Ian Nesbitt is a socially engaged art worker, filmmaker, writer, (post-)activist and pedestrian based in Sheffield, UK. His work holds space for practicing togetherness, using modes of cooperation, conviviality and kinship to explore the question of what it means to live well with the unfolding consequences of a collapsing system.

Working alongside citizens, communities and the more-than-human to consider and create spaces for exchange that are beyond the everyday, his work seeks to further emerging readings of these shared and entangled territories.

He is a founder member of Annexinema, Out.Side.Film, and Social Art Network, co-convening the first Social Art Summit in 2018. He is also a founder member of Open Kitchen Social Club, a field exercise in practicing togetherness that takes the form of a social eating project holding free weekly cafes, run by a collective that includes artists, activists and other citizens but is predominantly made up of people seeking sanctuary (asylum seekers, refugees and migrants).

Ian has delivered events, commissions and exhibitions for In Certain Places (Preston), Eastside Projects (Birmingham), Bloc Projects (Sheffield), G39 (Cardiff), Nottingham Contemporary and Primary (Nottingham), and his films have been screened at Oberhausen, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Liverpool Biennial, Berwick Film and Media, Abandon Normal Devices, and Glastonbury festivals.

He is currently artist-in resonance for Dancing On The Edge’s (un)festival entitled ‘Year of Listening’, and busy bringing Radio Commons into the world. He has also just completed a short film entitled ‘Grief Is A Shapeshifter’ and is about to start a commission for Gentle/Radical (Cardiff, Wales).