A New Term

EDI Platform Meeting 2024. Photo by Nendre Zilinskaite.

ELIA Executive Director Maria Hansen shares the start of the new season, featuring Creative Skills Week 2025, the Leadership Symposium, ELIA’s new collaboration with the Community Arts Network, and continued efforts to promote equity, diversity, and inclusivity in higher arts education.

For the ELIA Office, September always marks a fresh start: stepping back into our work with renewed energy and a calendar full of events, collaborations, and conversations. This newsletter offers a glimpse of what’s ahead, and how you can be part of it. 

A central thread this season is our collective work on equity, diversity and inclusivity. In July, ELIA — in close collaboration with our Equity, Diversity, and Inclusivity (EDI) Working Group — issued a position paper denouncing the global backlash against EDI initiatives and calling on the higher arts education and cultural sectors to resist regressive agendas while upholding justice, representation, and academic freedom. This message also frames the next gathering of ELIA’s EDI Community Hub, curated by the Working Group, which will take place online later this month during Creative Skills Week 2025. The session will focus on Contextualising “skill” in arts education within an EDI framework, exploring how power dynamics shape the definition and teaching of artistic skill, and how inclusivity, reflection, and equity can inform learning. We warmly invite you to join this important conversation on Monday, 22 September. 

Beyond this, there are more opportunities to connect and collaborate. Before the summer, ELIA joined the Community Arts Network, a global platform for socially engaged arts based in Vienna. We are proud to have been accepted into this network, and, with our shared interests, collaboration has already developed quickly. Our first joint initiative will take place on Friday, 10 October at 15:30 CEST, when we will co-present a webinar on the report ‘From Margins to Masterpieces – Charting Pathways to Strengthen Arts in Global Public Education’, commissioned by the Community Arts Network and the Porticus Foundation and researched by Dr. Heddy Lahmann (NYU Steinhardt). Dr. Lahmann will deliver the keynote, followed by an open discussion with participants. The webinar is free and open to all — please share widely with your networks and students, and please be there! 

Meanwhile, preparations are in their final phase for Creative Skills Week 2025 (22 – 26 September), an EU-funded collaboration rooted in the CYANOTYPES project. The in-person event in Prague has already reached capacity, but the online programme remains open and accessible, including the EDI Community Hub session as part of the programme. 

And of course, the ELIA Leadership Symposium is just around the corner. Hosted by HEAD Genève, the symposium will bring together leaders from higher arts education and beyond to reflect on 'The Power of Many' — exploring how collective intelligence and inclusive leadership can equip institutions to navigate societal challenges and foster resilient, future-focused communities. While the in-person event is already at full capacity, you can still register to join the online programme, which includes the plenary sessions that promise to be particularly thought-provoking.