Latest news:
Chella has just launched the latest #periodpositive campaign, Brands Off! We need your signatures to make an impact. Please sign and share to support this cause which is backed up by research with UK parents, kids and teachers.
Unmissably large petition link because this campaign needs your support!
Brands Off! Keep companies out of menstruation education.
- Sign and share the petition (launched midday UK BST 28 May 2017)
- Help us to get #periodpositive and #brandsoff trending on social media
- Visit www.periodpositive.com and follow @periodpositive on Twitter to find out more and pledge to support taboo-breaking period education
For over a century, menstruation education has been controlled by corporations selling disposable menstrual products using shame and secrecy, upholding taboos and taking power away from teachers, pupils and families. This has to stop.
With Sex and Relationships Education (SRE) about to become statutory in the National Curriculum, now is the time to ensure that ‘the period talk from the tampon lady’ and other poor replacements for high quality teaching and learning are gone for good, with government policy and a real commitment from schools and companies to back it up.
It’s about bloody time!
Recent news:
Chella’s comedy show, Adventures in Menstruating sold out at WOW Festival on 11 March 2017! Thank you to all who attended and apologies to those who were turned away! She will let you know when the show is back in London.
This show also sold out at the Sheffield Off the Shelf Festival and the Manchester Women in Comedy Festival, had a sell-out (well… full up – it was the Free Fringe) five star run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival (and had a couple of other lovely reviews and mentions), and Chella hopes to tour it later this year and early next year.
Chella provided the expert voice in a BBC Radio 4 doc about menstrual taboos, A Bleeding Shame, presented by Woman’s Hour’s Jane Garvey and first airing Friday 24 June at 11 am. Revisit the link for updates on further airings.
About Chella:
Chella Quint is a comedian, producer, designer, artist, presenter and education researcher from Brooklyn, New York who now lives in Sheffield, England. She coined the phrase ‘periodpositive’ in 2006 and founded the #periodpositive campaign which has spread around the world like a really big, friendly taboo-breaking period stain. She is a former head of PSHE and is now a teacher researcher with the Gender Respect Project and advisor on the Gender Equality Charter for DECSY (Development Education Centre South Yorkshire) after completing a Master’s Degree in Education focusing on changing attitudes to menstruation in secondary schools. Her research has an accompanying #PeriodPositive project and website, and her five-star Edinburgh fringe show, Adventures in Menstruating, will be touring later this year. Chella’s design portfolio is hosted here and you can also visit and make delightful purchases from her Etsy shop, Cut and Past.
A lot of her work focuses on science and the environment, health promotion, media literacy, current events, sustainability and social justice, and she regularly works with charities and the public sector to advise, design educational materials and deliver workshops on challenging and controversial topics. She has worked frequently with The Sex Education Forum of the National Children’s Bureau and with Sexpression:UK. She developed new art for Sheffield as part of her Urban Turbines installation during Sheffield’s Festival of the Mind 2016.
Chella was the Off the Shelf Slam Champion 2014, winner of the Sheffield Hallam Prove It award, the Sheffield Docfest 2013 Specialist Factual New Talent Pitch winner (for which she wrote and presented Lifting the Lid, a short film about menstruation education for the Open University), and often presents and provides research for segments on science and education at live events and for film and radio. Her spoof fashion line, STAINS™, was featured in the highly acclaimed BLOOD exhibition at Science Gallery, Dublin in 2015.
She frequently performs and comperes science communication comedy and improv shows, and creates interactive installations in the UK and abroad (check her schedule above for past and upcoming work), she is a regular contributor to the Manchester Science Festival, hosted the live-streaming Comedy Collider show, No cause for conCERN, from CERN in Geneva as part of their 60th anniversary celebrations, developed and performed a show based on her #IJustNeedSpace fanzine for the Institute of Physics as part of the Off the Shelf Festival, and intermittently tours her comedy show featuring other funny women in physics, Comedy in Space. She is a regular panelist on Live-ish with Bernie Clifton for BBC Radio Sheffield, and is a frequent contributor to a number of UK podcasts and live standup improv shows, mostly in the North.
