Women Who Make 2026 Programme

There’s something quietly powerful that happens when women come together to make, to walk, to talk, to share what sits behind the work.

Women Who Make began in that spirit.

Launched on International Women’s Day 2025, it set out to create space, not just for showcasing creativity, but for recognising the depth of women’s labour, lived experience and imagination. What emerged was something both generous and necessary. Through last year’s webinars and our festival day at Masson Mills, conversations unfolded that were honest, sometimes challenging, often affirming. Women spoke about their work, but also about care, exhaustion, purpose, visibility and what it takes to keep going.

At times, it brought to mind that familiar sentiment from The Guilty Feminist – the idea of being a feminist while still “failing” at it daily. That tension felt present in the room: the negotiation, the imperfection, the humour, the honesty. Not polished, but real.

It didn’t feel like a series of events. It felt like the beginnings of a network, or perhaps more accurately, an ecology.

That experience has shaped what Women Who Make becomes in 2026.

This year, the programme stretches outwards – into landscapes, into studios, into shared spaces and quieter moments. It moves at different paces. Sometimes it will look like a panel conversation, bringing together brilliant women whose work continues to inspire and challenge us. At other times, it will be a walk, a workshop, a conversation over a table, or time carved out to pause and reflect. There is a retreat woven into the year, alongside gatherings and moments of exchange that are less about outcome and more about connection.

At its heart, this programme is held and shaped by its curators - Sophie Gresswell, Samantha Whelan and Stephanie Walsh - whose care, thinking and commitment have helped grow Women Who Make into what it is becoming. It is guided and supported through our team at Local, and continues to evolve through the women who take part in it.

We are also building this work with partners who have opened doors, shared trust and created space for it to flourish. At Masson Mills, Caroline Bowler welcomed Women Who Make with generosity and vision in 2025, helping us shape a festival that felt both grounded in place and expansive in its thinking. That spirit continues as we grow the programme. This year, we are also proud to be working with the National Trust at Hardwick Hall, a place deeply connected to women’s histories, power and agency, as part of the evolving festival programme.

At its core, this is a programme built through shared thinking. The themes we are exploring have not been imposed, but gathered, shaped through conversations with women across Derbyshire and beyond. Again and again, similar threads have surfaced.

Questions of value, of how women’s work is seen, measured or overlooked. Questions of courage and agency, what it means to step forward, to lead, to take up space. The realities of care, resilience and the balancing of multiple roles. A growing urgency around sustainability and circular ways of making. The importance of play, imagination and rest, not as luxuries but as essential parts of creative life.

There are conversations about belonging, about how women connect to place, to history, to one another, and about the stories that have been hidden or erased. There is a strong current of enterprise and independence, alongside a recognition of the barriers that still exist. And running throughout is a desire to repair and renew, to share skills across generations, to hold onto knowledge, and to pass it on.

These themes are not separate. They overlap, intersect and build on one another, just as women’s lives and practices do.