Julia Payne - Director
Julia heads up the hub’s research and consultancy work. Her lateral thinking and experience in a range of roles and settings across the performing arts, combined with her strongly diagnostic approach, means that she has a reputation for producing useful and inventive results upon which our clients and partners can easily act. Clients she has worked with include Arts Council England, BBC New Talent, the Performing Rights Society Foundation, Folk Arts England and Guildhall School of Music & Drama. Julia also heads up the hub’s own internal research and development and its marketing campaigns for all of its events.
Julia’s career and experience reflect the artistic and economic developments that have changed the face of the arts in the UK in recent years. Starting out in marketing, Julia moved to the Barbican Centre in 1996, a year that saw the venue introduce a new contemporary music programme embracing jazz, folk and world music. Julia managed marketing campaigns for major festivals such as Inventing America and From The Heart, as well as WOMAD’s first London festivals. Becoming Development Director of the Jazz Development Trust in 1999, Julia developed its education, audience development and research programmes, as well as its fundraising. Before founding the hub, Julia worked as an arts consultant, managing education and touring projects for Arts Council England, developing the Connect outreach programme for Guildhall School of Music & Drama (GSMD), as well as working with a number of individual artists.
A highly talented non-musician, Julia founded the hub to work with like-minded visionaries with a talent for lateral thinking, an enthusiasm for the arts and a passion for asking ‘what if?’ She is the only member of the hub team sad enough to have alphabetised her CD collection and is an advisor to the Performing Rights Society Foundation.
