19 June 2018
Amati Global Investors is delighted to be hosting the 5th Annual Amati Guildhall Creative Entrepreneurs’ Award at The Guildhall School of Music & Drama on Wednesday 27 June 2018.
Amati is an award winning fund management company specialising in UK small & mid sized quoted companies who developed the idea of this award 4 years ago in conjunction with The Guildhall School of Music & Drama & their Creative Entrepreneurs’ Scheme. The Entrepreneurs’ scheme is a 12 month part time business training programme which offers personalised training, mentoring & guidance to help students develop their creative ideas into a sustainable, long term enterprise.
Amati’s partnership with The Guildhall means that we can offer a unique combination of artistic, professional & business expertise specific to the performing arts.
Dr Paul Jourdan, CEO and Fund Manager of Amati Global Investors and former first violinist for The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under Sir Simon Rattle, reflects on the past 4 years of this Award: “Prof Helena Gaunt, Vice Principal and one of the founders of the Creative Entrepreneurs Scheme at the Guildhall, is someone I have known since my early years as a musician. When she told me about the scheme, I thought it would be very appropriate for Amati to offer some encouragement through this award. Over the past four years we have been delighted to give the award to some very talented and dynamic young entrepreneurs each of whom is creating an enterprise using their education as artists which is of value to both the community they serve and to the artistic community more widely. These are themes that chime deeply with me”.
Last year’s winner was Ruth Mariner from Gestalt Arts. Gestalt creates music theatre and opera working with a wide range of partners to create striking, visually focussed work. A recent project by Gestalt is “The Unsung Heros of the Planet” Opera performed at The Eden Project. Ruth Mariner comments, “The aim has been to challenge the way we see the world and the environment around us, and aims to inspire connection with the environmental community. Messages about the environment are increasingly doom-laden, impacting our ability to respond and take charge. However latest developments in fungal ecology have discovered that fungi may even provide a solution to waste, with new evidence they can break down plastic. Unsung Heroes offers an alternative, positive starting point which uses ground breaking research to suggest the planet’s restoration can only come from listening to our greatest power: nature itself”.
This year three entrepreneurs from the Guildhall will again pitch their business ideas and plans to a panel of judges who come from a range of backgrounds across the arts to financial services in a mixture of roles from Theatre Producer, Professional Musician, Fund Manager to Board Director.
We are delighted to announce the line-up of judges for this year’s award as follows: