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On September 1, 2023, ENCATC has partnered with the Asia-Europe Foundation (ASEF) through its arts and culture platform culture360.ASEF.org to launch the second edition of the Arts Journalism Matters Fellowship. 

 The Fellowship aims to provide long-term capacity building, networking and peer collaboration opportunities for young emerging arts journalists, specialising in cultural management and cultural policy writing. 

Following a call launched in August targeted to ENCATC member universities based in Singapore, LASALLE College of the Arts and the Singapore Management University (SMU), two arts journalists were selected to take part in the Fellowship. 

The selected participants are Carla Castle and Esther Yeon, both from LASALLE College of the Arts. As part of the Fellowship, they will undergo a 4-week virtual residency under the mentorship of Ms. Audrey Wong, cultural policy expert and arts educator at LASALLE College of the Arts. 

As part of the residency, a workshop with ArtsEquator will be organised to expose participants to different writing modalities. Participants will also put to practice skills and knowledge gained from the residency, to cover an on-site event ASEF LinkUp | Asia-Europe Cultural Diplomacy Lab, taking place from 24 to 27 October in Singapore, as a journalist.

The second edition of the Fellowship takes place after a successful pilot held in 2021 entitled Virtual Crossovers, where two emerging arts journalists from Asia and Europe embarked on a 1-month virtual residency and mentorship programme, with the objective of writing a piece on the topic of cultural diplomacy between Asia and Europe. Moreover, following the residency, one journalist from Cambodia participated in covering the proceedings the 30th ENCATC Congress in Brussels in October 2022. 

Through the Fellowship, ASEF and ENCATC aim to address the shrinking of arts coverage and arts criticism as well as the lack of opportunities for young arts professionals interested in specialising in this area.

The profiles of the selected participants

Carla Castle is an aspiring arts journalist and researcher who hopes to share her excitement for cultural policy and Southeast Asian art. Her aspirations revolve around wanting to represent Southeast Asian art through a native lens in the English-speaking world — given how one’s cultural background shapes representation and perception. 

As an arts manager and writer based in Singapore, her multicultural background influences her diplomatic nature, where she’s highly attuned to working cross-culturally. Driven by her love for arts and culture, Carla recently worked on ARTWALK 2023 as the team leader. Under her leadership, ARTWALK shifted to contemporary programming to engage its audiences better while staying true to ARTWALK’s celebration of culture and heritage. 

Carla holds a Diploma in Broadcast Media with Distinction, where her award-winning works were showcased worldwide in film festivals and exhibitions. 

Esther Yeon found herself in the thick of programming for two festivals in a short span of 1.5 years - Rock and Indie Festival 2023 (RIF) in Singapore and George Town Festival 2023 in Penang, Malaysia. While she is interested in exhibitions and visual arts, her passion lies in writing about socially engaged arts and topics that touches on the arts, culture and heritage. She aspires to be a jack of all trades with an experiential understanding of the different art forms and the arts landscapes locally and internationally. 

Her adventurous spirit and boldness has led her to new places to take on new roles. Esther was an events executive until the pandemic happened. She was also a food writer with Miss Tam Chiak before embarking on her journey in the arts scene, as an undergraduate in BA (Hons) Arts Management at LASALLE College of the Arts.

About the mentor

Audrey Wong is the Programme Leader of the MA Arts and Cultural Leadership programme at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore. She was the first Nominated Member of Parliament for the Arts in Singapore (2009 – 2011) and has been involved in arts and civil society advocacy for many years.  

Prior to joining LASALLE in 2010, Audrey was the artistic co-director of The Substation, an independent arts centre in Singapore where she had worked first as a publicity and programme manager in the 1990s. She started the Moving Images film programme – Singapore’s first year-round film programme supporting local and Asian young filmmakers. She has served and continues to serve on various institutional boards and committees including with the Singapore Art Museum and the National Arts Council and is on the board of Singapore non-profit theatre company Nine Years Theatre. 

She writes and researches on arts management and cultural policy issues with an interest in Singapore’s arts policy, independent art spaces, cultural leadership and management models in Southeast Asian arts. She has had chapters published in The State and the Arts in Singapore: Institutions and Policies edited by Terence Chong (2018) and The Routledge Companion to Arts Management edited by William Byrnes and Aleksandar Brkic (2019).

About the partners 

ENCATC is the leading European Network on cultural management and policy. It represents, advocates, and promotes cultural management and cultural policy education, professionalizes the cultural sector to make it sustainable, and creates a platform for discussion and exchange at European and international level. The organization, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union, has developed a wide offer of activities, products, publications, projects, mobility schemes, and more to the benefit of the field. In 2022, ENCATC celebrated its 30th anniversary, marking three decades of development, representation, advocacy and promotion of excellence in cultural management and policy across an international network. 

ASEF promotes understanding, strengthens relationships and facilitates cooperation among the people, institutions and organisations of Asia and Europe. 

culture360.ASEF.org is an online platform managed by ASEF since 2008. It counts over 300,000 unique visitors yearly and offers up-to-date information on arts, culture, and heritage from 51 countries in Asia and Europe. Publicly funded by the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM), culture360.ASEF.org is for artists, cultural professionals, policy makers, and anyone interested in international cultural cooperation.