Staff Profiles

Jude Wright

Executive Director Jude Wright hails from Wakefield and has worked for the company since January 2010. On completion of her MA in Classics Jude started her career with Northern Broadsides touring to venues across the country for three years. She project managed and directed a number of devised pieces such as ‘Spitting Feathers’, ‘The Kind Of Folks We Are’ and ‘Hijacked Dreams’, all drawn from classical sources but moved to a very contemporary setting. Since then, Jude has worked for a number of different organisations, establishing and running new community arts-based projects and directing various productions at Bradford College, Theatre in the Mill, Square Chapel and Oldham Coliseum. From here she went on to Wakefield Theatre Royal as Creative Education and Outreach Manager, taking professional theatre and practice to new audiences across the district and programming and developing Wakefield Arts Centre as a space for new and innovative work. Jude is (the better looking!) half of Bent Architecht, a Theatre Company who create fresh, engaging, entertaining work that tells stories that address the issues and underlying questions of being alive now in a way that is highly visual, verbally and physically poetic, surreal yet immediate, tragic but very funny. Jude is a keen motorbiker lady and enjoys nothing more than zooming to and from work on her bike.

Steve Byrne

Steve has been Artistic Director of Interplay for 12 years and has taken the Company through a series of expansion and diversification, introducing Film, Music and Radio strands to the theatre work of the Company.  He has written several shows for the Company, including This Land: The Story of Woody Guthrie and directs all the shows across the five senses.  A graduate of Goldsmith’s College, previously Steve has worked extensively in theatre as an actor, composer, writer and director, including Birmingham Rep, The National Theatre and Pentabus. His work has also taken him to Germany, Japan and the USA.

Tom Jordan

Tom Jordan is the Company’s resident Digital Artist and Web Developer. Tom came to Interplay as one of our young people on the Tools for the Trade Programme in 2005. He began working as a freelance film editor and assistant deliverer for the Company and has since become full time, developing the website, delivering the Tools for the Trade sessions and working alongside the team to develop the Company. Tom is also a keen photographer and talented cellist, guitar, drums and bass player and has gigged with numerous bands around Leeds.

Lucy Scott

Lucy is our Administrator and does the majority of the Company’s Press and Marketing. Originally from Newcastle Lucy moved to Leeds to do her degree in Popular and World Music at the University of Leeds. On completion of her degree she travelled around Europe and hitch hiked through France and Spain to Morocco.

She has always had a keen interest in and involvement in the arts. She volunteered from the age of 14 for Digital Voice, a community media company specialising in Film and VJing with other young people based in Gateshead. Lucy plays the Saxophone in her band Pocket of 3 and gigs regularly around Yorkshire. She is also a key organiser of the Woodhouse Festival that launched in 2010, which is a series of events in Woodhouse to unite the community of students and local residents and engage them in arts activities.

Lee Smith

Lee is Lead Artist here at Interplay and delivers on the Tools for the Trade programme, teaching young people how to record in the studio, write their own tracks and play as part of a band. He plays Bass in the successful band Middleman, who represented UK music on the Yorkshire Forward stage at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas in March 2010. Lee is also a prolific Producer and has recorded with Sam Thornton, Milk White White Teeth, Buen Chico and The Taylors.