists as it is a biography.’ Her latest book, a memoir called Grounding: Finding home in a garden, was published in 2022.
Alex Grey
Alex is a Lewes-based writer, curator and facilitator of art and writing projects and residencies. She was the architect of the successful campaign to save Hans Feibusch’s mural Pilgrim’s Progress from destruction and now works with the Feibusch Progress Project to preserve it for the future. Her particular interests are public art and twentieth-century art, and she also writes about food and family/local history.
Zebedee Helm
Lewes resident Zebedee draws, paints and writes for a living. His work gets about far more than he does and may be found in distant villages like New York, Paris, Milan, London, LA, Tokyo, Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire… He uses various mediums, depending on the nature of the work, but there is to be found in all of it a unifying theme of affectionate humorosity, which is quite the sort of thing this world needs more of.
Leap Then Look
Brighton-based Leap Then Look create art works, participatory projects, workshops and events for people of all ages and abilities. It was established in Spring 2019 by artists Lucy Cran and Bill Leslie. Since then, they’ve run projects at institutions including Tate, Royal Academy, Phoenix Art Space, Orleans House Gallery, Photoworks, Brighton Photo Fringe, Thomas Tallis School, West Rise School, Hemmingway Design Events, and Universities of Brighton, Kingston, Westminster and UCL Institute of Education. They are currently undertaking research at the Universities of Westminster and Kingston.
Alexandra Loske
Lewes resident Alexandra is an art historian and curator with a particular interest the history of colour in Western art, print culture, and architecture. She has worked at the University of Sussex since 1999 and as a researcher and curator at Royal Pavilion and Museums Trust since 2008. Alexandra is the author of several books and book chapters on art and culture, including the hugely popular Colour: A Visual History (Tate).
Geometric Love
Steve Hyland is a Brighton-based creative and conceptual graphic designer. For the last 25 years he has worked within the cultural and entertainment industries, notably alongside marketers at EMI and Parlophone, before heading up the design department at Sony Music. From 2009 he was the Creative Director of multi-disciplinary design agency Hold, until 2018 when he struck out on his own as Geometric Love.
Imogen Lycett Green
A writer based in Bishopstone, Imogen worked at the Daily Telegraph for five years, writing for the Saturday magazine, the literary pages and the obituaries section. In 1991, she won a Winston Churchill fellowship which funded the research for her first book Grandmother’s Footsteps: a journey in search of Penelope Betjeman, that was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook travel book award. She’s written children’s fiction, columns for the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator, and has contributed to the Independent and the Evening Standard. She is a regular interviewer at Charleston literary festival and is a trustee for the John Betjeman poetry competition.
Hugh S Philpott
Hugh is a full-time supporter of the arts and occasional writer based in Bexhill-on-Sea. He is a former British diplomat, who specialised in the Former Soviet Union, serving as Ambassador in both Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, and before that as Charge d’affaires in Kazakhstan and Ukraine. Previously, he ran the UK’s Science and Innovation Network, for which he was awarded the OBE. Hugh speaks several languages, including French, Russian, Arabic, German, Spanish, Farsi, and has forgotten several others. He has sung in all of them as an enthusiastic amateur Baritone. A hobby which he continues to pursue actively.
Harry Venning
Harry is a cartoonist and comedy writer living in Brighton. He is best known for Clare in the Community, much loved as a weekly strip in The Guardian and as a BBC Radio 4 sitcom starring Sally Phillips. His awards include UK Cartoon Art Trust Strip Cartoonist Of The Year and the Sony Radio Comedy Award. Harry is also an accredited lecturer for The Arts Society, offering talks on the history of cartoons, sitcom writing and BBC radio comedy.
Paul Zara
Brighton resident Paul has worked on everything from large estate regeneration projects to small and medium-sized schemes and one-off houses, much of it during his 35 years at Conran & Partners. He has a passion for bringing historic buildings back to life and led the Bluebird Garage project in Chelsea, the refurbishment of Embassy Court on Brighton’s seafront, and is currently involved in saving Saltdean Lido. As a regular contributor to architectural and design publications, he has served as a Civic Trust Awards Assessor, and in 2007 was made a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts. He has sat on the Design South East review panel and currently chairs RIBA Sussex.