Audrey Perera

Audrey Perera is an independent festival producer based in Singapore. Trained as a journalist, she spent several years as an award-winning reporter and editor before embarking on a parallel career in the arts.

Credited with bringing Peter Gabriel’s iconic World of Music Arts & Dance (WOMAD) to Singapore, Audrey managed and curated this annual world music festival for seven years, bringing in hundreds of performing artists from all over the world, and tens of thousands of happy audience members. Post-WOMAD, she created other festivals, including The Ultimate Tribute Concert, Made in Singapore! and Play It Back!, celebrating the music of international pop icons, and Singapore’s own heritage of music and dance.

In 2016, The Nippon Foundation (TNF) appointed her Festival Director of True Colours Festival Singapore, TNF’s Asia Pacific celebration of artists with disabilities. The first of its kind in the world, True Colours Festival (TCF) presented more than 200 performing artists from more than 20 countries performing over a three-day weekend, alongside a village of interactive activities, workshops, talks, visual arts and music. More than 10,000 people experienced the milestone festival.

TCF is presented by The Nippon Foundation in Japan, a philanthropic not-for-profit organisation which has been championing disability-led arts from its first arts event in 2006. TCF is a series of performing arts events presented across geographies, in celebration of diversity and inclusion as “One World One Family”. TCF believes in the unifying power of the arts to build a society where everyone feels included and valued and no one is left behind. To date, festivals have been presented in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Singapore. COVID-19 led to the cancellation of the global edition in Tokyo, which will re-start in September 2020.

TCF brings performing artists and audiences together through various activities such as festivals, music videos, film screenings, children’s programs, musicals, concerts and workshops. To date, TCF has presented more than 1,100 performing artists from more than 30 countries. It’s most recent production, the Stand By Me music video, featured 46 singers, musicians and dancers from 15 countries/regions performing from their homes, and has been viewed more than 500,000 times on Youtube, FB and other platforms.

The TCF2020/21 festival theme is One World One Family, and it aims to showcase and celebrate the power of performing arts to break through and cross all manner of barriers real and imagined.