Murmurs in ACE (Arts and Cultural Entrepreneurship)

Murmurs in ACE (Arts and Cultural Entrepreneurship)

Location: The Arts House, Gallery II

What do creativity and entrepreneurship have in common? How do we create spaces that sustain inclusive, intercultural work? Join us for an evening of conversations with practitioners and thought leaders from the museum, theatre, music and fashion worlds as they share their experiences and pro-tips for navigating a creative career arts.

Organised in collaboration with William Lim Siew Wai Fellowship Fund, Cultural Studies in Asia PhD Programme and Master of Arts (Arts and Cultural Entrepreneurship) at the National University of Singapore, Department of Communications and New Media.

Speaker bios

Oniatta Effendi is a Cultural Entrepreneur. She is the Founder of Baju by Oniatta and owner of Galeri Tokokita.

A Singaporean by birth, Oniatta has always had a love for artistry. Trained as an educator, she taught for over 21 years in various institutions, including Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore Polytechnic, LaSalle College of the Arts, and secondary schools. She is also an applied drama practitioner and works with youth offenders at rehabilitative spaces, youths with special needs, children in welfare homes as well as ex-inmates with addiction issues at a halfway house.

Oniatta found herself drawn to batik on her many travels to different parts of Indonesia. Her personal journeys resulted in excessive purchases of batik fabric but also spurred her to share her passion for the craft and her desire to support the traditional ecosystem of this heritage textile. She started out with just 12 pieces of pants, uniquely designed to look like a sarong, at a pop-up. These Utama pants are today a bestseller and a cornerstone creation for Baju by Oniatta.

Oniatta dreams of documenting the voices of batik craftsmen from different parts of Indonesia as a way of preserving the trade and educating batik enthusiasts.  She is a mother of five, all of whom wear batik with nothing but pride.

Shridar Mani is currently the company manager and co-artistic director of The Opera People, a Singapore based opera company that redefine the experience of opera for live audiences and online through multidisciplinary collaboration. He is also the co-founder of The Public Space, a production house with an arts-centred vision, designing experiences that bring people, stories, and ideas together. Over the past decade, he has worked at Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay and The Arts House Limited in music, dance, theatre and the literary arts on festivals such as Singapore International Festival of Arts, Singapore Writers Festival,Kalaa Utsavam-Indian Festival of Arts, da:ns Festival, A Tapestry of Sacred Music. He graduated from The University of Chicago with a Bachelors in Music (Hon.) where he was awarded the Leonard B. Meyer Prize for his undergraduate thesis and was a Jeff Metcalf Fellow with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 2010-2011. 

 Jo's unnecessarily eventful life includes quitting lawyering the day after she called to the bar, training at a clown school (The Ecole Philippe Gaulier in Paris under a National Arts Council Residency), and then acting in productions that have been seen in cities from New York to Busan, most notably as the main lead in internationally feted movie, Tiong Bahru Social Club.  As a playwright, she has had several works staged including Forked, Happy Place, and King (the last of which scored her the Best Original Script and Best Actress titles in Singapore’s Life! Theatre Awards in 2022) She loves tabletop gaming and wrote the play play, Session Zero, about Dungeons and Dragons which received two sold-out stagings; and created Dungeons and Distractions, a live combat Dungeons and Dragons performance which has received its third commission in less than a year. She is currently meeting a bevy of fascinating characters in a new Channel NewsAsia series she is hosting, The Foreign Singaporean.