Creating the Creatives

Written By Andy Brydon

After five years of working internationally and training over 200 producers we're launching our Creative Producer Training in the UK. The first short courses go live next month with trainers from our team of major festival directors, senior producers from the Royal Ballet and Opera and internationally touring arts. Suitable for beginners, seasoned creatives or people seeking a career change - we've helped creative leaders in 18 countries raise over £3m to date to realise their creative vision. Read on to hear about the successes to date or to find out how you can accelerate your creative career go direct to https://www.creativeproducertraining.com/cpd-2025

Launched in 2019 Curated Place worked in partnership with the British Council to devise and deliver Creative Producers, a creative industries capacity building and skills programme designed to equip new, mid-career and established cultural leaders with the tools, networks and confidence to realise ambitious, collaborative, cross-sector projects. It was initially delivered face-to-face in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, before expanding across 13 countries with a Western Balkan core the programme was created in response to a growing recognition of the need for skilled cultural producers who could act as mediators between artists, institutions, civic bodies, and international partners.

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the programme was rapidly adapted to a fully digital model. Across the 2020/21 and 2021/22 cohorts, the team reimagined the offer to ensure it retained its dynamic, practical and network-building ethos. Online delivery opened access to participants across all participating countries: Albania, North Macedonia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo, Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Türkiye, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan.

Post-pandemic, the programme returned with renewed strength in a hybrid model: online initiation modules were followed by a week-long face-to-face intensive, first in Belgrade (2022/23), then in Tirana (2023/24). This structure provided the flexibility of online engagement with the irreplaceable impact of in-person collaboration and peer learning.

Strategic and Practical

The programme blends practical training with strategic development, rooted in Curated Place’s ethnographic and place-based approach. It supports participants in developing their own projects while learning to navigate the complexities of international working, funding landscapes, creative risk, and sector leadership. Throughout, the emphasis remains on building capacity, supporting innovation, and fostering meaningful regional and UK connections.

Participants explore key producer competencies across ten course modules:

  • Project scoping, constraints and ideation

  • Mapping local cultural sectors and supply chains

  • Storytelling, stakeholder engagement, and value proposition design

  • Fundraising, budgeting and financial narratives

  • Environmental responsibility and safeguarding

  • Project management, delivery, evaluation and reflection

  • Risk assessment and RAMS as creative tools

  • EDI in cultural production and team leadership

International Networks

By giving creative professionals a clear framework and methodology for how they work, the programme drives recognition of the creative producer as a critical professional lynchpin in any creative ecology — essential to enabling sustainable, high-quality, and impactful cultural work. The learning model combines structured modules, peer reflection, expert mentoring, and international matchmaking, allowing producers to both learn and immediately apply skills in real-world contexts as they develop shared skills together.

Beyond the core curriculum, the programme evolved to offer alumni development support, micro-grants for project development, and UK-based study visits that deepened relationships between participants and the UK cultural sector. This responsive expansion ensured the programme remained grounded in the lived realities of producers across Wider Europe while maintaining a strong strategic alignment with British Council priorities around cultural leadership, inclusion, and international collaboration. As a result we've supported our alumni to raise more than £3m in non-western econoimies driven by a stellar network of creative professionals sharing our common toolkit and workflow.

We're now launching the programme in the UK for leaders in the Creative sector and those from wider industry who want to learn how to make big ideas a reality or drive a career change into more inventive spaces. To find out how you can accelerate your creative career go to https://www.creativeproducertraining.com/cpd-2025

Andy Brydon