CuriousWorks enables communities to tell their own stories: powerfully and sustainably.

We are constantly innovating the connection between art, education and technology.

We’re steadily building a future where all Australians have regular access to self-directed, compelling stories from the margins of our society.

We do not document or represent those in the margins. We give them the tools and the training to speak for themselves.

We respectfully collaborate with communities to create innovative, acclaimed artistic product that celebrates their culture.

Step by step, we’re growing a new generation of storytellers by building cutting-edge arts and media capacity in the most under-resourced places in the country. Our process empowers – rather than exploits – those communities and brings long term, positive change to lives of our storytellers.

Our ultimate goal is redundancy.

Our Mission
CuriousWorks’ mission is to subtly reshape the systems of cultural production in Australia, for the benefit of all Australians.

Our work is always about instigating a more diverse, more accessible, more surprising, more imaginative arts and media scene in our home country. We want creativity and innovation to be a part of every day life for all Australians.

We establish long-term, multi-faceted partnerships with those who are working towards the same goals. We believe the arts and digital media can bring the stories of those in the margins into the centre of our society – for the long-term. However, we believe this must be done through a best-practice model that brings real, positive change to the people and communities that are involved in this process.

We do not document the stories of marginalised communities or engage in short-term programs with them. We work to empower their local cultural leaders to use digital media to represent their own people in their own ways, for the long term. In doing so, we hope to slowly build empathy and social inclusion within and between these communities and well as those in the ‘mainstream’ of Australian society.

Through extensive, respectful collaboration, we also develop innovative creative initiatives for the stage and screen that give prominence to Australia’s untold stories. The initiatives are multi-platform, in public spaces and aimed at fostering public dialogue around contemporary Australian issues.

Based in Sydney, Australia, our work will always possess the characteristics of the country that inspires it: intercultural, interdisciplinary and clearly challenging its status quo.

Our Purpose
CuriousWorks exists to identify, connect and build cutting-edge arts and media capacity in a new generation of storytellers: storytellers that hail from Australia’s most marginalised places and feel committed to improving their community’s capacity for self-representation.

Community Program
We use media and the arts as a transformative tool that prevents young people especially from succumbing to the entrenched disadvantage of their local environment.

Cultural Leaders Program
We transform a proportion of those young people into cultural leaders that have the ability to powerfully and sustainably represent their community – and influence their local public institutions as a result.

Enterprise Program
We further train a proportion of those cultural leaders into entrepreneurs that can make professional creative media, for the consumption of mainstream Australia, as their full-time job. These young leaders eventually take over CuriousWorks’ role in their community and are the centre of a hub of media and arts activities in their region.

We distribute all content widely and powerfully through the Internet as well as traditional media forms.

Our Values

• we provide the opportunity for all Australians to have a voice
• we find creative and innovative ways to build cutting-edge media capacity in people and communities
• we are agile and responsive: our model is tailored to each community we work with
• we focus on sustainable outcomes – the community takes ownership of our projects
• we network, both online and physically, the people and organisations we work with
• we have ambitious goals and achieve them in an organised and disciplined manner
• we are open: we share our knowledge and are as transparent as possible as a business
• we are a hybrid organisation: we bridge the arts and creative industries, enterprise and charity
• we’re playing our part in shifting to a renewable world running on renewable resources