Meet Story Fellow Anna Ball

Anna is a socially engaged creative practitioner and researcher who is interested in how collaborative storymaking can create spaces of care, connection and transformation against the backdrop of polycrisis. Working across textual, visual, sonic and curatorial narrative practices, she has partnered with organisations including The National Justice Museum, Right to Remain and Survivor Alliance on co-created documentaries, exhibitions and anthologies that address intersecting social justice crises, particularly around women’s experiences of sanctuary-seeking, immigration detention and modern-day slavery (‘Cecilia’s Story’, 2025; ‘Owning Our Words’, 2020; ‘And Still I Rise’, 2018). In her role as Co-Director of HEAL (Hostile Environment, Art-fuelled Learning) Collective, she acts as research, learning and evaluation consultant to organisations including Counterpoints Arts and Refugee Week.

The Challenge

Originally established as a ‘people’s art palace’ designed to inspire the city’s laceworkers, Nottingham City Museum and Gallery Services hold over 200,000 objects of art, craftsmanship and textiles in their collections, most of them stored out of sight from the general public. As the Museum and Gallery services head towards their 150th anniversary, they are interested to look again at the relationship between their collections and the city’s communities, and to explore what their collections mean to Nottingham, now and in the future. Mindful of the huge questions that this process will raise – of object provenance; of social history; of community access; and of power / agency – Anna has worked with the gallery team to establish a programme of community engagement founded in principles of openness, curiosity and wonder that enable a wide range of people from across Nottingham to explore these questions for themselves, and to make their voices heard in a way that shape the future story of Nottingham’s cultural collections. Over two months, Anna will lead ‘wonder learning’ conversations in the museum and gallery stores, where community groups will be invited to encounter a variety of objects that raise important questions for the city’s cultural heritage. The conversations will lead to a co-created exhibition in the Lab at Nottingham Castle, featuring objects selected by project participants alongside photos, audiotracks and documentation that explore the questions raised during the project.

Anna’s First Steps

Originally, the project was very direct in its desire to address the journeys that objects had travelled to the museum and gallery stores, in order to open up questions about homemaking, belonging and transnational heritage. However, both Anna and the Museum and Galleries team came to feel that this approach assumed too specific a narrative around very varied objects, and risked instrumentalisation in its methods and outcome. Anna’s first encounter with the museum and gallery stores was a transformational moment in the project. The experience of exploring room upon room of treasures carefully packed in boxes, each item bearing its own story, mystery and question, was at once thrilling and thought-provoking. With this in mind, the team decided to shift the project to one founded in archival exploration and community access, with a view to raising more open and generative dialogues around the collections.

The end goal of this project is to create a space in which people from across Nottingham’s communities have the chance to ask questions about the city’s cultural collections, and to have a say in the stories that they tell, now and in the future. It’s hoped that this will be a moment of democratisation, founded in the sharing of curiosity and creativity as tools that can connect and inspire. For StoryArcs Fellow Anna, meanwhile, the project is a chance to shift her storymaking skills into the curatorial space, thinking about how voice can translate into visual and spatial narratives; while for the Museum and Gallery Services in Nottingham, it’s an amazing opportunity to engage with the communities they serve, and to look at the narratives that will carry them into the future.

Anna’s storymaking skills lie in wonder-learning techniques that use storytelling and sensory prompts to spark curiosity and invite self-expression in community co-creators. Operating on the belief that stories are made, not just written, Anna works across textual, spoken, crafted and visual mediums to generate collaborative narratives through co-created art, sound, photography, film and text. As a creative-critical researcher of polycrisis, she is interested both in narrative output and in the systems that underpin the ways we think, speak and act, and brings an ecosystemic approach founded in principles of equality, justice and joy to every project. She is interested in honing these techniques across a wider range of community and contextual settings during this project.

Interested in archival research? Why not see how Story Fellow ____ is tackling this problem.

Meet another Story Fellow partnered with University of Nottingham: Panya Banjoko

Have a look at some of the our Fellows who have reached the end of their projects: _____