Meet our New Marketing and Development Coordinator!

Headshot of Ayesha Aggarwal by Sia Duff

We are very excited to introduce the wonderful Ayesha Aggarwal, ActNow’s new Marketing and Development Coordinator!

We spoke to Ayesha and asked her a few questions about herself, her visual arts practice, and what she is most looking forward to about working with ActNow.

Tell us a bit about yourself!
Hi everyone, I’m Ayesha. I’m an Indian-Australian arts worker and potter who has been bouncing around arts orgs in Adelaide for the past 7 years. If you’re in the arts, we might have met through my previous roles at Wakefield Press and Guildhouse or maybe you’ve seen me selling my pots at local markets?

You’ve just started as the new marketing and development coordinator, how did you get into marketing, and what challenges are you looking forward to tackling in the role?
I studied Communications at university but I’ve kind of fallen into marketing in some ways.

I held a number of roles at Wakefield Press where I moved from administration to publicity and then to marketing over the course of five years. I started making pots at the same time and I had quite a learning curve figuring out how to market them. I used a lot of what I learnt at Wakefield and I taught myself a lot of things by looking at what other small businesses were doing, especially on social media. In the end, it worked both ways because I also learnt things through my own small business that I fed back into my work at Wakefield Press!

More recently, I was the Marketing Coordinator at Guildhouse where I learnt so much from the incredible team. My time at Guildhouse prepared me really well for my new role at ActNow, but development is a new area of work for me and I’m looking forward to doing some more learning in this field.

What are you most excited about at ActNow?
I’ve been working with South Australian writers and artists for the entirety of my marketing career but what excites me about ActNow is our focus on marginalised communities and social justice. I am passionate about an arts landscape that is diverse and inclusive and it’s so brilliant to be part of a team that is driven by the same values.

We know you’re a wiz at marketing, but you’re also a visual artist. How do you find balancing the two? Do you have any tips?
For me, doing both seems to work better than doing either role full-time. I think both jobs use quite different parts of my brain which can be really great for stimulating ideas. Being in the office and ticking off a bunch of marketing or admin tasks is a really great way to keep myself accountable on my admin to do list for my ceramics and when I’m working with my hands in the studio, it can often be a really fruitful time to come up with new marketing ideas.

My main tip is really just to write things down. My phone is full of little reminders and calendar deadlines to help me plan ahead. I know not everyone thrives on planning but I find it’s the only way I can keep on top of it all. That said, I also try to be realistic about what I can actually accomplish in a week and there are times where I have to turn things down to make sure I have plenty of room in my schedule for myself.

If you could be remembered for one thing, what would you want it to be?
I would like to be remembered as being happy. For me being happy looks like being true to myself and making time for the people and the causes that I care about. I’ve been a lot more intentional about the choices I’ve been making in the past few years and I hope that the people in my life can already see that this is true for me now.