About AMA

Objectives

Facilitate regional and transregional cultural exchanges in Africa for individual artists/cultural operators and cultural organisations and encourage the mobility of artists and cultural professionals to exchange experiences, information and ideas

Encourage artists and cultural operators to work towards shared projects and artistic collaborations across the continent

Provide the opportunities for artists and cultural operators to gain more knowledge of the diverse contexts and the cultural environments of the African continent

Encourage independent initiatives, small projects and participation in highly professional artistic and arts management workshops, seminars and residencies for artists

Encourage the attendance of festivals that provide artists and cultural operators with the opportunity to gain wider exposure and enrich their own creativity

Develop methodologies to increase access to information and knowledge on arts and culture within Africa

Backgrounds

AMA was first launched as a program initiated by the Young Arab Theatre Fund (YATF) and a group of African and Arab organizations to facilitate and encourage the mobility of artists and cultural operators within the African continent. In 2001, YATF participated in meetings in Egypt, Kenya, and Zimbabwe, together with different organizations and cultural activists from Africa and the Arab world.

The meetings aimed at linking organizations and individuals, and at creating informal continent-wide networks. The participants agreed that one of the major obstacles for artists and cultural professionals in Africa was the persistent lack of funds specifically allocated to support travel.

Khadija El Bennaoui, Director

Cultural practitioner and consultant working at the intersection of artistic practice, cultural policy and civil society with a focus on the Global South.

Khadija El Bennaoui came to the arts & culture sector through theatre performance. She has a B.A. in Arabic studies (Ibnou Zohr University) and in Cultural management and policies (Hassan II University & Paris VIII University).

Lara Bourdin, Coordinator – Grants, Research and Communications

Lara Bourdin is an art writer, researcher and translator. Her areas of focus are the arts and culture of the Global South, arts mobility and issues surrounding migration.

She holds an M.A. in Art History from the Université de Montréal, where she completed research on (South) African modern art and visual culture. She is currently a researcher for cultural mobility network On the Move and a volunteer advocate for PEN International.