On Lucy Sollitt

Creative Director, 2024–2026

Lucy Sollitt arrived at FutureEverything in 2024 with a precise and urgent vision: that cultural organisations had a role in the ecological emergency that most had not yet grasped, and that the rights of nature had to be at the centre of it. She brought fifteen years of experience spanning art, technology and futures thinking – from Rhizome to Serpentine Galleries – and with it real clarity of purpose.

Once in post, Lucy developed that commitment into a concrete proposal and presented it to me: a wholesale reorientation of FutureEverything around nature-directed practice, culminating in the formal appointment of Nature to its Board. I backed it without hesitation. This was FutureEverything at its most itself – not a departure but a full-force expression of what the organisation had always stood for: prototyping the futures we want to build, and committing to that vision without reservation.

What followed was Nature Directed. Lucy conceived and led it from the ground up: making FutureEverything the first arts and cultural organisation anywhere to appoint Nature to its Board – a genuine reorientation of governance, creative practice and daily operations around the rights and intelligence of the natural world, not symbolic gesture. Compost Computer, the inaugural Nature Directed art commission, translated that vision into tangible form: internet infrastructure powered by microbial energy, technology grounded in natural systems rather than extracted from them. Read more about Nature Directed <Link to new Nature Directed project page>.

Lucy is now taking Nature Directed forward beyond FutureEverything, exploring how to support other organisations on the same transformation journey. She is seeking roles at the leading edge of ecological and technological futures – in international policy, research or strategic funding – where she can continue the pathfinding work she brought to FutureEverything with the same clarity and commitment. She is a rare combination of visionary thinker and determined practitioner. Whoever works with her next inherits something significant.

Drew Hemment, Founder, FutureEverything