Before writing a series of books (based on research in schools), Adrian Hart was a community and schools filmmaker and film tutor. After seven years as a part-time lecturer in special needs education, he formed Coyote Films in 1998. His films prioritise the participation of children and focus on a range of cohorts from refugee and asylum seekers to children with moderate or severe learning difficulties. Other projects simply use filmmaking as an enabling process for children in schools or in theatre groups or in council estates. In his last years in filmmaking (hired to develop local authority anti-racism educational resources) he concluded the work was damaging. He ended this work and warned about it in subsequent writings.
Collaborations with various London arts organisations resulted in a number of award winning films. These include Safe (winner of LWTs Whose London? competition and broadcast in 2002), Moving Here (awarded beacon status in 2006 by the Home Office) and Only Human (made in 2006 for Essex primary schools and broadcast on Teachers TV in 2009).
Adrian has lived and worked in Bethnal Green and Stratford in east London since 1984, and before that he was an activist in late 1980s/early 1990s anti-racism campaigns.
Living in Brighton from 2003, Adrian has continued to work on video projects in schools (Longhill School) and elsewhere (Brighton Museum, Greenwich & Lewisham Young People’s Theatre). But it was in 2009 that Adrian had his first book published. A critique of ‘official’ anti racism interventions in primary schools, the Myth of Racist Kids hit front-page national headlines in October 2009 and led to several years of research and another book, That’s Racist!, in 2014. Adrian has written for Spiked, The Big Issue and the Daily Mail and been written about in The Observer, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and interviewed on Radio 4’s ‘PM’, The Jeremy Vine Show (Radio 2), and BBC Radio London.
In the neighbourhood of his home in east Brighton, from 2010 onward Adrian has been involved in local politics campaigning on issues around the theme of both failing housing policy and bad local governance and democratic accountability.
