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Maya Coombs

Juliet Beadle

Esme Fisher

Jac Holt

Arkady Johns

Erin Brookes Doolan

Yasmin Aishah

Read Esme Fisher's article in the Hastings Online Times.

An exciting new mentoring programme funds six early career artists to experience festival planning and delivery by working alongside the #ATownExploresABook core team through the year. Working with mentors who are arts facilitators from a variety of festival backgrounds, the mentee team have explored the core team's innovative approach to communications and marketing and embraced of the learnings of our first covid delivery in 2020, when we extended the festival through the first lockdown. The mentee team have been given a variety of unique, bespoke opportunities to explore how their skills and interests will best serve a career in arts festival management.

This scheme was piloted through a SECCADS grant in Summer 2020 with three mentees and developed to the present ACE funded programme with six young practitioners aspiring to a career in arts festival management and requiring support to overcome significant barriers to work, such as learning needs and health issues.

The scheme has increased diversity on the core team and been most enthusiastically valued by mentees and mentors. We are awaiting news of funding to take the current cohort through delivery of #ATownExploresABook21 and recruit those on the waiting list. If you would like to apply for this scheme, please email explore@atownexploresabook.com to request a mentoring programme information pack and application form.

Yasmin Aishah is our newest mentee, recruited to Peter Quinnell's Nonsens Street project to learn about community art engagement.

Juliet Beadle is a media student and musician focusing on project accounting with Arkady Johns, learning the ins and outs of managing a medium scale arts festival budget.

Erin Brookes-Doolan is a graphic designer and illustrator working on the #NutsAboutLear team with arts facilitators Hannah Collisson and Alison Cooper, a team promoting free expression of the imagination! As well as working on this community engagement doodle project inspired by Lear’s The Nutcracker and the Sugar-Tongs, Erin’s learning about engagement in the #NonsenseStreets project led by outdoor artist Peter Quinnell and she worked on book cover design with Erica Smith on the festival anthology cover.

Maya Coombs is a media student and performer aspiring to a career in arts facilitation. She is working on the #NutsAtboutLear community doodle project with arts facilitators Hannah Collisson and Alison Cooper and mentee Erin Brookes-Doolan, exploring Edward Lear’s The Nutcrackers and the Sugar-Tongs song. Her area of interest is community engagement and socially-conscious project design and she will be working across projects during the festival delivery period in this capacity.

Esme Fisher is a visual artists who undertook an assistant curator role early in the programme and will be mentored as curator of the #4LittleChildren online exhibition in the festival. She has worked on video resources for Emma Harding’s outdoor art project #GreenHeadsBlueHands, the #OwlAndPussyCat150 project with community partner, Hastings and Bexhill Mencap’s Active Arts and the poetry competition with Education Futures Trust. Esme is also working the #NonsenseStreets project led by outdoor artist, Peter Quinnell.

Jac Holt is a media student assisting composer Ruby Colley on the community sound project, #HearMyTree, honouring Edward Lear’s relationship with the natural world and its role in his painting. Jac’s specialism is photography and film and he is widening his skill set to sound work.

Arkady Johns has been shadowing the management of festival funds and development of programme of events in the festival.

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