I have never really known what to call what I do.
I began as a participant. I became a technician, production manager and producer. I created events, built businesses, worked inside cultural institutions, toured artists, developed community programmes and went on to work with boards, governments, founders and organisations trying to work out what should happen next.
On paper, it can look like several different careers.
I have never experienced it that way.
The environments kept changing, but the people didn't.
A theatre, a rave, a conference, a carnival, a Biennale, a corporate gathering and a cultural institution may have very different purposes, but each creates an environment in which people behave. I have watched what happens inside those environments at very different scales.
Much of what I know came from doing rather than studying.
At the ICA, emerging technology became interesting to me because artists could do things with it that its creators had not necessarily imagined. At Notting Hill Carnival, culture wasn't something contained inside an institution. Building businesses taught me that organisations create environments too. Working in the Middle East taught me that experience gained in one place cannot simply be exported to another.
Over time, I became less interested in the categories separating these experiences and more interested in what connected them: the environments we create, how people behave within them, and what remains afterwards.
That question now runs through my writing, my practice and the work I choose to become involved in.

Christopher Pleydell FRSA, CEF–IF
Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts ·

International Fellow of the Centre for Events & Festivals