Milena De Rosa: Oil Painter

Milena De Rosa is a 23 year old Nottingham-based oil painter whose practice explores women’s lives, identity and her own connection to the natural world. Alongside her painting practice, she creates large-scale public murals.

She graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2025 and was recently commissioned by Tate to create a public mural inspired by Frida Khalo. Through this work, she is interested in bringing painting into everyday spaces, creating accesabilty for wider audiences to engage with art.

Vishal Joshi: Fine and Contemporary Artist

Vishal's artistic practice centres around Flow State - the point where movement, music and creativity become instinctive and absorbing.

Working closely with dancers and musicians, Vishal curate and host Flow State events, capturing authentic moments of performance through photography and video. These images become the starting point for new paintings, translating moments of genuine expression into their own visual language.

Vishal's practice connects with space research through questions of human consciousness, isolation, communication and wellbeing. Space exploration challenges us to understand how people adapt to unfamiliar, confined environments, maintain connection and collaborate under pressure. They are interested in how creative practice can support these experiences, offering alternative ways to communicate ideas, overcome perfectionism and build connections across disciplines.

Through Flow State, Vishal hopes to explore how shared creative experiences can generate new perspectives within the space research community, connecting artistic instinct with scientific inquiry and our understanding of what it means to be human, both on Earth and beyond.

Angie Roberts: Contemporary Abstract Artist

Angie Roberts is a contemporary abstract artist based in Market Harborough, originally from North Wales. Her multidisciplinary practice, Navigation, explores the connections between memory, place, identity and the human experience. Angie is also an elected member of Leicester Society of Artists

Working with painting, drawing, maps and layered cartographic materials, she investigates how we find our way through both physical and emotional landscapes. Her work reimagines maps as lived records, where memory, movement, ritual and personal experience transform fixed geography into something fluid and deeply human.

Central to her practice is a curiosity about how we experience the world, how our environments shape us, and how creative exploration can reveal new ways of understanding ourselves and our place within it.

Through her participation in the Leverhulme Centre for Humanity and Space artist programme, Angie hopes to extend this exploration through interdisciplinary research, bringing artistic perspectives to questions of navigation, connection and what it means to live well.

Her approach is grounded in a simple philosophy:

“I don’t create to escape my life. I create to understand it.”

Matthew Turner: Fine Art and Concept Artist

Matthew Turner is a British artist whose work explores the intersection of science, engineering, humanity, and art. Drawing upon a lifelong fascination with technology, space exploration, and visual storytelling, his practice seeks to reconnect artistic creativity with scientific and engineering innovation.

Raised in a working-class community in England's Black Country during the 1970s and 1980s, Turner developed an early appreciation for engineering through his father, a mechanical engineer. Fascinated by science fiction cinema, concept art, and the possibilities of future technologies, he initially dreamed of working for Industrial Light & Magic. However, limited creative opportunities in his local area led him into industry, where he followed in his father's footsteps, beginning an apprenticeship at a copper tube plant before working across a range of manufacturing environments, including brickworks and quarry machinery production.

Despite his engineering career, Turner remained committed to creative pursuits and eventually enrolled in art college before studying for a BA (Hons) Fine Art: Painting at the University of Wolverhampton School of Art and Design. While supporting himself through work as a cycle courier and labourer, he immersed himself in painting and drawing, further broadening his artistic outlook through a period of study at the Moscow Institute of Architecture (MARHI) shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This experience proved transformative, particularly visits to the Moscow Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics, which helped shape his enduring interest in space exploration as a subject for artistic inquiry.

Following his degree, Turner completed a Postgraduate Certificate in Education at De Montfort University and embarked on a distinguished 27-year career as a secondary and post-16 Art, Design and Technology teacher. Throughout his teaching career, he developed innovative curriculum projects that integrated art, design, engineering, and space science, including spacecraft design, perspective drawing, and space-themed creative programmes. These experiences reinforced his belief in the power of art to inspire curiosity about science and encourage interdisciplinary learning.
Alongside his professional practice, Turner has travelled extensively in pursuit of inspiration and adventure. His journeys have included cycling across America, Iceland, and Europe, mountain biking in the Andes and the Amazon, and motorcycling from southern Spain to the Arctic. These experiences have deepened his interest in exploration, discovery, and humanity's relationship with challenging environments, themes that continue to inform his work.

In 2021, Turner left full-time teaching to focus on his artistic practice. That same year, he was invited to exhibit at the Legends of Space event in Lausanne, Switzerland, presented in association with NASA and Lockheed Martin. There he met Apollo-era astronauts, NASA personnel, and leading figures in the aerospace community, including Charlie Duke, Dave Scott, Gerry Griffin, Holly Ridings, Kathy Sullivan, and Bertram Ulrich of the NASA Art Program. Following this experience, Turner was elected as an artist member of the International Association of Astronomical Artists (IAAA).
His growing reputation within the field of space art led to numerous exhibitions, projects, and awards. In 2022, he organised and curated UK-Space: Science and Nature at Leicester's Space Park during World Space Week, combining exhibition curation with educational workshops and public engagement activities. In 2023, he received support from both the Oppenheim-John Downes Memorial Trust and Arts Council England's Developing Your Creative Practice (DYCP) programme, while also placing second in the PackSend UK Art of the Year competition.

In 2024, Turner undertook an Arts Council England-funded research trip to the United States, visiting NASA's Kennedy Space Centre and Johnson Space Centre, accessing the NASA Art Program archive, and meeting fellow space artists and astronaut Nicole Stott. The same year, he won the NASA Space Tech Art Challenge: Imagine Tomorrow, selected from 480 artists and designers representing 39 countries. His winning proposal envisioned an evacuated airship designed for Martian surface exploration. He also presented a major solo exhibition at Space Park Leicester and exhibited in Lunar Lullabies at Firstsite Contemporary Art Gallery alongside fellow IAAA artists and Grayson Perry.

During 2025, Turner contributed concept designs for Australia's SpaceLive event, became a finalist in the Royal Cambrian Academy of Art Open Exhibition, and represented Space Park Leicester as Artist-in-Residence at both the UK Space Conference and the Higher Education Technicians Summit. His work was also selected for Street Stories, a national public arts initiative transforming vacant retail spaces into immersive cultural experiences in Leicester city centre.

In early 2026, Turner received support from the Lucy Phillips Art Fund, enabling a research visit to SpaceX Starbase in Texas. Alongside his studio practice, he continues to deliver workshops and educational programmes across the East Midlands, helping young people engage with subjects ranging from space science to literature through creative learning. His work and ideas have also been featured in numerous science, space, and arts publications and podcasts.

Turner's artistic vision is inspired by the legacy of the NASA Art Program and the Soviet Cosmic School. Through painting, drawing, and concept design, he seeks to celebrate the achievements of space exploration while fostering greater public understanding of the relationship between art, engineering, and science. His work aims to inspire future generations of explorers, innovators, and creative thinkers, encouraging society to look both outward toward the cosmos and inward toward humanity's capacity for imagination, curiosity, and discovery.