Our Work

Around the world top-level training opportunities exist in every field, where deep personal investment and exclusive access to decision-makers train next generation leaders. These are overwhelmingly comprised by young people with privilege.

Ilumina works to overcome systemic barriers to world class training and leadership opportunity for talented musicians from South America and other places around the world. A majority of these musicians come from low income brackets and socially-focused music programs, which lack the resources to help highly talented students advance to the level career their talent might deserve. They struggle to access and finance further study.

Through our festival, education and entrepreneurship projects, and mentorship structure, we identify and support young talent to access and finance top level music education around the world, develop professional opportunity and build entrepreneurial skills and projects which can then reflect value back to their communities.

Ilumina’s model is to invest deep in individuals who have extraordinary potential to scale that investment forward. The results are staggering. In just six years close to 60% of the young musicians Ilumina has worked with have gone on to access top-level university training. Of those, 98% who applied were accepted to their first-choice institution.

Ilumina’s powerful artistic projects unite a collective musicians from diverse backgrounds around the world and inspire new work. We believe that diversity and equity are values that should generate new energy on stage— visibly and audibly— and that we should expect to make better and more innovative work when we include more voices. Our family of artists commit together to equity in how we connect with audiences, and where we play. We believe all communities deserve access to committed live performance, whether at the sawmill on our festival coffee farm or in the most famous concert halls of the world.

Ilumina works with communities to bring equity of access to music education and live performance for all people, with a focus on agricultural regions and the peripheries of cities where live performance is often rare or non-existent. Our community work is holistic—we’re working to develop an ecosystem where artists from communities receive investment, where we perform consistently in those communities, and where young artists who receive investment reinvest that knowledge and impact their communities into the future.

We also support the international social music sector, through on-site educational residencies and curriculum assistance, sharing the Ilumina deep-investment model via hands-on musical experiences.