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Our team

groupFounded by Vivian Gladwell in 1990, Nose to Nose is a team of people with diverse experiences in the fields of theatre, community building, teaching, storytelling, play therapy, counselling, Special Needs and organisational consultancy. Our influence and training ranges from The Bataclown (France) and the Sacred Art of Clowning to Jonathan Kay’s Theatre of Now and the Roy Hart Theatre.


OUR CORE VALUES

We are all trained and accredited facilitators with Nose to Nose. This means that as part of the team we are committed to inform our practice of teaching clowning through a team process of supervision, peer review and co-facilitation.

Through our willingness to explore positively issues of communication and collaboration within our team, we believe we practise the central message of the work we teach – an approach and philosophy that sees clowning as a social playground for exploring our humanity.

This collective intelligence (as opposed to an individual one) contributes to the creative diversity and quality of our work.

Vivian close 2

Vivian Gladwell

Vivian is the founder and director of Nose to Nose and has given hundreds of workshops around the world. He lives both in the UK and France where he started clowning in 1978. He speaks French and English fluently.

Vivian began teaching in 1988 as part of the Lifeways Festival at Emerson College – UK. He trained as a facilitator with the Bataclown in 1990 and joined their team in 1991 also working as a modern day Court Jester (Clownanalyst).

He created Nose to Nose UK in 1990, Nose to Nose of North America in 2006, Nose to Nose Germany in 2008, NTN Italy in 2016 and Fool View, the Social Clowning group and has trained facilitators in the UK, the USA, Germany and Italy – view history.
He continues his role as ambassador for the work by researching the applications of clowning in the context of teacher training, medicine, conflict management, ecology and intercultural work in many countries (South Africa, USA, Senegal, Vietnam, India, Malaysia, Italy, Germany, Norway…)

He holds clowning as a social playground for exploring our humanity.

UK team

Alison Stockford

Ali participated in her first Nose to Nose workshop in 2002 and fell in love with the work. Since training Ali has been facilitating workshops with Nose to Nose since 2016. She holds this work in high esteem as a perfect grounding for all creative work and the bigger picture of trusting ourselves and life. Alison is a qualified and experienced teacher of over 25 years having delivered Performing Arts workshops in mainstream and special schools and older peoples settings. Dancing since the age of four she is drawn to facilitating how others explore the dimension of movement in their clown.
Performing experience includes: tap dancing and comedy in café-théâtre with Les Amuses Gueules Lille, France; Street Theatre and Theatre in Education with Inside Out Theatre Company, Hastings. In recent work for Nose to Nose, Ali has delivered trainings for the Giggle Doctors – Theodora Foundation, Lis’n Tell Speech and Language Practitioners, Quantum Marketing, London, medical students at the University of Bristol and social clowning at The Imaginarium,  a writers conference, Cambridge.  Ali speaks both English and French.



Carol Thompson

Carol’s training was in English and Theatre Arts at the University of Toronto and the Drama Studio in London. She worked in Education and Theatre for some years and then qualified to be a Psychosynthesis therapeutic counsellor and an NLP Master Practitioner. Carol took these skills into business in the private and public sectors as a Communication Skills Trainer. In recent years she has become involved in the positive psychology movement as a Laughter Leader and now a Clowning Facilitator, combining her interests in education, theatre and psychology.


Jessica Hernandez

Jessica studied Speech and Drama in Switzerland and England from 2002 and decided to try out a Nose to Nose clowning course in 2004, which sent her on a wonderfully joyous clown journey and messed badly with her sense of wanting to get things “right”. From 2006, she trained as a clown facilitator with Vivian Gladwell. Since then, Jessica has been working as an actress, storyteller and clown facilitator. Her multilinguistic background has sent her on many adventures abroad to work with teachers, health care professionals and people with additional support needs. A mother of two young clowns, Jessica lives and mainly works in Scotland, where she has recently trained to become a Forest School Leader. This allows her to combine her love of stories and playfulness with all that Mother Nature has to offer.


Angie WakemanAngie Wakeman

Angie is a former Nurse and Steiner Teacher. Her 3 adopted children paved her way to finding clowning, where she discovered her own need for playfulness and freedom.
Having trained as a clown facilitator with Nose to Nose, she went on to facilitate Clowning workshops for medical students at the University of East Anglia for a number of years. She is particularly interested in working with health care professionals, and more recently social workers- indeed anyone who has a role in caring for others.
Her interest in clowning is only really to do with love; which in essence she sees as the freedom to be ourselves, which turns out to be funny and beautiful, or not at all funny, but  still beautiful.

Germany team


Catherine Bryden (Canada / UK)

Catherine has been teaching at the Rudolf-Steiner School in Gröbenzell, Munich, Germany since 2001. In Canada, she studied Developmental Psychology, Theater, Teaching English as a Second Language (TESL), and Translation. She has taught ESL in Canada, Taiwan, Singapore and Germany, where she founded and directed children’s summer language camps in French and English. In the last 5 years, she has been conducting workshops for teachers and student-teachers in communication, improvisation and clowning in Stuttgart and the Witten Annen Seminar for Waldorf teachers, as well as at her school in Munich. She has been coordinating various UNESCO projects, in conjunction with students, parents, and colleagues. For the last two years, she has been training and practicing conflict and mediation. She speaks English, French, and German.


Hanna Mosch

Hanna has worked as a school teacher, also teaching German to people from all over the world. Currently she works as a legal guardian and as a consultant for families. People with questions and difficulties are close to her heart as they have taught her the most about life and love.

She discovered clowning at 2004, qualified in the Facilitator training of 2012-2014 with Nose to Nose and has worked with various groups teaching clowning in Germany and Britain since. Her warm receptiveness and joy in accompanying others resonates in her work.

She is fluent in German and English and lives as a mother of three near Munich.


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