Who we are
Deliberately small at the core
Left Blank is led by Francesca Gkotsi and Dave Darch, working with a close group of East London specialists. We're deliberately small at the core — the people who design our programmes are the people who deliver them — and we build the right team around each brief. A commissioner gets senior leadership on every project, not just at the pitch.
Between us we've taught right across the age range, from early years to higher education, in schools, community settings and cultural institutions. That breadth lets us pitch a programme precisely for the room it lands in.
Senior producer and cultural education strategist
Francesca Gkotsi
Francesca is a programme producer with over twenty years in cultural education, specialising in complex, multi-partner programmes. She has managed budgets up to £150K and commissioned artists, evaluators, filmmakers, designers and organisations. She currently produces Arts Council England's Artsmark 25 anniversary programme, and has worked alongside Artsmark since 2006 as an expert, consultant and network convenor — supporting hundreds of schools to achieve and sustain the award.
Her wider leadership spans a seven-borough Cultural Education Partnership, senior roles across a music education hub reaching 116 schools, capacity-building for East London organisations as Creative Producer for Foundation for Future London's Co-Lab, and inclusion-focused action research and evaluation with schools facing structural barriers. Her strength is the architecture of a project: designing it well, building the partnerships that sustain it, and keeping it focused on the people it's for.
Innovation, digital and inclusion
Dave Darch
Dave leads our work on innovation, digital programmes and AI, and on inclusion, SEND and wellbeing. A creative technologist and artist, he designs and delivers across coding, music technology, animation, AI and mixed reality — with a rare knack for making it usable for every young person, whatever their needs. He's an associate musician with Drake Music, a leader in inclusive music-making, and has worked with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Google.
His SEND and neurodivergent practice runs deep: accessible music-technology sessions bringing together young people and adults with and without special educational needs, creative programmes with Artillery for neurodivergent young people, and work with Phoenix, a Tower Hamlets all-through autism school, and West Lea, a group of North London SEND schools. For Dave, accessibility isn't an add-on to a session — it's the starting point.
Our team
Lean core, long-standing collaborators
Francesca and Dave lead every project, but they don't work alone. Around them is a group of East London artists, educators and technologists they've worked with for years, brought in to match each brief. It keeps the core lean and the quality consistent, and it gives us the capacity for larger commissions without senior leadership drifting away from the work.
What drives us
Why our work is genuinely accessible
Left Blank is a female-led team that brings lived experience of neurodivergence to its inclusion and wellbeing work. That perspective shapes how we design, and it's part of why young people who don't always thrive in conventional settings tend to thrive in ours.
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