Tara is founder and director of Compass Presents.



In her artistic work for Compass Presents Tara creates expanded cinema experiences, immersive environments, enhanced screenings, and interactive encounters. Mixing film and archive, visual art, digital content, music and performance, she uses a multidisciplinary approach to bring new relevance to work, presenting it afresh in a live performance setting. Tech plays a role in all her work, whether immersive techniques like mapping or thermal imaging or low-fi installations in which digital masquerades as analogue. Tara has extensive experience working with archive material to bring new relevance to the stories of local communities through presenting it alongside live performance or as part of installation.

Through Compass Presents she has created work in venues nationally but also works in outdoor and found spaces in an effort to work outside of traditional performance environments and reach new audiences.

With a background in community outreach and education, Tara's creative methodology includes local community engagement and focus group consultation in order to test ideas and enable new and different perspectives. She has particular experience of communities and individuals currently underserved by the arts.

Recents work includes an expanded screening of Singin' in the Rain as part of the BFI's Musicals Season; House Party on Henley Street (an immersive promenade theatre piece involving a 90s rave in the house in which Shakespeare was born, and the result of an Inclusion R&D for the Royal Shakespeare Company & Shakespeare Birthplace Trust). Celluloid Sail was a circus, archive and projection show set aboard a touring tall-ship. The Caligari Experience was a Gothic re-staging of 1920s cult cinema classic The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, with 3D projection-mapped set, circus and live score.

On the Rocks at Minack Theatre was just one of many expanded cinema experiences across the UK in which Compass Presents has created an atmospheric world around the screening of a well-loved film using projection mapping, performance and installation,

Compass Presents also create stages and interactive installations for festival environments, including Shambala, Glastonbury, BoomTown and other grassroots festivals, and conferences such as UNESCO Creative Cities Annual Conference.



Tara has devised and written educational programmes and courses in creative skills for homeless people, care-leavers, the long term unemployed and for communities for whom English is not the first language.

Studio themes