Lesley Anne Rose
Co-founder and Director
Lesley Anne is a writer and producer. She is a Co-founder and Creative Director of Open Road, a company which consolidates her experiences at senior management level in the cultural sector, passion for people and place and commitment to working towards a better future for the planet and each other.
She has produced complex award winning community projects, city wide festivals, large scale international co-productions, award winning mid scale touring theatre and site specific new work. Her work crosses into heritage, academic research and climate change.
Lesley Anne is a published and commissioned writer, working for many years as a travel writer, and a trained therapist. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts and a member of Scottish Pen – a not-for-profit organisation which champions freedom of speech and literature across borders. She is also chair of a community development trust and sits on the Board of Directors of Magnetic North Theatre Productions Ltd.
Alison Louise Merrett
Co-founder and Director
Alison started her career in banking before moving on to run the family business with her husband for 25 years. In that time, they expanded the business from her and two working partners, to the company it is today employing 25 people. She gained valuable across the board experience of running a small business including aspects of HR and finance.
Stepping aside to pursue other projects, Alison now works in bookkeeping for businesses in many different industries. This variety has given her a clear insight into the challenges of running small to medium sized enterprises.
Alison has a lifelong interest in the Arts. Her family’s creative gene has manifested itself in her as a keen florist completing three years City and Guilds training. She has recently completed a two year Undergraduate course in the History of Art at the Department of Continuing Education at Oxford University.
Lucy Stroud
Director and Press and Social Media
Lucy has a passion for crafting narrative to create engaging content that encapsulates and tells the story of a brand, performance or act.
She graduated from Robert Gordon’s University in Aberdeen with a degree in journalism and for many years worked in London as a journalist for national newspapers and magazines, specialising in Features and Real Life stories.
Lucy returned to Aberdeen to complete a PhD at the University of Aberdeen in the Centre of Modern Thought. During that time she worked as a freelance PR agent, which included Head of Press for Aberdeen International Youth Festival for several years. Lucy teaches media and communication skills including units on PR, advertising and feature writing. She also practices and instructs yoga, having gained her qualification in Mysore, India.
Kirsty Bailey
Director
Kirsty is an experienced finance, project and events manager. She has a wide range of experience working in the Scottish arts sector and beyond. She was the Training Manager for the Federation of Scottish Theatre and established, fundraised for, and managed a wide range of development opportunities for the sector including bursaries, mentoring schemes and residential training programmes.
Kirsty moved home to Aberdeen ten years ago and has since worked as a freelance project manager on training programmes for youth theatre, producing small to mid-scale theatre productions, event management, research projects and fundraising. Kirsty has worked with Open Road on various projects over the years.
In addition to her role at Open Road, Kirsty is a Director in her family business, where she is responsible for accounts, marketing and administrative elements of the business.
Sarah Boyle
Choir Leader
Sarah’s passion for music blossomed from an early age along with her interest in community music and music therapy. She studied for a BMus in Community Music at the University of Aberdeen and is a member of Killer Quines, Aberdeen’s all-female a cappella group. She also plays the cello with the University of Aberdeen Symphony Orchestra and has undertaken placements across North East Scotland to learn more about facilitating community music. Sarah leads our Harbour Voices Choir and aims to strengthen links between harbourside communities through the choir and her work with Big Noise Torry. She believes that community music can create positive change, on both an individual and societal level. As Higgins and Willingham (2017) state:
community musicians intentionally set out to create spaces for inclusive and participatory musical doing. This impulse comes from a belief that music making is a fundamental aspect of the human experience and is therefore an intrinsic and foundational part of human culture and society.
Martin Aitken
Producer
After training at RSAMD and building a career in technical theatre, Martin now produces a range of work from small to mid-scale theatre and creative community projects, embedding environmentally responsible principles into all his work.
Martin first worked with Open Road as the Creative Producer for Safe Harbour: Open Sea and now supports our work in the communities of Fittie and Torry, including our Harbour Memories coffee mornings, Harbour Voices Choir and Harbour Film Nights.