I am the Emerge Festival Director at Culture24. Back in 2010, when I started here, I was running Museums at Night, a UK-wide museum event night.

In 2017 I was given the opportunity by the Fellowship to research the impact of these kind of event nights (Lates) on the night-time economy of Mexico City, Moscow, Sydney and Melbourne. This research coincided with a parallel exploration I conducted into similar events in the UK. I wanted to find out how important these events were in other contexts, what impact they had on the local museum sector, and if there might be scope to support more events in the UK.

I published three reports in February 2018, which have been downloaded over 14,000 times from the Culture24 website. In June 2018, we organised the first conference dedicated entirely to the subject of Lates, at the National Gallery, attended by 120 industry professionals. In September 2019, we produced the UK's first multi-venue one-ticket Lates festival, in London, attracting 9,000 people. In June 2021, we published a new report examining how Lates can break down the barriers to participation experienced by some communities that are under-represented in museum visitation.