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Cultural Funding and Financing: Insights, opportunities and challenges

All are welcome to attend this special event exploring current and new thinking on funding models for arts and culture globally.

Phone, money jar, bank note
Date(s)
February 24, 2026
Location
Old McMordie Hall, Music Building, Queen’s University Belfast
Time
17:00 - 18:30
Price
Free

As a special event to mark the launch of a new open access collection of essays edited by Carolina Dalla Chiesa (Erasmus University, Rotterdam) and Anders Rykkja (Queen’s University Belfast), Cultural Funding and Financing - A Guide to New and Traditional Models in Arts and Culture.

Those attending will hear from the editors and about established and emerging funding and finance practices. The event will be chaired by Brona Whittaker, Arts & Business NI.

This event and the publication will be of interest to both researchers and practitioners in arts, culture and creative practices. Scholars interested in financial and funding models in both nonprofit and private finance will also find much of relevance here.

Attendance is free but booking is required due to limited capacity.

Light refreshments will follow the talk.

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

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.

Speaker bios:

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.

Image acknowledgements:

Seamless Transactions: Making a Digital Purchase with Phone and by Ajab wicaksono;

Glass jar with money and text Donate on table by AtlasStudio both from https://thenounproject.com (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Department
School of Arts, English and Languages
Audience
All
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