Rikki Beadle-Blair
Rikki Beadle-Blair 9born 1961) is an actor, director, playwright, singer, songwriter, dancer and choreographer.
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.
Named several years running on the Independent on Sunday’s Pink List as one the 100 most influential gay people in Britain, Rikki has a life-long commitment to creating challenging, transformative entertainment in the mediums of film, theatre, music, television, radio, dance and design. He created the production company "Team Angelica" to pursue these goals and 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 tv 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.
Recently 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 18 new plays in the last six years, 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.
In the last three years, Rikki 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.
Rikki is currently working on his next Feature film Taken In, a thriller set in the world of homeless youth.
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 now through Team Angelica Books.
He 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
