Artists and Cultural and Creative Professionals: Rethinking Roles, Work, and Policies

The ENCATC 2026 Congress will bring together educators, researchers, artists, cultural practitioners and policymakers from around the world to explore the evolving roles, working conditions, and support ecosystems that shape the lives and careers of artists and cultural professionals today. At a moment of rapid transformation, the Congress invites participants to reflect on how artistic and creative work is performed, supported, valued, and sustained across diverse contexts. The ENCATC 2026 Congress offers a vital platform to rethink how artistic and cultural work is understood, supported, and sustained. By bringing together diverse voices and perspectives, we aim to shape a more equitable, resilient, and future-oriented cultural ecosystem.

Reframing the Status of the Artist

Across international, national, and regional policy environments, the status of the artist is being reconsidered. Current debates highlight the need to reassess how rights, protections, and socioeconomic conditions for cultural workers are defined and implemented. Persistent statistical blind spots continue to obscure the realities of artistic, cultural, and creative labour, with many professionals misclassified or overlooked entirely. These gaps limit policymakers' ability to design effective, evidence-based frameworks that accurately reflect the sector's complexity.

At the same time, divergent terminologies and classification models within the cultural and creative industries shape which practices are recognised, funded, or prioritised. The Congress will examine how evidence, language, and policy can evolve to capture the diversity of contemporary cultural work better.

Fair Working Conditions in a Diverse Global Landscape

Working conditions for artists and cultural professionals vary dramatically across regions and cultural contexts. Differences in resources, policy frameworks, and social recognition create uneven opportunities and vulnerabilities. Freelancing, project-based employment, unpaid labour, and blurred boundaries between personal and professional time have long characterised the sector — pressures that have intensified with digitalisation, shifting consumption habits, and evolving public funding models.

Many practitioners also work collectively or outside traditional institutions: in community arts, socially engaged practices, informal networks, online spaces, or hybrid creative roles that challenge conventional definitions of “the artist.” Yet these forms of organising often remain invisible in policy and social protection systems.

Questions of resilience, sustainability, mental health, and equitable recognition are central to today’s debates. The Congress will explore how policies, institutions, and sector practices can adapt to ensure fair conditions and sustainable careers for all cultural workers.

Careers in Transformation

Technological innovation, globalisation, and shifting policy landscapes are reshaping the careers of creative and cultural professionals. New expectations around digital literacy, interdisciplinary collaboration, and adaptive creative and managerial skills are redefining professional profiles.

Education and training systems — from higher education and vocational programmes to informal, peer-to-peer learning — are evolving in response, experimenting with new pedagogies and practice-based approaches. Artists and cultural professionals are navigating new tools and platforms, including AI and digital media, while responding to changing audience behaviours, institutional priorities, and funding models.

International mobility remains a vital component of career development, with residencies, festivals, collaborations, and cross-border exchanges playing a key role in building networks, skills, and visibility. Issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion are increasingly central, shaping who participates in cultural life and how opportunities are distributed.

The Congress welcomes contributions that explore individual strategies, professional trajectories, and forms of agency, as well as how careers can be supported and made sustainable in ways that reflect the sector’s diversity.

Collective Practices and New Organising Models

Cultural and creative work rarely happens in isolation. It emerges within ecosystems of interdependence: shared studios, cooperative infrastructures, peer-learning communities, informal support networks, cultural intermediaries, and community cultural spaces.

Entrepreneurship in the sector is increasingly collective. Artist-run spaces, cultural associations, cooperative production structures, and community-based initiatives challenge the dominant narrative of the independent creative entrepreneur. Instead, they foreground mutual care, shared risk-taking, commons-based resource management, and co-creation.

Social and solidarity economy models are gaining visibility as viable frameworks for cultural production. The Congress invites contributions that examine how these alternative organising models can be supported, scaled, and recognised — not only through policy and funding, but through the everyday organisational practices developed by artists and cultural professionals themselves.