16 Collective (formerly known as 16 Nicholson Street) is a Glasgow-based feminist curatorial collective and art gallery which consists of Nell Cardozo, Aga Paulina Młyńczak and Kelly Rappleye. The organisation is currently managed by directors Cardozo and Młyńczak.  

We aim to challenge the sector-wide gender and class disparities in contemporary art discourses, labour conditions, and professional opportunities. We support LGBTQIA+ and marginalised-gender artists to develop and produce large-scale commissioned bodies of work for exhibitions and publications.

16 Collective’s programme is informed by interdisciplinary research in a creative laboratory model and partnership working.  Since 2016, we have been supporting LGBTQIA+ and marginalised-gender, early and mid-career artists to develop and produce large scale commissioned bodies of work for exhibitions and publications. Since 2023, 16 Collective has worked with an site-specific model building our focus on fostering and commissioning long-term, research-led artistic projects foregrounding an engagement with urban spatial politics and social histories. Our organisation works to insure the future of the Scottish art sector and workforce against deepening socio-economic power imbalances by making an intervention into early-career and sustained artists’ development opportunities. 

Curatorial Collective:

Nell Cardozo

Curatorial Director

A founding member of 16 Collective, Cardozo is a community engaged freelance curator, writer, producer and creative project manager based in Glasgow. She has curated exhibitions and new commissions, programmed events, led workshops and edited and written for publications with organisations such Film Hub Scotland, GoMA Glasgow, Flatpack Festival, Shaftesbury Arts Centre. She is a member of the Curatorial Ethics Network, was a guest curator at the MINT Chinese Film Festival, is part of the current SCAN Affiliations cohort and was previously supported by the British Council to visit the Venice Biennale (2024).

Concurrently, Nell works within Falkirk Council as the Development Officer for HippFest, Scotland’s premier silent film festival, where she builds and manages relationships with stakeholders, funders and international and community partners. Here, she established the HippFest Young Programmers initiative.

Previously, she worked at the Scottish National Galleries as a Gallery Assistant and at the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, curating GROWTH, an exhibition of youth artists. She graduated with an English Literature MA and a Museum Studies MSc at Glasgow University, where her thesis focused on investigating accessibility in online museum databases, with an internship at Art UK. She has also taught and led accessible activities connecting community storytelling with art in Glasgow and Albany, NY.

Aga Paulina Młyńczak

Curatorial Director

Aga Paulina Młyńczak is a Polish and Scottish artist-curator and a graduate of the Glasgow School of Art. Currently they are a certificate programme student and scholarship recipient at The New Centre for Research & Practice in Art & Curatorial Practice. They are a founding member of 16 Collective CIC. Młyńczak’s artistic practice primarily revolves around installation and utilises various media. In recent years, their work has focused on exploring migration through histories of language and translation, along with their sonic and geographical correlations. Their interest in the social role of voice has overlapped with their ongoing research project around queer migration histories.

They were commissioned to take part in Thierry Geoffroy’s, also known as Colonel, the Emergency Room—a continuously evolving collaborative exhibition in Copenhagen. Since moving to Scotland, they have been awarded Creative Scotland’s Open Fund for Individuals twice. In 2023, they created a set design for “Sonar (;;) Sauna” at the Take Me Somewhere Festival in Glasgow, held at Tramway. Other notable exhibitions featuring Młyńczak’s work include the Bucharest Experimental Film Festival (2017), Trongate 103 (2019), Street Level Photoworks (2019), Studio Pavilion (2021), LingComm Conference (2022), The Revelator (2024), Architectural Fringe Glasgow (2025), and Cryptic Nights at The CCA (2025).

Kelly Rappleye

Senior Curator

Kelly Rappleye is an independent curator, programmer and researcher working across visual arts, moving image, and urban studies, and a current AHRC/SGSAH PhD researcher at Glasgow School of Art. Her research and practice focus on the role of contemporary art in urban place-making and spatial politics, informed by her background working in community mental health, with particular interests in moving image and cultural memory.

Kelly was a 2024 member of the British Art Network’s Emerging Curators Group and selected as a 2024 Venice Biennale Fellow with the British Council acting as British Pavilion exhibition ambassador for Listening All Night To the Rain by John Akomfrah for the 60th International Art Exhibition (2024), and a 2025 member of the FieldARTS research residency (Infrastructures Humanities Group, University of Glasgow). She holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, UoL and has presented her research at various conferences. Her doctoral research on hydropoetics in contemporary Scottish moving image considers contested memory and colonial residues in urban landscapes. Kelly has curated exhibitions and programmes with organisations such as Tate, LUX Scotland, GSA Archives & Collections, and ArchiFringe, integrating research, screenings, discussions, and workshops.

Nancy Holt

Sapphic Cinema Club Curator

Nancy is a film curator and arts worker based in Glasgow. After her studies in film exhibition and festival research, she now sits on the selection team for Glasgow Short Film Festival’s International Programme. She also works in short film development as part of GMAC’s Little Pictures commissioning scheme, working with filmmakers to create their first funded short film. Sapphic Cinema Club was born out of her passion for queer film, alongside her desire to create meaningful cinema events for queer audiences. 

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Our Ends Policies (16 Collective’s Organisational Goals):

16 Collective CIC exists so that arts and culture are made by diverse voices and meet diverse audiences.

16 Collective is there so that new artists and those from female-identifying, LGBTQ+ and class-marginalised communities are included in: critical discourses, curatorial research, art-historical contexts, public arts commissioning and writing.

Accessibility is at the core of our work to trouble, negotiate with, and remove what barriers we can to those experiencing and participating in art.

We embark on public art commissioning and curating in varied contexts with exhibitions that will be free to attend for the public.

Our programming is a space for varied communities to come together to enjoy art, a space for cultivating art for enjoyment which is a priority of our curatorial collective.  

We implement fair work for all those that work with us and balanced, strategic partnership working to increase our positive impact on the art sector.  

Our programming doesn’t shy away from political work and recognises art’s convergence with activism.

We create long term impactful interventions into artists’ careers, and projects with sustainable environmental impacts.

We create a levelling of gender imbalance in art exhibitions, discourses, pay and collector’s markets.

Our attention to intergenerational projects de-stratifies the arts and culture sector.

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Funders and Partners:

This organisation would not have begun without the generous patronage of the late Joseph Shields.

We are currently a Multi-Year Funded organisation, with generous support provided by Creative Scotland regular funding for organisations.

Funders:

• Film Hub Scotland and British Film institute
• Henry Moore Foundation
• The Exhibitions Group
• Art Fund
• Glasgow Life
• Hope Scott Trust
• National Lottery

Partners:

• SGSAH
• Glasgow School of Art
• Sotheby’s Institute of Art
• Turning the Tide
• Sculpture Placement Group
• StrangeFIELD
• Empower Women for Change
• British Art Network
• Glasgow Film Theatre

16 Collective CIC is a non-profit limited community interest company registered in Scotland, Company Number: SC658873.