Currently being appointed. Full list with bios and photographs soon.

INTERNATIONAL ADVISORY GROUP

Léo Valls

Founder, Connect Skate Urbanism Festival, France

Festival website: here

Valls website: here

Instagram: @leovallsconnected

Born and based in Bordeaux, Léo is an internationally recognized professional skateboarder and a pioneer of the skaturbanism movement — a vision of skateboarding that goes beyond performance and explores artistic, architectural, and social aspects of urban space.

April Jones

Visual story-teller, filmmaker, journalist, creative and public speaker.

Instagram: @dream_evil_pictures

IMDB: here

April Jones is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, impact journalist, and public speaker whose work blends storytelling, social change, and civic engagement. With two decades in unscripted media, film production, performance-driven marketing, and on-the-ground activism, she elevates underground communities and addresses urgent issues in the creative communities including DIY urbanism, spatial justice, and policy reform.

Recognized by the City of Los Angeles for her philanthropic contributions, Jones brings over a decade of global fieldwork documenting DIY skateparks and community-built third spaces. Her film Concrete Law chronicles a community-led battle to save a skatepark from demolition, laying the groundwork for the first Permission DIY blueprint, a replicable model for sustaining and legalizing community-built skateparks. She is also pursuing undergraduate studies, integrating academic inquiry with hands-on work in storytelling and advocacy.

Dr Harry Meadley

Researcher, Leeds UK

Website: here

Instagram: @harrymeadley

Dr Harry Meadley is an artist and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Leeds Beckett University’s Leeds School of Arts. Through research and socially engaged practice, he develops arts-led approaches to skateboarding to help foster safer, more inclusive spaces. Meadley’s recent PhD, ’The Art of Skating Institutions’, explored how building mutually beneficial relationships between skate communities, arts organisations, and civic institutions can make street skateboarding more accessible to non-traditional skateboarders.

Farran Golding

Writer, Journalist, Founder of Skate Bylines, UK

Skatebylines website: here

Instagram: @farrangolding

Farran Golding, Editor-at-large for Quartersnacks, associate editor at Closer Skateboarding, Founder and editorial director of Skate Bylines, freelance journalist. Website

Chris Lawton

Skateboarder. Co-Founder, Skate Nottingham

Chris Lawton is a lifelong skateboarder, activist and community organiser and former economic development professional and academic economist. His research and advocacy interests include employment, skills and policies that might improve the ‘quality’ of work, especially in urban centres and the post-industrial North and Midlands of the UK, and the potential role of skateboarding to develop both the praxis and the social capital necessary for more sustainable and inclusive urban development pathways (again, especially where cities are cold, rainy and constructed primarily out of red bricks and post-war concrete). He was a panel speaker at Pushing Boarders, London, 2018, and contributed to the programming of Pushing Boarders, Malmö, 2019.

Chris is one of the co-founders of Skate Nottingham, a now nine-year deep project to rescue and reimagine a UK post-industrial city in crisis, which each year engages more than 1,000 young people and gets an average of two new skateparks or skateable spaces over the line. Skate Nottingham’s current portfolio of interventions include several programmes that are closely complementary to SkateCER’s objectives: ‘skate creative club’ is a regular workshop programme that engages children and young people with skater-creatives across a wide range of disciplines, from graffiti, fine art, character design and filmmaking, in order to raise aspirations, especially amongst more disadvantaged inner-city communities; ‘skate and regenerate’ teaches young people trade skills, also raising awareness of career paths in the built environment professions, all whilst mobilising volunteers to repair and improve concrete skateparks and other outdoor public spaces; and Skate Nottingham are one of just two organisations in the UK that deliver Edu-Skate, the life-skills programme developed and led by Concrete Jungle Foundation, who work with communities in Jamaica, Morocco and Peru. Up until November 2025, he led the community development function at Skateboard GB, the National Governing Body for Skateboarding in the UK.  Last year, Chris joined CJF’s Board of Trustees and is stoked to be a member of the SkateCER international Advisory Group in 2026-27. 

AUSTRALIAN ADVISORY GROUP

Aaron Christiansen

Skateboarder (Optifreaks team), Landscape Architect Hons. Student, UNSW

Instagram: @ronnychrysler

Aaron Christiansen, skateboarder, skate design consultant and landscape architect hons. candidate, UNSW

Sue McGill

Participation Growth Director, Australian Sports Commission and skateboarder. Bio