Visionary

NABA – the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti – has been shaping Italy's creative talent since 1980, first in Milan, then Rome. Now it has arrived at Here East in London, and the choice of location is anything but accidental. For Diego Mattiolo, Head of Education at NABA, London's density of cultures, institutions and creative energy made it the only logical first step for the school's international expansion.Georgina Godwin speaks with Diego about what the great creative cities of the world actually have in common – and what they risk losing. He reflects on growing up in Milan surrounded by design weeks and fashion shows, taking it all for granted until distance gave him perspective, and on what NABA's particular philosophy – that combination of rigorous thinking and hands-on making – produces in students that more conventional institutions do not. The goal, he explains, is not to teach students what to think, but to help them find their voice.The conversation ranges from the deep cultural roots of Italian style to the question of whether cities like Milan and London are in danger of becoming victims of their own polish – and why Diego thinks the next genuinely surprising creative hub is more likely to be found in Tokyo, Singapore or India.

When Shanta Thake became Chief Artistic Officer at New York's Lincoln Center — home to the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic and the New York City Ballet — she inherited one of the most storied platforms in global culture. But she also inherited its assumptions: about which art forms deserve the grandest stages, which audiences are welcome and where the boundaries of a great institution should end.Georgina Godwin speaks with Shanta about the art and politics of curation at scale — and why the most urgent question facing the Lincoln Center right now isn't what to programme, but how to ensure that the work stays genuinely ahead of the world rather than just responsive to it. Shanta argues that artists are always ten steps ahead of the rest of us, and that a curator's job is less to follow the news than to trust the artists who are already living in tomorrow.The conversation ranges from the collision of salsa and symphony to the Lincoln Center's Collider programme — a remarkable cohort of artists working at the frontier of technology and performance, from 4D sound compositions to art that generates new forms when two people hold hands and complete a human circuit. And it ends with a question we're all asking: in an age of AI and humanoid machines, what is it that makes art uniquely human — and how do we hold onto it?

The country that accidentally incubated Google DeepMind, that draws one in five of Palantir's global workforce to its shores, that saw AI startups raise nearly eight billion pounds in a single quarter of 2026. Britain is already a major player in the AI race, but can we counter the familiar narrative of decline?In this special edition of Visionary, recorded live at the Margaret Thatcher Conference in London, Charlotte Crosswell chairs a sharp conversation with Tom Westgarth, Head of Growth at British AI chip designer Fractile, and Louis Moseley, Head of Palantir Technologies UK. Together they make the case that Britain sits at a rare and potentially fleeting intersection: world-class machine learning talent, a legal and cultural framework that global companies trust, and a geography compact enough to allow the kind of creative collision – technologist meets creative director, chip designer meets software engineer – that Silicon Valley has to take transcontinental flights to replicate.Visionary is brought to you by Here East, London's home of innovation and creativity.

There's an uncomfortable truth settling across the media industry. AI is already inside the production pipeline – generating imagery, animating characters, building virtual worlds, and doing it faster and cheaper than any human team. For some, that's the promise. For others, it's an existential threat. But the more interesting question lives somewhere between those two positions. Because the history of entertainment has always been, at its core, a history of technology forcing change. From the Fleischer brothers to Disney to Pixar, every era has had its disruption – and every era has found that the human appetite for story, for wonder, for experiences that make us genuinely feel something, has survived it.Michael Stein was on the frontline of cinematic innovation during Pixar's early years. He's now the Chief Technology Officer at Journey, one of the world's most ambitious experience design agencies. And he's spent his career adapting – reading where technology is heading and figuring out what it means for the people making things. AI, he tells Georgina Godwin, isn't the end of creativity. It might just be the beginning of something we haven't had the imagination to picture yet.

The most important decision you'll make about your business might not be what you're building – it's where you build it.Gavin Poole has spent fourteen years proving that point. And what he's built at Here East is, at its core, an argument: that proximity to ambition is itself a competitive advantage. Georgina Godwin sits down with the CEO of Here East to explore what it really means to engineer a place for success. Gavin talks about the concept of creative collision – those unplanned, unchoreographed moments that happen when the right people share a building, a canteen, a yard – and how Here East has made the deliberate cultivation of those moments the foundation of its model. When an Oxford Economics study found that over ninety percent of Here East tenants had collaborated with another business on campus, and that those collaborations had directly increased revenue and headcount, it confirmed what he'd had long believed: that community isn't a soft benefit. It's a growth strategy.He's candid too about the stubbornness it took to get here – the reports that predicted failure, the holidays cut short, the promotions turned down – and what he'd tell any leader serious about building something that endures.

Britain's beauty industry is worth more than £30 billion, growing at four times the rate of the national economy – and until recently, the government was still classifying it alongside dry cleaners and funeral parlours.That gap between perception and reality is precisely what Millie Kendall has spent her career trying to close. The entrepreneur and co-founder of the British Beauty Council has worked in almost every corner of the industry – from shampoo girl at thirteen to brand founder to policy advocate – and few people understand its contradictions better. An industry where 86% of businesses are owned by women, and yet the top jobs still tend to go to men. An industry that outsizes automobile manufacturing but receives none of the same political attention. An industry that has thrived through financial crisis, pandemic and the cost of living squeeze, but still can't quite shake the charge of being frivolous.In this episode, Georgina Godwin speaks with Kendall about the forces reshaping beauty right now: the rise of aesthetics and what it means for the future of makeup; why fragrance is quietly becoming the category to watch; what heritage brands get wrong in their panic to compete with challengers; and why biotechnology – creating ingredients in labs rather than sourcing them globally – may be the industry's shrewdest hedge against geopolitical instability. Kendall is also blunt about the fight to regulate the aesthetics industry, the limits of social media, and why the lipstick effect, far from being a marketing myth, tells us something true about how people cope.Sharp, funny and unexpectedly political – this is the business of beauty, taken seriously at last.Visionary is brought to you by Here East, London's home of innovation and creativity.