Phoenix Patron Biographies
Phoenix Patrons advocate for Phoenix’s work, helping to raise our profile.Phoenix Patrons advocate for Phoenix’s work, helping to raise the charity’s profile and support our fundraising activities.
Amit Gupta
Amit is a director and writer for theatre, film and television.
His recent directing work includes Sky One’s top-rated drama comedy, Delicious, starring Dawn French, Emilia Fox, Iain Glen and Sheila Hancock. His two part adaptation of Cecilia Ahearne’s bestselling novel Thanks for the Memories, which he wrote and directed for ZDF, premiered in September 2019.
Amit’s first feature film, Resistance, starred Andrea Riseborough, Tom Wlaschiha and Michael Sheen and was nominated for three BAFTAs, the WGGB Best First Feature and the CineVision Award at Munich. His second film, Jadoo, a comedy drama adapted from his own Radio 4 play, was the only UK narrative feature to premiere in Official Selection at the Berlin Film Festival in 2013 and has played at over 50 international festivals around the world. His latest feature, One Crazy Thing, was the Opening Gala at the East End Film Festival and was released theatrically in 2018 in the UK and US.
Amit’s stage plays include Touch (winner of the Royal Court Theatre Young Writers’ Competition), Option which premiered at London’s Tricycle Theatre, and Campaign, which was nominated for an Olivier Award and won a Liberty Human Rights Award as part of The Great Game.
Ernest Edmonds
Ernest Edmonds is a pioneering computer artist and HCI innovator.
In 2017 he won both the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award for Practice in Human-Computer Interaction and the ACM SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art.
He is Professor of Computational Art at De Montfort University, Leicester UK, and Chairman of the Board of ISEA International. His most recent book is “From Fingers to Digits: An Artificial Aesthetic”, with Professor Margaret Boden (MIT Press, 2019).
He is an Honorary Editor of Leonardo and Editor-in-Chief of Springer’s Cultural Computing book series. His work was recently described in the book by Francesca Franco, “Generative Systems Art: The Work of Ernest Edmonds” (Routledge, 2017).
The Victoria and Albert Museum in London holds some of his artwork and is collecting his archives within the National Archive of Computer Based Art and Design
His website is ernestedmonds.com