CHARLENE PREMPEH is the founder of A Vibe Called Tech, a Black-owned creative agency that is dedicated to approaching creativity through an intersectional lens. Charlene is also a Financial Times HTSI columnist and contributing editor who writes about design, travel, and culture.

After studying PPE at Oxford University, she began a career in marketing and worked at some of the UK’s most prominent media platforms and art institutions including the BBC, The Guardian, and Frieze. More recently, she launched A Vibe Called Tech to encourage a culturally diverse lens in design, technology, arts, and culture by spearheading partnerships, events, research, and workshops across London and through her journalism and consultancy work.

Since its establishment in 2018, A Vibe Called Tech has worked with brands including, Stine Goya, Faber, Frieze and institutions like Whitechapel Gallery, White Cube, and V&A East to deliver ambitious creative output that nourishes communities. In 2022, the agency launched Turned A, a cultural merchandising project that seeks to amplify key messages of the creative agency’s projects. Its Art Consultancy arm was established to help clients connect seamlessly with artists. Charlene currently consults for the Royal Academy of Arts, is a Non-Executive Director on the Tate Enterprise board, a trustee for Contemporary Arts Society and Committee Chair for Frieze 91.

Charlene’s debut book, Now You See Me: 100 Years of Black Design, was published in October 2023.

LEWIS DALTON GILBERT is the creative director at A Vibe Called Tech, focusing on the creative strategy, execution, and art direction within the company.

Following his BA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design, he went on to coordinate and produce exhibitions and projects for White Cube and Frieze, two of the UK’s largest arts organisations. In 2016, he co-founded ROLE, a podcast created to discuss defining roles and strengthen communal bonds within underrepresented communities. ROLE now acts as an online forum seeking to achieve the same.

In 2021, he curated the Hackney Windrush Art Commissions with Veronica Ryan OBE, for which she won the Turner Prize, Thomas J Price and Alberta Whittle as well as the coinciding public programme and is currently the associate curator for New Art Centre, where he previously served as creative director.

Recent independent curatorial projects include Liaqat Rasul: NAU, NAU, DOH, CHAAR” at Tŷ Pawb (2024), Francis Offman: Notes from the Heart at La Società delle Api (2024), South by Southwest at Gurr Johns (2024), Pictures of Us at Gathering, London (2023), We Share the Same Sky on Vortic Art (2023), Abstract Colour at Marlborough Gallery (2023) and Peripheral Vision at Anna Schwartz Gallery (2021).