Are artists entrepreneurs?… Scholar and entrepreneur Charlie Wall-Andrews believe that while not all entrepreneurs are artists, nearly all artists are entrepreneurs.
Calling all artists: It’s time to find your place in the world. If you’re a working artist, then you’re an entrepreneur. Everything has a price, including your talent. How can you capitalize on your creativity? What skills do you need as an entrepreneur to build and sustain a career? How can you pursue your art while living and thriving as a professional? How can you develop the business savvy specific to succeeding in the arts?
Charlie Wall-Andrews is a Trudeau Scholar, entrepreneur, a faculty member at the University of Toronto, and alum of the prestigious Ariane de Rothschild Fellowship, an international, competitive program that specializes in entrepreneurship. In 2020, she launched Music&Brands, a branding agency designed for the music industry, especially independent artists.
Wall-Andrews is also pursuing a Ph.D. at the Ted Rogers School of Management in Toronto, Canada, where she is researching entrepreneurship and innovation in the creative and cultural industries. Recently she was featured as the keynote speaker at the Tunecore Creative Entrepreneurship Summit, detailing “The Rise of the Artist Entrepreneur.”
Wall-Andrews knows that the creative industries are complex ecosystems—so much so that artists can struggle to promote their art and find resilience in the face of inevitable setbacks.
Thus, she draws on her experience, expertise, and scholarly research to help artists around the world embrace an entrepreneurial mindset and develop their skills to take control of their careers and achieve their worth.
She has shared her work in the way of teaching and speaking at conferences globally, designing incubators and accelerators for artists, and doing community-engaged research to better support artists, and the environments they navigate.
She has pioneered the Incubator for Creative Entrepreneurship in Canada to offer emerging artists of exceptional potential start-up funding, mentorship, skills development, and networking opportunities. A firm advocate for the artistic community nationwide, Wall-Andrews teaches rising talent the necessary skills for cultivating and sustaining a profitable career.
She helps her collaborators gain traction by exposing them to industry sessions with experts from PR, branding, business planning, social media marketing, rights management, and financial management.
She will leverage knowledge as a Canadian delegation to the G20 Young Entrepreneurs Alliance Summit hosted by Italy in 2021, where she can advance more inclusive policies to support entrepreneurship activity with global leaders.
As Wall-Andrews explains, “Although artists exhibit some critical essential entrepreneurial skills, they need to enhance these competencies to succeed in accessing new opportunities and enhancing their discoverability in a competitive marketplace.”
Her research reveals how artists can seize control of their creative careers by acting as entrepreneurs in service of themselves. Wall-Andrews stands at the forefront of the creative and cultural industries as she helps artists achieve their full professional potential.
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