Joanna Foster is an actor, singer, composer and playwright and lives in Clapton, Hackney with her husband and son. As well as singing and composing music Joanna’s acting career includes work with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Royal National Theatre and a variety of work for television. She co runs Hackney Voices Community Choir and is currently producing her new play The Inn of the Dawn Horse about the artist Leonora Carrington, due for a full production in 2025.
In May 2024 Leonora Carrington became the most successful female artist in UK history, in terms of sales: her painting Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945) was sold at Sotheby’s in New York for USD$28.5 million.
Last year, the Wall Street Journal predicted she would be the next Frida Kahlo. Like Kahlo, Carrington’s life was as surreal as her paintings; like Kahlo, she drew heavily on her own extraordinary experiences in her work.
Having been presented at court, Leonora avoided the life expected of a deb by moving to Paris to join the surrealists. There she became the lover of Max Ernst and, on the Nazi invasion, she fled to Spain where she spent time in an asylum. A marriage of convenience won her passage to New York and finally she settled in Mexico where she painted in a manner that derived from Bosch and the Italian Renaissance.
| Event type: | Meeting |
| Date: | 19th November 2024 |
| Time: | 11:00 am - 1:00 pm |
| Venue: | Homerton Library |