miss represented
Young women exploring life through creativity, making powerful work for personal development and social change.
Young women exploring life through creativity, making powerful work for personal development and social change.
Miss Represented is a story about strength, personal transformation and love.
Since 2011, we have been working with young women, aged 13 upwards, who display courage and tenacity when facing complex and deeply rooted problems in their young lives.
These are young people who have enormous amounts of potential yet are often misunderstood or ignored, and are disadvantaged through cycles of dysfunction, trauma and economic, social and political barriers.
Miss Represented is very simple.
It gives young women a space to meet, once a week to talk about their lives. We eat together, we share stories and we make art, working towards exhibitions, performances and talks or workshops. We work in youth centres, arts venues and schools.
The Miss Rep team is a multidisciplinary group of Artists-Mentors that help develop the girls’ creative vision as they explore their own identity and the world they inhabit. The girls’ lives are often complicated and full of rich, important stories that matter to young people, women, and our wider communities, everywhere.
We make invisible stories visible. We share our work to ask questions, to embrace common ground and to spark vital dialogue with our communities. Miss Rep seeks to shine a light on the young people whose potential has been obscured by simplistic labels, to amplify the voices that are unheard, to build resilience and self-love and discover purpose and passion.
Creativity has the power to heal deep wounds.
Community Project
Young Women who are not going to school and/or not engaging with services, are referred to Miss Represented through a range of agencies including, social services, youth offending service and pupil referral units.
We are a bold, rich, loving and creative way of providing support to these young women leading them away from destructive patterns, and helping them understand and process complex relationships or painful life experiences. Miss Rep moves the girls towards solidarity, connectivity and friendship, giving them the lifelong skills they need to communicate and thrive.
Part of why Miss Represented is so successful is because being collaborative is at the heart of what we do. We are led by our young women and we develop strong relationships that build trust and generate confidence.
We take all our conversations and creativity and make cross-art productions and installations that are raw, unapologetic, layered and strike to the heart. We take the work on tour locally and nationally including Q&A’s and workshops.
We bring our work to social care and youth work conferences connecting with different sectors, influencing policy and having honest conversations. If this sounds like a young person you know or work with, or you are interested in hosting Miss Rep, please get in touch.
Schools Project
Talk to any child in prison or in trouble with the police and they will tell you that falling out of school was a trigger point.”
Anne Longfield, Children’s Commissioner for England, March 2019.
Intervention before exclusion – Miss Represented works in schools with young women who are at risk of exclusion, and in Pupil Referral Units.
Experienced Facilitators
Two Miss Rep artist-mentors run weekly specialised creative and pastoral sessions with 6 girls identified by the school as needing support.
Creative work is shared at miss Rep events and often the young women across a number of schools collaborate to create larger pieces such as I See Red (link to film) which featured in Brighton Festival.
Example
Year 9 can be tough. At Hove Park School we supported six Year 9 girls as they transitioned into Year 10. Only 1 needed ongoing additional support following this intervention.
If you are a school interested in this programme, we’d love to talk about how we can make it work best for you. We like to work in a bespoke way making sure the young women and the schools are getting what they need.
Meet the team
some of the organisations we work with:
