Held in the McMordie Hall, the attendees were treated to a talk on current trends and best practices in terms of arts and cultural funding, hosted by Arts Management & Cultural Policy. The two editors, Dr Anders Rykkja and Dr Carolina Dalla Chiesa, participated in the conversation. Expert moderation was provided by Brona Whittaker, CEO of Arts & Business Northern Ireland, who managed to give the discussion a Northern Irish context and spin that resonated with professional arts managers, performers, students, and faculty members.

Open Access publication (free digital access) has been made possible through a joint library grant for open access publication from Erasmus University Rotterdam and Queen’s University Belfast.

Dr. Carolina Dalla Chiesa is a Cultural Economist and Cultural Anthropologist who dedicates her research and teaching to exploring the changing landscape of production and consumption of arts and culture post-digitalization. She is an expert in cultural organisations, funding for the arts, patronage and the socio-economics of cultural markets. Throughout her career, Carolina has focused on crowdfunding and crowdsourcing as powerful tools to leverage creativity and innovation as well as offering solutions to cultural policymaking. Carolina also explores bottom-up, collective solutions aligning with the “commons” for the governance of artistic communities.

Dr Anders Rykkja is a Lecturer in Arts Management & Cultural Policy in the School of Arts, English & Languages at QUB. His research interests include cultural entrepreneurship, festivals, and events; platform economics; cultural leadership and management; cultural and creative organisations and the ecosystems within which they are embedded; cultural policy; and the music industry. He is an affiliated member of the University of Agder’s (Norway) Crowdfunding Research Centre and the Volda University College (Norway) research group on cultural policy and artistic labour. Prior to becoming a full-time academic, he was the coordinator of Knowledge Works, a Norwegian Ministry of Culture-sponsored research centre on the cultural and creative industries.

Brona Whittaker is Chief Executive of Arts & Business NI, where she leads the organisation’s strategic direction in partnership with the Board and staff team, driving A&B NI’s vision of a vibrant and sustainable creative sector for Northern Ireland. Since joining A&B NI 2007, Brona has held a range of leadership roles, including Arts Manager and then Head of Arts, where she shaped and delivered the organisation’s cutting-edge programme of skills development, fundraising and governance support for the cultural sector. With more than 20 years’ experience in Northern Ireland’s cultural landscape, she has previously worked for leading arts organisations such as the Lyric Theatre and Replay Theatre Company.

Arts & Business NI is a creative membership network bringing together cultural and commercial businesses, helping them grow stronger together through the power of partnership. It advocates for the value of arts, investment in innovation, and to ensure that the NI arts and cultural sector has the confidence, capacity, and skills to achieve creative freedom through financial independence.

This event was made possible with the assistance of the School of Arts, English & Languages through the Arts CDRG.