Role at Interwoven Arts CIC
- Founder & Creative Director
- Designated Safeguarding Lead
- Artistic direction, technical design, programme delivery
- Primary contact and project lead
Other governance commitments
Board member, Grove Wellbeing CIC. Direct governance experience inside the CIC structure: accountability, community benefit reporting, regulatory compliance.
Qualifications
Music practice since age six
Dan picked up the guitar at six and has played continuously since — through formal study, professional work, and personal composition. Music has been the through-line of his life: a means of expression and a way of regulating his own nervous system. The formal training that follows sits on top of this foundation.
BA (Hons) Music Informatics — University of Sussex (2009)
The study of how technology can shape music experiences. Joint honours degree combining music and computer science/AI. Three-year programme covering computational music, generative creativity, algorithmic composition, multimedia systems, non-symbolic AI, and creative music technologies. Final-year dissertation research focused specifically on the interaction of light and sound within immersive installations — the direct technical and conceptual foundation for Interwoven Arts’ work.
HND Music for the Moving Image — University of Worcester & Kidderminster College (2005)
The study of how music can evoke emotional states in an audience. Two-year programme covering film scoring, orchestration, sound design, soundtrack editing, audio recording, and digital sound technology. Distinctions in Sound Creation and Manipulation, Independent Study, Historical Style and Contemporary Influences within Film Scores, and Final Commissioned Composition. The compositional foundation for how audio is crafted to support, enhance, and deepen the visual experience of each installation.
Music therapy knowledge
Two strands of applied understanding.
How specific musical scales, harmonics, ambiences, and sonic textures produce measurable physiological and psychological effects — calm, relaxation, wonder, meditative states. Applied as a core design element in every installation.
How the barrier to music creation can be lowered by environment and accessibility design. Empirically demonstrated through years at Rhythmic Unity and Beacon: people who have never made music before can create together within minutes when the conditions support it. Built into every installation as a participatory mode — the audience is the maker, not the spectator.
Somatic colour sensitivity
Highly developed sensitivity to colour relationships — how specific palettes produce stimulating or relaxing effects. Shapes every visual aesthetic decision.
Professional background
Interwoven Arts is the continuation and scaling of work Dan has been doing in inclusive creative environments since 2002. Five strands underpin it.
Forest School Leadership (2018 – present)
Dan has worked as a Forest School Leader for over seven years, teaching children environmental respect and understanding of the natural world through hands-on, embodied learning. Working in this role with neurodivergent and disabled children — the audiences Interwoven Arts exists to serve — Dan saw firsthand how much the environment shapes a child’s nervous system: how much calmer, more regulated, and more present children become when the sensory conditions around them are right. This is the origin of two of Interwoven Arts’ design commitments: that the venue is the first layer of the design, and that installations should respect and reveal rather than dominate.
Harley Entertainments (2002 – present) and Rhythmic Unity
Dan has worked for Harley Entertainments (Bewdley, Worcestershire) since September 2002 as sound engineer, technical assistant, and musician across a range of live entertainment projects. Origin of his live event lighting and sound engineering experience.
Out of the working relationship with Harley, Dan co-founded Rhythmic Unity with Stephen Harley in the early-to-mid 2000s — a djembe-led world-music workshop and education company operating across Kidderminster, Bewdley, and the West Midlands. The company’s stated scope explicitly named “people with special educational needs” as a core audience. Workshops ran in hundreds of schools, community settings, care units, and specialist SEN settings.
The repeated observation across that work: the drum is one of the most accessible instruments — no musical background required, anyone can play within minutes. Once the bar to participation is that low, a group of strangers comes together as a whole quickly. Teachers and carers noted that children whose behaviour was difficult before the session were calmer and more regulated afterwards. This is the experiential source of two principles in Interwoven Arts’ work: that accessibility unlocks co-creation, and that co-creation regulates the nervous system. The participation-over-performance principle was earned here, not theorised.
Beacon Employment Music Studio, Kidderminster (2006)
Dan designed and built a music technology studio from scratch at Beacon Employment, a pupil referral unit serving disaffected learners alongside children with disabilities and nonverbal autistic children. Built so teachers and students could co-create musical experiences together, breaking down hierarchies and facilitating connection through shared expression. Reference on file from Vanessa Lee (Youth Express Co-ordinator): “a gifted trainer” who used the creative process “as a vehicle to build the confidence and self esteem of the learners involved.” Working alongside autistic children in sensory rooms there, Dan saw firsthand how autistic children flourish when given access to new forms of expression and safe, low-stimulation environments.
Key insight from this work: neurodivergent people who face barriers to verbal expression can communicate powerfully through alternative creative pathways. Art and co-creative experience bypass traditional verbal barriers, opening up forms of expression and social connection that conventional environments close off. This insight runs directly through Interwoven Arts’ interactive installation model.
Arcadia Roots
Arcadia Roots is the direct extension of the creative expression that began with Dan’s first guitar at six. Dan has been a member of the seven-piece band for over ten years — touring, festival circuit, a settled live audience. The band’s own description: “psychedelic rock fused with the deep pulse of roots reggae”
The lyrical and thematic ground is environmental concern, opposition to hunting, ecological consciousness, and questioning the systems that brought us here. With close to three thousand followers across social platforms and consistently packed gigs, Arcadia Roots demonstrates Dan’s craft directly: sound built to land in bodies and carry meaning at the same time.
Being in a band has also shaped how Dan thinks about music bringing people together. It bonds the musicians as a family, and at the right gig band and audience merge — those moments when everyone in the room is part of the same thing. Those are the moments musicians live for. The same principle runs through Interwoven Arts: well-made sound and shared participation collapse the line between maker and audience.
Interwoven Arts CIC (2026 – present)
The strands of Dan’s working life were not planned to meet. They accumulated. Guitar at six was the first channel — for expression and for self-regulation. Music informatics taught how technology can shape what people experience. Music for film taught how sound and image together produce feeling. The drumming work showed what happens when the bar to making music drops low enough for anyone to enter. The studio at Beacon showed that children locked out of conventional expression find it readily — when the channels are built for them. The forest school years showed that environment is not background to a nervous system; it is half of what regulates it. Each of these was learned in its own context, for its own reason. Looking back, every one has turned out to be a piece of the same craft.
Interwoven Arts is that craft consolidated. Not a new direction. The shape the accumulated work has been taking all along.