RAVING THROUGH GRIEF: Dance Floors & Collective Healing | Keynote | ATTUNE Festival

On October 4th, 2011, Annie Frost Nicholson’s life was irreversibly changed when a tragic helicopter accident in New York claimed the lives of her mother, sister, and partner. In the years that followed, she also lost her father to cancer. Out of this profound grief, Annie has created a body of uplifting and provocative work that transforms tragedy into art, activism, and community.

In this keynote, Annie — artist and co-founder of Grief Raves — shares her personal journey of loss and survival, and how creative expression became her way of navigating the unimaginable. She explores how art and dance floors have become radical sanctuaries: spaces where grief and joy, mourning and celebration, can coexist.

Through her story and her work, Annie invites us to reimagine grief — not as a solitary weight to carry, but as a collective, transformative experience. This is a conversation about love, loss, resilience, and the healing power of movement, music, and shared humanity.

FREE WITH REGISTRATION
Presented by The Indigo Project

ATTUNE: A free digital festival.
Exploring progressive approaches to mental health through sound, somatics & ideas. See the full program here.

About Annie Frost Nicholson

Annie Frost Nicholson is a London-based interdisciplinary artist whose work examines some of the most uncomfortable and tragicomic aspects of the human condition. The Fandangoe Discoteca is a touring mini club which invites the public to dance out their grief, from climate rage to Brexit fury to bereavement, all intersections of loss are welcome. This piece is at Southbank Centre , London throughout July and August, 2025, including a Grief Rave. 

Annie’s painting practice has been shortlisted by John Moore’s Painting Prize 2025 and Delphian Gallery as one of the winners of their Open Call 2024, following a solo show at Dorothy in Liverpool alongside the Discoteca at Royal Albert Dock. She has an installation called the A Piece of Silk at RMIT in Melbourne , which opened in July, exploring the space between life and death.

Annie’s public realm work intersects with her painting practice, which has evolved into large scale wall hangings with textile narratives, reflecting upon memory, the human condition, the stories we tell one another and how our cultural and anthropological experiences of the world coexist.

Annie responds carefully to time and space, working with community groups across London, the UK and internationally for many years to develop workshop programmes in advance of her installations. She lectures twice a week in experiential design at Chelsea College of Art, UAL.