Based in Belgium, Marie Fol is an advocate for international cultural collaboration, active as independent advisor, researcher and cultural manager. Working at the intersection of social justice and international cooperation, she engages with people, projects and institutions that are committed to fair(er) exchanges in the cultural sector and creative industries.
From 2019 to 2024, as part of her work for Keychange, the global movement for gender equity in music, Marie led large scale collaborations in Europe and Canada and oversaw the development of the movement in the USA, working closely with public and private stakeholders. Marie continues her involvement with Keychange as Board Director of the Belgian legal entity. Marie Fol is a Director of Res Artis, worldwide network of art residencies and is the former President of On the Move, the international network dedicated to cultural mobility. Marie co-authored two publications on the funding needs for cultural mobility (i-Portunus Operational Study, 2019, and Mapping Study and Report on mobility and collaboration funding for NDPC and EUNIC, 2021), a Music Mobility Funding Guide with focus on Europe (OTM, 2023) and wrote a research paper on virtualisation in contemporary dance (EDN, 2021).
She has served as an expert for entities such as the European Commission, the Institut français, We Transfer’s Supporting Act Foundation, and she advises and co-creates projects for a diversity of organisations such as CNM Centre National de la Musique, Wales Arts International (Arts Infopoint UK initiative), European Dancehouse Network, Flanders Arts Institute and more. In 2022, Fol was part of the conference jury for WOMEX, shaping the conversations on music worldwide.
She is a frequent public speaker on fair practices in the arts, with a focus on power dynamics and inequalities. Fol has presented and chaired sessions on equity and fair practices issues (with focus on gender equity, music and/or artist mobility) at numerous conferences, including Artist Communities Alliance (Providence, Charleston), Arctic Arts Summit (Rovaniemi), ArtCop21 (Paris), Babel Music XP (Marseille), Classical:NEXT (Rotterdam), CultureOnLive (Sopot), c/o pop (Cologne), Eurosonic (Groningen), Great Escape (Brighton), IFACCA World Summit (Stockholm), ILMC (London/online), Ireland Music Week (Dublin), Linecheck (Milan), MaMA (Paris), Mastering the Music Business (Bucharest), MIL (Lisbon), Reeperbahn (Hamburg), Res Artis (Kyoto, Tehran, Melbourne), SXSW (Austin), Tilting Axis (Miami), TransCultural Exchange (Boston, Quebec City), UNAM (Mexico City / Online), Visa for Music (Rabat), Waves (Vienna), and WOMEX (Porto, Lisbon, A Coruna, Manchester).
