ELIA's New Era

ELIA Executive Director, Maria Hansen, welcomes everyone to the new year, sharing exciting ELIA developments, including the launch of our LUMINA project and evolution of our community hub ecosystem. 

We're already in the second half of January, but since this is our first newsletter of 2025, I'd like to take this opportunity to wish you a happy new year. How has your January been so far—are you feeling the winter blues, or have you begun working on your New Year's resolutions? No matter where you are in the world or what challenges you face in your community, all of us at ELIA wish you a peaceful, healthy, productive and creative year ahead. I hope that, as a community, we can be there for each other throughout 2025. 

At ELIA, it’s an exciting time as we prepare for many events and initiatives already in motion. Many of you contributed to our calls for contributions, and now registrations are opening for our 2025 events. Stay updated and make sure to register for your spot! 

This month, we officially launched the project we call LUMINA (Leveraging Unique Methodologies for Interdisciplinary Networking in the Arts), which refers to ELIA’s recently awarded network funding from the Creative Europe programme. This substantial four-year funding comes at the perfect moment as we take action to bring our new values and strategic missions to life. You can find ELIA's new Strategy consisting of our values and missions (Community – Connection – Advocacy) here.  

At the core of the LUMINA project is our community hub ecosystem, formerly known as ELIA platforms, which refers to the many sub-communities already active within ELIA. We will strengthen these community hubs to provide continuous support on topics you want to work on with an international community. We will also introduce more community hubs to ensure topics such as generationality, new technologies, global connectedness, and arts and ecology are available to you for more in-depth community exchange.  

In addition, we are also developing an ELIA student community, which will provide an exciting opportunity for students from all arts disciplines to work together in the ELIA space.  

All ELIA community hubs are curated by working groups, and I want to take this moment to thank everyone who is currently involved in these groups, serving the ELIA community so effectively. Several new community hubs will be launched in due course, and some existing groups will be seeking new members through upcoming calls.  

All the more reason to read our newsletter every time it pops into your inbox—you might just find new opportunities for you and your colleagues to get involved!