Marie Fol

Marie Fol is the Global Project Lead for Keychange, the international movement for gender equity in the music industry. In this role, Fol oversees strategy and programs in Europe and North America, works closely with public and private stakeholders as well as develops new partnerships on global scale.

Based in Belgium, Fol is an advocate for international cultural collaboration, active as independent advisor, researcher and cultural manager. She is an expert for entities such as the European Commission, the Institut français, We Transfer’s Supporting Act Foundation, and she advises and co-create projects for a diversity of organisations such as CNM Centre National de la Musique (France), Arts Council of Wales (UK), European Dancehouse Network (Europe), Flanders Arts Institute (Belgium) 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 Community Alliance (Providence, Charleston), Arctic Arts Summit (Rovaniemi), Babel Music XP (Marseille), Classical:NEXT (Rotterdam), 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, London), SXSW (Austin), Tilting Axis (Miami), TransCultural Exchange (Boston, Quebec City), Visa for Music (Rabat), Waves (Vienna), and WOMEX (Porto, Lisbon, A Coruna).

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. Recently, Fol 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).