Founder/CEO Ariane Barnes
Yoga For Mental Health (YPS 300)
Acting BA (HONS)
Performance (QTLS/MA)
Hi, I'm Ariane.
I’m the founder of the Different Women Project.
I’m also an artist, and qualified lecturer in advanced performance & yoga psychology.
I specialise in confidence building, empowerment and person-centered development at FE/HE Level & Continual Development Practice.
My method fuses performance, psychology and diversity of craft as a pedagogy to increase personal power and leadership.
I empower women, and those who work with women, to stand strong and tall in their craft in live and online trainings with a strong focus on body-mind connection.
Difference & power are closely united.
And it's only when I truly understood this in a deep and transformational way that things in my life started to change.
I was actively working as an actor, booking large corporate clients, dance jobs and travelling with my craft but the same situations kept cropping up, time and time again.
Women Of Colour and LGBTQ+ women are at twice as likely to suffer micro aggressions at work and 50 percent less likely to be cast overall in the UK performance industry. These worrying trends have contributed to a mental health crisis that has been overlooked for decades in performance and business.
The lack of support present was astounding, so I set to work gathering testimonials from actors and teachers and worked for unions and creative companies to find the solution, the answer was simple:
The performance industry needs to put the power back into our hands by surrounding us with holistic methodology that supports, nurtures and values us as whole human beings that need a 'Kula'- a sense of belonging.
I decided I would do just that.
I began to actively seek out and work with women of colour and LGBTQ women wherever possible to strengthen and support this amazing community of women and give us opportunities to do what we love in a supportive community.
I built my artistic work around this concept creating transmedia projects voicing the mixed race experience.
I fell in love with warrior archetypes and fused my now considerable experience in world dance, acting, singing and wellness training into a web of programmes that would provide women who don't fit the standard mould in performance with a place to feel safe, nurtured, acknowledged and developed.
Empowered.
My live trainings bring some of the world's leading practitioners in the field of performance and diversity into professional development days for performers and offer performance skill masterclasses for corporates.
My online programmes provide an opportunity to easily access wellness, coaching and specialist programmes remotely whilst keeping in touch with my ethos of helping women blossom and giving opportunity to the women in our WOC/LGBTQ community.
Infusing your performance or business with your unique voice, your true self, from a place of power, active questioning and openness is the biggest investment you can make in your own future.
I'd like to share that gift with you.
Ariane