The Founder

Alma Salem is an independent curator and cultural advisor with 22 years of knowledge and expertise in producing hundreds of cultural projects across all arts forms. Her work has spanned international cultural relations, heritage protection , visual, digital and new media arts, performing arts, cultural policies, cultural Leadership, creative economies, industries and entrepreneurship, arts for development of communities and social change, arts in conflict, arts strategies, management, monitoring and evaluation, coaching and mentorship for artists and cultural institutions, capacity building, training and educational curricula design, arts grants management and judging and cultural translations. She is a recognized cultural expert, working with the British council from 2006 to 2015 in a variety of positions, including 5 years of leading the Middle East North Africa regional arts programmes, overseeing over 800 arts projects across 17 Arab countries—from the Levant to North Africa and the Gulf regions, to the U.K. and Europe during Arab Spring, with a co-curated exhibition entitled Syria Third Space. In 2008, she was a national expert on the EU ISMF-ICT (Institutional and Sector Modernization Facility) project (funded by the European Commission), a software development and technical assistant for e-Government and ICT Standards Applications, where she designed the rehabilitation, branding, and launching of the first e-government CSC in Syria (at the Syria Citizen center). From 1995 to 2006 she worked at the IFPO The Near East French Institute as the cultural resources manager. Here, she created the “First Digital Levant Bank of Images,” a ten-year project that aimed to preserve the visual heritage of the Levant in partnership with EU, France (CNRS) and different museums. She has also worked in an advisory capacity to archaeologists and historians, and, in 2000, she published the book “Photographies du Levant”. Providing arts management consultancies, coaching, and mentorship to artists and cultural institutions, she is currently an instructor to KWN Education, an online learning platform for digital arts and design, and a fellow of DEVOS Institute For Arts Management at Maryland University in Washington DC. She is the Founder of Alma Salem Bureau for Curation and Cultural Advisory, and Syria Sixth Space Contemporary Arts Touring Curatorial platform.