FUTURE CULTURE
Salaried artists-in-residence and arts worker interns
Image credit: Future Culture cohort cutting up cake, 2025. Photographer: Jenny Trinh.
Participant reflections:
“The program created space for me to bring my lived experience into conversations, and to express the needs, challenges, and possibilities that exist within our communities”.
Kobra Sayyadi, Future Culture Intern
“The Future Culture program enabled me to dive deeper into my practice. As someone who did not attend art school, it was a really rare opportunity to refine my ideas with the support of arts leaders and producers on the team”
Emma Pham, Future Culture Artist-in-Residence
“The program created space for me to bring my lived experience into conversations, and to express the needs, challenges, and possibilities that exist within our communities”.
Kobra Sayyadi, Future Culture Intern
“The Future Culture program enabled me to dive deeper into my practice. As someone who did not attend art school, it was a really rare opportunity to refine my ideas with the support of arts leaders and producers on the team”
Emma Pham, Future Culture Artist-in-Residence
How do you build a more relevant, equitable, sustainable and future-focused arts culture? You invest time and money in the people; and you create multi-directional opportunities for sharing, learning and growing relationships. Future Culture was a pilot program in 2024-2025 that aimed to do all of that.
It paired an artist residency program (two early-career artists) with an arts worker development program (two arts worker trainee/interns), embedding all 4 creatives in the company's operations to benefit the artists, arts workers, and the organisation symbiotically; and in turn to nurture sector development and foster sustainability for the community arts and cultural development sector.
From September 2024 through to June 2025 we worked with artists-in-residence, Emma Pham and Cassandra Li; and arts worker interns, Kirsten Maglalang and Kobra Sayyadi. You can read their reflections on their time in the program below:
Emma Pham
Cass Li
Kirsten Maglalang and Kobra Sayyadi
CREDITS
Artists-in-residence: Emma Pham, Cassandra Li
Arts worker interns: Kirsten Maglalang, Kobra Sayyadi
Creative Producer: Miranda Aguilar
Future Culture was supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.