Dr Penelope Mendonça FRSA is an award winning visual storyteller and facilitator who creates hand-painted, original artwork. She is known for her work on equity and inclusion.
Visual Facilitation
Pen has pioneered and critically examined a values-based approached to visual facilitation. She has significant experience of UK health and social care policy and practice, a background in research, co-production and public engagement. She is arts lead for the NHS Neighbourhood Mental Health Centre Programme and a member of the Creative Newham Advisory Board.
Pen supported racialised communities and disabled people’s organisations during the pandemic, developed visuals for the Windrush Campaign (2015-2018), and collaborates with leaders in the violence against women and girls sector. She was the first to visually record a service at Westminster Abbey, has won awards for both her artwork and academic writing. Pen teaches visual methods in communities, schools and universities.
Fine Art
Pen spent her childhood on Te Pātaka o Rākaihautū carving pictures in the sand while her brothers played cricket. A mixed heritage upbringing meant growing up with whispering rivers and haunted houses, hearing stories of partition, migration and forbidden love. With only faded photographs to work with, Pen imagined her grandparents eating bright orange halva and on a smoky pink balcony in Karachi.
Decades later, having visited that balcony, and collaborated with communities and diaspora across the world, Pen continues to draw on imagination, dreams and memories, her love of people, their stories and landscapes. Through painting, she explores ideas of home, grief and belonging, drawing on the rich human connections she has been privileged to make across place, culture, gender and age.
Education
Pen holds a PhD (Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London), an MSc in Citizenship Studies (Birkbeck, University of London), and a BA (Hons) Fine Art (Chelsea, University of the Arts London). She has taught visual methods, contextual and theoretical studies at community, degree and masters level.