About Us

Selina Thompson Ltd is an interdisciplinary performance company based in Birmingham. 

We make passionate, rigorous, political work, full of joy, but with a clear focus on those excluded by society at large, and how the politics of identity define our bodies, lives and environments.

Since 2012 we have made theatre shows, installations, workshop plans and radio work for pubs, clubs, shopping centres and performance spaces across the UK and the world. In 2016 we retraced a route of the Transatlantic Slave Triangle by Cargo ship and went on to create Salt, which has since toured to four continents and won three awards. In 2017 we were commissioned as part of 1418NOW to begin a major new work looking at radical futures for democracy in the wake of the Suffragettes. And in 2018 we began to write our first mid-scale musical work, bringing together a Hip Hop Icon and the dreams and energy of teenage girls from across the world. We slept a lot in 2019, but came back in 2020 with new dreams about new democracies, and race and gender after the end of the world.

Listed 4th in BBC Front Row’s The 10 Biggest Risks in 21st Century Art (February 2020), salt has since been made into a major award-winning commission for BBC (first broadcast October 2021).

A lot more has happened, and changed, since then; for STL, the country, the world. In 2023 the company joined Arts Council England’s National Portfolio, with a programme delivering political, ambitious art with, for and about those historically marginalised in society. Our focus is Black, people of colour, disabled & working-class people, advocating for better working conditions within our field. We want to put care and wellbeing at the heart of everything we do, and leave our sector better than we found it. 

The team currently consists of Selina Thompson, Toni-Dee Paul, Toni Lewis, Stacey Potter, Pippa Frith and Hilary Foster, supported by a team of collaborators and our Board. We advocate for the rights of artists as workers, and better approaches to wellbeing in our industry. We make passionate, rigorous, political work, full of joy, but with a clear focus on those excluded by society at large.  We hope our work will always be characterised by ambition and integrity.

Artistic Leadership

Selina Thompson: Artistic Director

The Company is led by Selina, an artist and writer whose work has been shown and praised nationally and internationally. Her practice is chiefly concerned with grief, love, and the world to come, and she seeks to make work that is visually striking, and lyrical, even while grounded in politics. She has led the company since its inception in 2016, and is primarily concerned with it centring those historically excluded by the arts, without compromising on rigour or experimentation. 

Above all, she wants her work and the company to move through the world with integrity: what it says, does and thinks all in harmony.

She won the ISPA Distinguished artist award in 2023, and her credits, both with and outside of the company include  BBC4, BBC Radio 3, The Royal Court Theatre, The Public Theater and BAM as well as theatres across the UK, Europe, South and North America and Australia.

She is a Brummie, and a cat lady. 

Toni Dee Paul: Associate Director

Toni-Dee is an artist and a writer working across form, based in the UK. She has worked in a wide variety of contexts as a workshop leader, dramaturg, director, performer, facilitator, collaborator and ‘thinker-in-the room’. Their current body of work, made with ‘infectious warmth’ (Exeunt) is a series of performances & installations made for cemeteries, refugee centres, kitchens, churches and theatres. Since 2015 she has been commissioned by Fuel Theatre for the New Theatre In Your Neighbourhood project, been a contributing story group writer for climate justice project Hello X, created performance as public intervention for Queerly Departed, and presented works in SICK Festival, Queer Migrant Takeover and Works Ahead. 

Currently, she’s working on ‘Doze’ a chronic-illness centred project exploring rest as resistance. Outside of her solo artistic practice, Toni is Associate Artist of award winning company One Tenth Human making intricate, intimate, and wildly entertaining live imaginative events for children and families, and also facilitates part-mutual-care-part-art-making-part-activism project Balmy Army.

Toni -Dee is also a Trustee of Leeds based international performance festival Transform.

Board

Our Board of Directors consists of Lucy Pilkington (Chair), Tim Etchells, Emma Frankland, Emma Beverley and Rosi Byard-Jones.

Lucy is an award-winning producer, and founder of factual film & TV production company Milk and Honey. She mentors young filmmakers, is a lifelong campaigner for inclusion and diversity, and was the inaugural chair of the Royal Television Society’s Diversity committee. Lucy is a member of BAFTA, and has been appointed to the Edinburgh Television Advisory Committee. Lucy joined the Board in November 2022.

Tim is an artist and a writer based in the UK whose work shifts between performance, visual art, and fiction. He has worked in a wide variety of contexts, notably as the leader of the world-renowned Sheffield-based performance group Forced Entertainment, who were awarded the International Ibsen Award 2016 for their ground-breaking contribution to the field of contemporary theatre and performance prestigious Spalding Gray Award in February 2016. He became a board member for the company in July 2019.

Emma Frankland is a live performance and theatre artist. In recent years Emma’s work has been focussed on the None of Us is Yet a Robot project a series of performance pieces recently published by Oberon Books as “None of Us is Yet a Robot – Five Performances on Gender Identity and the Politics of Transition”. She became a board member for the company in July 2019.

Emma Beverley is a multi-artform Producer and Curator, and is currently the Director of HIAP – Helsinki International Artist Programme. She has made and presented work that has toured across six continents, and has previously held several Exec Leadership and producer positions, including LEEDS 2023 and East Street Arts, and Eclipse Theatre Company.

Rosi Byard-Jones is Media & PR Officer at Midlands Arts Centre (MAC) in Birmingham. Prior to this, she spent a couple of years reporting on the arts and culture sectors at the London bureau of Kyodo News, a Japanese news wire agency. She has been a judge for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction since 2024 and for the Young Walter Scott Prize since 2023, alongside a content lead role at Asian Leadership Collective CIC.