Dreaming of a Queer Utopia with Sarah Joy Ford

Workshop Copy:

DREAMING OF A QUEER UTOPIA

Join Sarah-Joy Ford and Roma Havers for a series of workshops to build a collaborative queer utopia in collaboration with Queer Publishing & Culture Coop. These workshops will explore writing, drawing, badgemaking and textiles to think together about queer approaches to alternative living, what would our utopias look like in Rochdale, and beyond. These workshops will culminate in the creation of a series of banners designed by Sarah-Joy Ford.

Biographies Short

Sarah-Joy Ford

Dr Sarah-Joy Ford is a Todmorden based artist and independent scholar working with quilting to explore the complexities and pleasures of lesbian, feminist and queer communities, histories and archives.

Solo exhibitions include dykeland is at The Whitaker 2025 (Rossendale), Rabbit at Bury Art Museum 2024, HARE at Bobinska Brownlee Gallery 2023 (London), Looking for Lesbians at ONE Gallery 2022 (Los Angeles), Beloved at Plas Newydd Historic House and Gardens 2022 (Llangollen). Her work is represented by Cassinelli Mills. She was the recipient of an NWDTCP award for her PhD research examining quilting as an affective methodology for re-visioning British lesbian archive, at Manchester School of Art.

Roma Havers

Roma Havers is a writer, dramaturg and theatre-maker, with a community-embedded approach to creative work. Roma uses archives and conversation to imagine and build worlds around questions of queer inheritance, what happens after survival and what it means to decipher a myth with no origin. Roma works across forms including poetry, play-writing, verbatim theatre and writing for exhibition.