Dan Gauden — founder & creative director.
Dan leads artistic direction, technical design, and programme delivery — shaping how each installation is conceived, built, and experienced. Interwoven Arts is the integration of a lifetime of work.
He holds a BA (Hons) in Music Informatics from the University of Sussex (2009) — a joint honours degree combining music with computer science and artificial intelligence — where his final-year dissertation studied the interaction of light and sound within immersive installations: the direct technical and conceptual foundation for the work he is building now. He also holds an HND in Music for the Moving Image from the University of Worcester and Kidderminster College.
At Beacon Employment (closed 2016) — a pupil referral unit (PRU) in Kidderminster serving disadvantaged children and individuals with disabilities, including non-speaking autistic young people — he designed and built a music technology studio and syllabus from scratch, and saw directly how people who face barriers to spoken communication can express themselves powerfully through music. With Rhythmic Unity, the drum-workshop company he co-founded, he watched, time and again, what happens when the bar to making music drops: everyone plays, and a room of strangers transforms from isolated individuals into a connected whole.
Then came ten years leading Forest School (2016–2026) — a decade of weekly evidence that the same child who struggles in a classroom can thrive outdoors, given the right setting, tools and guidance, and that the environment, not the child, is the variable that needed to change.
“I’ve lived this world from three sides already.
As a child I was so disengaged, always daydreaming in the classroom, but I remember becoming fully present and curious outside in nature. I also remember picking up a guitar at seven, and realising for the first time that I could express my emotions and regulate my nervous system through playing.
As a teacher, I’ve watched children really struggle in school, and then witnessed the same children transform and thrive given the right environment and tools for creative self-expression.
Then I became a father, and watching the shape of the same story unfold in my own children just landed in a completely different way.
These experiences give me all the fuel I need to make Interwoven Arts the success it deserves to be.”
Dan is also a board member of Grove Wellbeing CIC, giving him governance experience within the CIC structure.
Kubi May Wilson — wellbeing advisor.
Kubi is our wellbeing advisor and Deputy Safeguarding Lead. She brings her therapeutic knowledge into the design of each installation and each outreach programme, so that the spaces we create — whether a public walk-through in an arboretum or an adapted session in a specialised respite unit — are grounded in genuine therapeutic and wellbeing understanding rather than assumption.
Kubi holds a BA (Hons) in Creative Expressive Therapies and a PGCE from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is a member of the National Council of Integrative Psychotherapists. She has worked as a trained therapist since 2013, with over ten years of art therapy practice, including five years with a Mental Health Intensive Intervention Team helping families and children on the edge of foster care to move through trauma. She has also worked internationally in humanitarian settings, including creative therapy with refugees in Calais.
In 2024 she founded Grove Wellbeing CIC in Glastonbury, which offers discounted therapy sessions and free community groups reconnecting people with folklore through creative art and eco-therapy. Kubi’s art therapy practice, eco-therapy programmes and nature-based outlook align directly with our work; her trauma-informed and intensive-intervention experience is particularly relevant to our work with autistic and disabled audiences and families whose lives are shaped by complex needs.
James Silvanus — creative oversight and documentation lead.
James’s role covers two functions: documenting installations and live events to produce material for public audiences and funders, and creative oversight on installation development.
He holds a First Class BA (Hons) in Film Production from the University of Gloucestershire (2015), where he won the Best Director award.
His documentary Voices, made with Worcester Mela, records the history of the first South Asian communities to settle in the city; he filmed many of the community’s elders for the archive during the pandemic and shaped a very large body of footage into a single narrative. It won the RTS Midlands Creative Community Award. He works often in community settings and with sensitive subjects, and navigates that storytelling gently, to reveal the heart of a message rather than extract it.
From 2019 to 2023 he documented the Arches Festivals under Worcester’s Cultural Development Fund. He has documented co-creation directly, including a living willow sculpture memorial garden in Redditch and a co-created sculpture for the Alexandra Hospital. Other commissioners include Severn Arts, three local councils, the University of Worcester and Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, alongside international commercial work for Intel, DHL and JD Sports across ten countries.
James also teaches — community storytelling workshops for Malvern Hills District Council, and a Creative Identity series for art students in Worcester in June 2026, where he designed the closing exhibition. His broad experience informs and aligns with all areas of Interwoven Arts.
See his work on LinkedIn.