Hello and welcome,

My name is Grant Hall. That’s me pictured above with my family attending the Womadelaide Festival. Thank you for visiting my website Arts, festivals & innovation, which is all about exploring the links between innovation and the arts. Professionally, I am an event manager and consultant, working through my own agency, League Cultural Diplomacy, whilst academically, I am a Masters by Research candidate at the University of South Australia, where I also lecture occasionally within the Business School. I already hold a Masters Degree in Arts & Cultural Management from the University of South Australia, and I have a Diploma of Music and a Graduate Certificate in Art History as well. I am currently based in my home-town of Adelaide, South Australia, although I have lived abroad for the bulk of the last fifteen years (in Vietnam, Northern Ireland, Canada, and Perth in Western Australia).

I’ve created this website to support a research project which I am working on titled How do transformational festivals support innovation processes?, which I hope to turn into a PhD project. Transformational festivals are ‘counterculture events, alluding both personal and cultural transformation through self-realization and an ethos of sustainability, sharing, co-creation, creative expression and community-building’^[1]. Festivals which have been categorised as transformational festivals include Burning Man (USA), Boom (Portugal) and Rainbow Serpent (Australia).

As a worker in the events, arts, cultural and festivals sectors, I have long been interested in how arts and cultural initiatives, such as festivals, can bring about positive change within individuals, communities and organisations. One thing I have found very interesting in my reading about festivals, is how many people, including some world leading innovators, have discussed how their transformational festival experience has had an impact on their working-life innovation processes. My interest in this topic, gained from working professionally on over thirty-five festivals, led me into this project, which will allow me to learn more about how transformational festivals support innovation processes, and subsequently allow me to share this information with others. You can click here to read more about my motivations for commencing the project.

So please explore the site, and if you have attended a transformational festival, please be sure to complete a survey to help us to learn more. If you’d like to engage with the project in other ways, feel free to subscribe to the project blog, comment on the blog posts, or continue the conversation in my Facebook group. You may also be interested in some other social media projects that I have initiated, including the where words fail blog and the Phan Thiet Buildings Project.

I would love to connect with you. You can find me on LinkedIn or Twitter, or you can send me a message by clicking here.

Looking forward,

– Grant

Endnotes, sources and photo credits are listed on the next page.