About Elaine

I am an arts and culture consultant who has spent her whole working life bringing live arts to people who would not always have come otherwise.

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Get in touch

Who I am and what I do

I am Elaine Grant. I run Elaine Grant Creative Consulting, an arts and culture consultancy based in London, and I founded The Arts & Culture Group, a national membership network with over 1,100 members. My work is to connect people, communities and audiences with the live arts, and to make sure that arts and culture is genuinely for everyone, not just for the few.

I do that in two ways. As a consultant I work with theatres, producers, galleries, museums and heritage sites who want to develop new audiences, fill an allocation, run a focus group, host a post-show talk, or moderate a panel. As the founder of The Arts & Culture Group I bring that same love of the arts to a national community of members who get discounted, sometimes complimentary, tickets to wonderful shows.

My story

Where do I start? I am a working class Black woman. I grew up in Peckham, went to a comprehensive girls’ school and absolutely loved drama. From there I went on to a performing arts centre to learn more about the arts, tried everything from ballet to jazz dance to jazz vocals, and then went on to do a BA Honours Degree in Performance Arts.

I left and worked in the industry as an actor, which I did for 12 years. After that I decided to step away from the performing side of things. I retrained as an arts administrator and a project manager in the arts. That was where I started working with schools, with community groups and on community engagement work.

I left that organisation after 11 years and went to work for a theatre education charity. That was where I developed my two specialisms, audience development and community engagement, working with schools, working with families, engaging them in theatre, theatre visits, workshops in schools, in theatres and in community settings, coordinating workshops, sometimes facilitating them, leading programmes and selecting productions. All the leadership skills I now use, I learned at that charity.

In 2023 I decided to leave that organisation and start my consultancy. There was no real strategy. I did a few business programmes along the way, but what I really did was build very good relationships with industry specialists, marketeers and producers. I met with a few of them, who generously gave me their time, and I spoke to them about what I wanted to do. Work just came to me. I started working with some community groups, started getting them into seeing shows, and they would pay me to coordinate their visits.

In 2024 I founded The Arts & Culture Group. It is a national membership network, continuously growing, now over 1,100 members. I get discounted, sometimes complimentary tickets for a variety of theatre, art and cultural events for my members, and they are absolutely loving the experiences. I get the most incredible feedback. People want to keep going and seeing high quality art and culture, and that is what I stand for.

Testimonials

What clients say

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Christina Rollander

Talk to me about your project

Whether you are a venue, a producer, a heritage site, or an arts lover thinking about joining The Arts & Culture Group, I would love to hear from you.

Get in touch

What I stand for

I stand for creating live experiences for my members and for the community groups, schools, families and individuals I work with. High quality art and cultural live events. That is what I want my legacy to be, that I was able to give people these experiences, life-changing, long-lasting memories with their friends and their families.

Arts and culture is for everyone. Not a luxury. Not elitist. When I talk about diversity, I do not just mean culturally diverse. I mean diverse in the widest sense. There is no discrimination, no prioritising of particular race groups or genders. For me, art is for everyone, and I think a lot of organisations should engage more in that.

That is the mission. That is the work.

What I bring to a project

If you are thinking about working with me, here is what I bring to the table.

  • 25 years of audience outreach across theatre, galleries, museums and heritage
  • Over 40 years of community engagement work in the arts
  • A deep, organic database of community groups, schools, teachers and families I have built over decades
  • Real, trusting relationships with community leaders across the UK
  • A diverse list of audiences I can speak to honestly, including audiences for opera, ballet, musicals, plays, exhibitions and family work
  • A track record of filling allocations, growing audiences and bringing people back
  • Warm, confident hosting and moderating skills for talks, panels and post-show events

I am very proud of three years in business, and I feel I have proved myself as authentic, genuine and hard working. If I say I am going to do something, I do it.

How I work with people

A lot of my work is relationships, building them and sustaining them. People have been incredibly generous to me, and I take that seriously. I do my best to be supportive of everybody who works with me, whether that is a client trying to engage a new audience or an audience member coming to the theatre for the first time.

Some people need more hand-holding than others, and that is fine. What I have learned over the years is that if you support people on their first visits, they will feel much more comfortable booking their own tickets the next time around and bringing other people with them. That word-of-mouth is everything in this industry.

Speaking and panels

Alongside my consultancy and my membership network, I take on speaking engagements. I have moderated panels at marketing conferences and family arts conferences, hosted post-show talks for theatre productions and given talks of my own, including one on becoming an entrepreneur at 59. Age is just a number, and that talk goes down particularly well with women starting out a little later in life.

If you are looking for a host or a moderator who knows the arts inside out, I would love to hear from you.

Testimonials

What clients say

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Christina Rollander

Talk to me about your project

Whether you are a venue, a producer, a heritage site, or an arts lover thinking about joining The Arts & Culture Group, I would love to hear from you.

Get in touch