Artists – musicians, visual artists, actors, and writers – need to learn business skills including: how to network, how to negotiate and enter into contracts, how to manage a team of people, how to find and advertise to their customers, how to manage social media campaigns, just to name a few!

While traditional art education is excellent at helping artists finetune their craft, few schools adequately prepare artists with the skills and ongoing support needed to be successful entrepreneurs.

Unfortunately, an entire industry of for-profit entities exists to take advantage of unsuspecting artists. Stories regarding predatory record labels, business managers, booking agents, publishers, and countless other entities taking too much of the economics in return for helping artists with commercialization abound. Left with a shrinking slice of the economic pie, many artists give up on their dreams of changing the world through their art.

With the rapid growth of artificial intelligence “creating” artistic works that compete with human-created art, the need to find a new way to help human artists achieve commercial success has never been greater.

That’s why we created LIKHAYA, a nonprofit entity with a mission to provide an incubator for artists in the same way traditional incubators help founders launch tech companies. We provide training, mentorship, physical space, equipment, and all the tools necessary for artists to commercialize their art. More importantly, we provide member artists a community that lives by the phrase “a rising tide lifts all boats.” We show up to each other’s performances, exhibition opening and closing events, book readings, and other critical moments of the artist’s commercial journey.

Likhaya

Empowering artists through community and entrepreneurship

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