Rikki Beadle-Blair
His mother had come to the UK from Jamaica when she was 12 years old. He was born in Camberwell and raised in Bermondsey where he attended the experimental Bermondsey Lampost Free School, where he could study any subject he liked and focused on theatre and film making.
He created the production company "Team Angelica" to create transformative entertainment in many mediums, and to share opportunities with performers, artists and practitioners from the widest possible range of backgrounds.
In 1994 he wrote the screenplay for the film Stonewall, about the Stonewall riots, for the BBC. It was directed by Nigel Finch, and won the audience awards at the London Film Festival and the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay film Festival as well as an award for Rikki at Outfest LA for Outstanding Screenwriting.
Among other television projects, Rikki wrote, directed and featured in the internationally successful Channel 4 series "Metrosexuality", also composing the soundtrack.
His radio documentary, The Roots of Homophobia was awarded the Sony Award for Best Documentary Feature.
He was a writer and the executive story editor for the US television series, Noah's Arc, and was supervising director of debut films with first-time gay filmmakers as a director for the "Out in Africa" organization in South Africa.
In 2008 Rikki directed The short film Souljah by John Gordon, about a transgendered former child soldier, which won Best Film at the Rushes London Short Film Festival.
Rikki works extensively in theatre — creating many new plays, including Bashment, Familyman, TwothousandandSex, the stage version of Stonewall and most recently, Shalom Baby about a black man and a Jewish girl who fall in love in Nazi Germany and are deported to a concentration camp.
More recently he has directed three successful feature films for his company Team Angelica: Fit about teenage sexuality and homophobic bullying which was distributed to every school in the UK and has become a phenomenon with screenings world-wide, and KickOff a comedy about a football match between a gay and straight football team; along with several more short films, including Gently, 7 Dials, Thrive, Alive, and Butterfly commissioned by the Royal Albert Hall.
He is a committed mentor, regularly teaching his "In the Room" career alignment course and one on one "Career clinic".
His self-help book What I Learned Today is available through Team Angelica Books.
He was included under "Unsung heroes" in the Independent on Sunday's Pink List 2008 and was ranked number 92 in the Pink List 2010 and 91 in the Pink List 2011. The Pink List 2011 citation said:
- "A man of many talents, Rikki Beadle-Blair describes himself as a performer, writer, director, composer, choreographer, artist, activist, CEO and mentor. His latest play, Shalom Baby, at Theatre Royal Stratford East, looks at inter-racial pairings in both gay and straight relationships."[1]
References
Based mainly on http://www.teamangelica.com/contact
