Persephone Swales-Dawson is a British actress. She is known for her role as Nico Blake in the Channel 4 soap opera Hollyoaks that she played regularly from 2014 to 2016, reprising the role briefly in 2018 and 2020.

Swales-Dawson was born in Rochdale and grew up in Yorkshire. She attended Todmorden High School.^[1] She began acting in school and joined the youth group at Hebden Bridge Little Theatre (HBLT). In 2013, she successfully auditioned for the Lowry Young Actors Company in Salford.^[2] She later enrolled in classes at Mindful Acting.^[3]

In 2014,^[4] Swales-Dawson joined the cast of the long-running Channel 4 soap opera Hollyoaks as the murderous teen villain Nico Blake, whom she would play until the character's supposed death in 2016.^[5] For her performance, she won Best Bad Girl at the Inside Soap Awards that year. In a surprise, she returned to the soap in 2018 to reprise her role as Nico, but the character was killed off the same year. She then reprised the role in 2020 in a series of hallucinations.

Swales-Dawson made her professional stage debut when she played Jade Harcourt on the 2019 UK tour of The House on Cold Hill with Joe McFadden and Rita Simons.^[6][7] She also appeared in the television film Risk Takers.