Founder, CEO and Executive Creative Director
Evadne is a 2022 JET-UK award winner for her Outstanding Contribution to Education and the Community. She has worked in challenging primary and secondary London schools and abroad for over 20 years with a range of experience from Assistant Head Teacher, curriculum developer, student Life Coach/mentor to Visiting Assessor for Coventry University’s ITT programme.
Her wide-ranging experience, including working with reluctant readers, helps her to create music using current and traditional compositions guaranteed to engage the children. Evadne is a top-liner, vocal producer, writing the songs for the musical productions, Sing a Book’s Literacy based singing workshops and After School Drama Book clubs, which explores characters and authors’ central theme in books to develop core reading skills using song.
Evadne has a detailed understanding of how children in developing countries value and crave education. This is reflected in the campaign song that she composed for The Steve Sinnott Foundation’s ‘Education for All ‘awareness day and her recently opened initiative of the Calderwood MaC (Mother & Children) Centre in Jamaica. The centre provides a safe place for mothers to interact with their children through play and early learning activities designed to help raise the literacy levels within the community and prepare the children for school.
In 2015, Evadne wrote and staged her first musical, an adaptation of Anthony Browne’s story ‘Into the Forest’. Examining the thoughts and emotions of the main characters allowed children and audience to empathise with their dilemmas. She continues to write and direct musical theatre for Sing a Book Productions, encouraging and facilitating underrepresented communities to engage in theatre through participation and audience membership. The productions are based on the historical character Dido Belle, one of Britain’s first aristocrats of African descent, other Black historical character and themes that impacts local communities.
Evadne’s mission is engage hard to reach members of the community to participate in the arts, to promote tolerance and understanding of the contributions we have all made to British history and society.
“The arts are not just a nice thing to have or to do if there is free time or if one can afford it. Rather, paintings and poetry, music and fashion, design and dialogue, they all define who we are as a people and provide an account of our history for the next generation.”
Michelle Obama