Ruth Daniel
Activist, Change-Maker, CEO, Author
Ruth is an award-winning cultural producer and social entrepreneur. Inspired by the transformative use of hip-hop in the drug cartels of Medellin, Colombia, when a young MC said: ‘If it wasn’t for hip-hop, I would be dead. Hip-hop gave me another option and I’m truly thankful for that.’ Ruth believes art has a capacity to make change in the toughest of contexts.
Over the past 20 years, Ruth has worked to make change with creativity in the most marginalised communities across the world working across 26 countries in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. Ruth has taken an organisation routed in research around the impact of arts in conflict zones, to an organisation supporting grassroots change-makers and their respective organisations to amplify their socio-economic impact
Ruth has spoken at over 100 music and creative industry events in over 30 countries, including two TEDx talks. She is a trustee with Comma Press, All FM and The Radical Independent Arts Fund. She is a Honorary Research Fellow, University of Manchester; Visiting Scholar, Hip-Hop Education Center, New York; Cultural Ambassador, Somerset House, London; and an advisor for the Center For Music Ecosystems, USA.