Meet Our Team
Thank you for taking the time to explore our website. You can meet the Creative Cities team below.
Vicky Jepson
Event Producer
Vicky is a well connected media professional with a wealth of creative industry knowledge, expertise and experience. She started her career at the BBC, becoming an award winning television producer, specialising in factual entertainment and documentaries.
Now freelance, Vicky has a successful portfolio career, drawing on her flair for communication, strong editorial skills and proven track record in project management. Passionate about training, Vicky set up and ran Create Central’s Screen Bootcamps and was Director of the Creative Futures Incubator at the University of Warwick.
Her clients include BBC Academy, Channel 4, Creative UK, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Paramount and Sunset+Vine. Her work takes her all over the world, from TV production hubs in the UK to British embassies in Belgium, Saudi Arabia and Barbados.
She has two teenage sons, loves the arts and has graduated from Couch to 5k on more than one occasion!
Ruth Pitt
Creative Director
Ruth co-founded the Creative Cities Convention with Pact chief executive John McVay in 2018 and is responsible for the convention’s creative, editorial and business activities.
In addition, Ruth runs the media consultancy Under The Moon Ltd, advising media and public sector bodies on the strategic development of the screen sector across the UK. She also designs and leads talent and entoring initiatives for clients ranging from Channel 4 and Directors UK to Bradford Council and Batley Girls’ High School and is deeply committed to broadening access to the industry for people from all backgrounds, especially those working outside London.
Ruth was the creative consultant on the successful Leeds bid for Channel 4’s national headquarters, winning an RTS award for outstanding contribution to television. A trained print journalist, former radio and TV reporter and a documentary-maker by background, Ruth has been creative director of documentaries at BBC Religion and Ethics, head of documentaries at Granada TV, founding MD of Real Life Productions, head of factual at Tiger Aspect Productions and executive director of Screen England.
A regular festival and event chair with a specialism in political interviewing, she is currently also chair of the National Poetry Centre, a multi-million pound project led by Poet Laureate Simon Armitage to establish a new cultural home for poetry outside London.
Susie Townson
Event Organiser and Project Manager
Susie has worked on the Creative Cities Convention since it began in 2017. She began her career in the Features and Events department at the BBC working her way up from researcher to producer on various studio-based shows (live and pre-recorded.) She then worked in programme development at both the BBC and Discovery Networks Europe looking for new on-screen talent before setting up her own talent management company.
In addition to ensuring the smooth delivery of the conference and arranging all the commissioner meetings, Susie works alongside Ruth at Under the Moon organising one off events such as the Pact Indie Party (dinner/awards for 700 guests from across the television industry hosted by Hugh Dennis and an afterparty with Boy George performing) and project managing the various mentoring projects that UTM deliver which includes the highly successful Channel 4 Commissioning Mentor Network that has been nurturing rising stars from diverse backgrounds since 2015.
Sam Thodhlana
Social Media
Sam Thodhlana is a Digital Marketing and Communications Specialist with significant experience across a range of sectors including arts and culture, academia and creative entrepreneurship. In the past 12 years, she has created a digital & comms agency and a fashion blog site that built a following of 50K subscribers with a team of over 30 online content creators worldwide.
Also an experienced events producer, she also provides ad-hoc support on events, networking, online webinars and masterclasses. Sam has produced the BBC Digital Cities Creative Futures Day Birmingham 2022, bringing together partners ScreenSkills and BBC Academy.
Sam’s network in the creative content sector in the Midlands is extensive and past work includes projects for Create Central, The Space, WM Creative Scale Up Programme, Birmingham City University, CREME at Aston University, Punch, Mission Accomplished, ScreenSkills, and more.