Arts Festival Impacts

Arts Festival Impacts is a collaboration between Project Zero (PZ) and Independent Schools Victoria (ISV) that incorporates documentation and field research to investigate the impacts of ISV’s Arts Learning Festival in Melbourne, Australia. The project involves the development of original multi-modal research instruments to understand participants’ experiences, culminating in an evaluation of the Festival.  The project team is investigating ways the Festival makes salient how the arts connect across different disciplines and the role art plays in our lives.  Arts Festival Impacts allows PZ to begin to fill a significant gap in the literature on the impacts of festivals by exploring individual experiences, as much of the scant existing research and theory focus on community- or region-level impacts of festivals.  Arts Festival Impacts aims to offer a case study to concretely examine theoretical ideas about the impacts of festivals, and, more broadly, further PZ’s research interests in exploring the impacts and characteristics of arts and cultural offerings on community audiences.