Abi Lawrence

Background

About Abi Lawrence

I’ve spent almost 20 years helping creative organisations figure out how to genuinely connect with people. That’s meant different things in different roles — leading public engagement at BBC Cymru Wales, running operations at Chapter Arts Centre, sitting on the board at Amgueddfa Cymru — but the thread running through all of it is the same: how do you make culture feel like it belongs to everyone, not just the people who already know where to find it?I work across strategy, partnerships, and teams. I’m as comfortable in a budget conversation as I am in a creative one, and I’ve learned that the best public engagement work happens when those two things stop feeling like opposites.What I care about most is impact that actually lands, programmes that reach the people they’re meant for, partnerships that hold up under pressure, and organisations that are set up to do their best work sustainably.I’m based in Cardiff and rooted in the Welsh cultural landscape, but the questions I work on, about access, inclusion, and what public institutions owe their communities, feel pretty universal.Always happy to connect with people working on similar things.