Dr Mo Lovatt is co-Director of The Great Debate. She is a writer and academic based in the North East of England. She has been an active member of The Great Debate since its inception in 1998 and is a founding member and co-organiser of POLITICS in PUBS Newcastle. She is a programme coordinator for the Academy of ideas and is also the national coordinator for Debating Matters, a debating competition for sixth-form students run by the charity Ideas Matter. Her academic interests centre on participatory arts and literature, reading for pleasure, the aesthetic experience, qualitative research methods and the politics of cultural participation.

Mo has a BA (Hons) in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from the University of Oxford and and completed her doctoral research at the University of Northumbria, examining the application of arts and culture policy in areas of economic deprivation. Her previous work includes co-writing and lecturing on the core modules of Northumbria University’s Masters Programme in Creative and Cultural Industries Management. Prior to this, Mo was a writer, director and producer in the Performing Arts sector for fifteen years, having managed a number of high profile events such as the Festival of the North East, the national Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations and, for the Cultural Olympiad, West Side Story with Sage Gateshead and the RSC. In 2007, she received a bursary from the Arts Council’s Cultural Leadership PEACH placement to work in South Africa for two years under the mentorship of Peter Stark OBE. During this time, she set up the trans-national programme, The Swallows Partnership / Sihlanganiswa Ziinkonjane between the North East of England and the Eastern Cape of South Africa.

Working in South Africa (where her grandmother was born) provided Mo with the inspiration for her first novel, African Violet which received a Northern Writers’ Award in 2013. She is now working on her second novel, The Park.

For The Great Debate, Mo brings together her event management experience and her dual interests in Arts and Politics. She has convened and chaired a number public engagement discussions including Is Anti-Americanism Xenophobic? (In association with The Ashton Group’s production of Lockerbie 103) and What does it mean to be human? (In association with David Glass Ensemble’s production of The Chimp That Spoke). Among her countless contributions to The Great Debate she was instrumental in organising and obtaining Mediabox funding for The Great Debate's documentary-making project for young people, Living in a Changing World in 2010 which was the inspiration for The Great Debate's film-making programme.