Mapping Your Dream: A Fundraising & Marketing Workshop

How to Tell Your Story, Promote Your Work, and Raise Money for Your Creative Project

Mapping Your Dream is a grassroots fundraising workshop that teaches artists four key steps to financing their creative dreams. Learn how to tell your story, set a campaign budget and goals, brainstorm culturally-relevant fundraising strategies, market yourself, and build community around your work.

Facilitator: Iquo B. Essien – Writer, Director & Business Consultant

Iquo B. Essien is a writer, director, and business consultant. She teaches self-producing artists how to fundraise and market their work through her online course and workbook, Crowdfund Your Dream.

With a B.S. in biological sciences from Stanford University, Ms. Essien began her career at a communications firm representing global health clients such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Driven to combine her passion for social change and the arts, she received her MFA in Film from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts where she was nominated for the 2013 Student Academy Awards, 2015 Africa Movie Academy Awards, and won the Spike Lee Production Fund grant for her film Aissa’s Story.

The recipient of a Hedgebrook Writers’ Residency, and a 2019 Finalist for the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Screenwriting, Iquo has contributed to Gawker, Okayafrica, Shadow & Act, Guernica, and Essence.com. An avid dancer, she has studied and performed with choreographers Nia Love, Katiti King, and Apollonia Holzer. 

Photo by Scott Shaw.

ACCESSIBILITY

Gibney 280 Broadway is accessible via elevator from the main entrance at 53A Chambers Street.

We welcome the opportunity to make this event more accessible. Please refrain from wearing scented products, so that people with chemical sensitivities can join us. Please request ASL interpreting, audio description, or open captioning 30 days before the event or submit other requests by completing our Access Requests and Inquiries Form or calling 646.837.6809 (Voice only).