Kidology Arts is a community interest company run by composer and musician Amanda Johnson and visual artist Richard Johnson. Our aim is to engage children and young people from disadvantaged areas of South Yorkshire and North East Derbyshire in high quality, contemporary art and music inspired by the natural environment.

We work from home, a house on the edge of the woods just a few minutes from the Peak District.

Our work is inspired by the nature around us and over the course of our 25 year long careers in the arts we have built up a wealth of knowledge about our area’s natural environment. Part of our aim is to share this knowledge with the people we engage, people who tend to live in urban areas where levels of engagement in the arts is low.

In our most recent project we collaborated with young people from Rotherham. Together we made a work about Rotherham’s red deer population that was installed in Wentworth Woodhouse.

We have worked with partners including: the National Trust and the Peak District National Park, as well as many local museums and every local council in our area.

We have engaged participants and audiences in a range of settings including: young people at risk in Rotherham, museum visitors at venues across Barnsley, refugees and asylum seekers in Derby, Romany Gypsy Travellers and families in former Derbyshire mining villages.

Since the founding of Kidology Arts in 2013 we have run 7 projects directly funded by ACE, 3 projects funded by the Heritage Fund and 5 projects commissioned by local councils.

Our work regularly requires us to work with freelance artists. In the last 3 years we have either directly employed or helped to commission a choreographer, 2 dancers, 5 musicians, a sculptor, textile artist, photographer, film maker and a ceramicist.

We have been recognised for our work too. Three pieces of our work are now in public collections and in 2018 we were recognised by the Government for our work with residents of Derbyshire mining villages.