Regional Snapshot II

Zainab Syed is an independent arts consultant. She has served as the Director of International at Creative Australia, leading the organisations’ international engagement strategy for the arts. Originally from Pakistan, Syed has lived, studied, and worked across Romania, Yemen, England, Wales, the US and Australia. Her practice sits at the intersection of social justice and live performance. After graduating from Brown University, she toured across the world as a performance poet working with incarcerated women, trauma victims, and refugees in prisons and detention centres.

From 2014 to –2017, Syed worked as a researcher with the Centre for Muslim States and Societies in Perth, WA and New York University. Between 2017 and –2023, she worked as Senior Producer at Performing Lines WA in Perth and Belvoir St Theatre in Sydney, where she spearheaded ambitious works of scale with artists across dance and theatre. Her work has focused on facilitating intercultural collaborations and developing inclusive frameworks for creating new work and for advancing culturally diverse artists, as well touring Australian works regionally, nationally and internationally. She also does advocacy work to enable systemic change within small-to-medium and mainstage institutions in Australia.

Syed has served on the boards of the Blue Room Theatre and Theatre Network Australia. She also founded the Pakistan Poetry Slam and co-founder HME-WRK: a diverse arts collective. She is recognised as a Humanitarian Observer with the Australian Red Cross Immigration Detention Program and a 2020 Churchill Fellow.

David Baile is the Chief Executive Officer of the International Society for the Performing Arts (ISPA) based in New York. ISPA is an international network of more than 500 leaders in the performing arts from 60 countries. Since joining ISPA in 2007, he has significantly expanded both the diversity of its membership and its global leadership development initiatives.

Prior to joining ISPA, Baile enjoyed a 20-year career in the arts in Toronto in both management and consulting roles across a variety of disciplines including contemporary dance, theatre, literary arts, and music.

Baile is often asked to sit on juries and has spoken on or moderated panels around the world including conferences held by Association of British Orchestras (ABO), Association of Performing Arts Professionals (APAP), Canadian Association for the Performing Arts (CAPACOA), International Artist Managers' Association (IAMA), and Performing Arts Market in Seoul (PAMS), to name a few. In addition to his professional involvement in the arts, Baile also volunteers his time, with past positions on the Board of the Toronto Arts Council and OPERA America. He is a Chief Executive Global Fellow of National Arts Strategies and recipient of the 2025 Patrick Hayes Award for innovative leadership. He holds an Honours BA in Urban Development from the University of Western Ontario.

Nike Jonah has spent more than two decades working at the intersection of African and diaspora arts, international exchange, and equitable cultural collaboration, including over a decade spent building infrastructure for African performance networks. She is Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director of the Pan-African Creative Exchange (PACE), conceived in 2015 and launched in 2018 with the Vrystaat Arts Festival and the University of the Free State in South Africa. PACE is now one of the continent’s most active platforms for African-based artists, producers, festivals, and arts organisations to connect with international touring, visibility, research and partnership opportunities. Its fourth edition took place in Bloemfontein in July 2025, giving Jonah a current, grounded perspective on the opportunities, pressures, and shifting conditions shaping African performing arts networks.

Through PACE and her wider consultancy, Jonah works across the conditions shaping African performance networks: artist mobility, producing capacity, festival partnerships, market access, cultural diplomacy and international collaboration. Her work spans South Africa, Senegal, Nigeria, the Gambia, the Netherlands, Denmark, the UK, Canada, the USA, Ireland, South Korea, and Australia.

Building on two decades of practice in equity and diversity, Jonah is also Director of Connecting Dots, a consultancy specialising in African and diaspora arts strategy, international partnership development, and equitable cultural infrastructure. From 2004 to 2012, she led Arts Council England’s Decibel Programme, the national flagship for African, Asian, and Caribbean artists, producing four editions of the Decibel Performing Arts Showcase.

Her practice is underpinned by doctoral research on Pan-African Performance Networks at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London. In 2024–2025, she co-led a pilot with DAS Graduate School, Amsterdam, on decolonising producer training. Reflecting a commitment to equitable arts practice across disciplines and geographies, she is a trustee of Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and the Royal African Society, and advises RIGHTABOUTNOW Festival in the Netherlands and the Centre for Socially Engaged Theatre in Canada.

Catherine Magnant has devoted her career to the European project. In her early career, she served in the first Delegation of the European Commission to Moscow as a press officer. Back in Brussels, she worked on the expansion of the European Union, with a focus on the Czech Republic, as well as human rights issues within the context of the EU’s relations with developing countries. This was followed by a few years developing anti-discrimination policies in EU countries. Mid-career, she pivoted to cultural policy, inspired by the transformative power of culture and the untapped potential of the creative sectors.

In 2018, she ran the European Year of Cultural Heritage across 37 countries. She then led the 20-people strong Cultural Policies Department; in 2025, her team put together the strategic Culture Compass for Europe and “Europe for Culture and Culture for Europe”, the first-ever Joint Declaration on Culture, which was signed in June 2026 by three key EU institutions. In July 2026, Magnant retired from her official posts to begin a new chapter. She is now the artist of her own life, as well as an independent expert in her free time.

Jennifer Dautermann is an arts consultant, strategist, facilitator, coach, and project architect working internationally across the performing arts. She collaborates with cultural organisations, creative leaders, and emerging professionals to design and deliver conferences, strategic processes, and capacity-building initiatives.

Dautermann is an International Advisor to the Hong Kong Performing Arts Expo. She was the Founding Director of Classical:NEXT and later conceived and led Art In Action (ArIA), a “glocal” initiative to empower art music as a force for positive social change. Earlier in her career, Dautermann founded the C3 Festival at Berlin’s Berghain club, following a seven-year tenure in the Arts and Creative Industries department at the British Council in Berlin.

Dautermann studied teacher training at the University of Cambridge and has many years of hands-on teaching experience. She is also a graduate of the Global Leaders Institute for Arts Innovation Executive MBA programme. Dautermann divides her time between Canada and Germany.