Curator (Festival & IPs)

Curator - Under 25

As the Curator of the Festival, your role is to lock Thought Leaders (TLs), curate the full festival experience, and manage outreach to bring the best talent to the event. This isn’t just about booking famous people; it's about building an impactful event that adds real value for students, connects them with industry experts, and helps them grow before entering the job market.

You’ll also create engaging segments, develop talking pointers, and shape the entire show flow to keep content fresh and relatable. If you have experience in artist management or talent coordination, this role will challenge you in new ways. It’s about building an IP, sales, networking, and managing 20-40 conversations at once with stakeholders across various levels — agencies, talent, internal teams, and students on campus.

In addition, you will be curating for Under 25 IPs. While Under 25 Summit at Campus is our flagship IP, as part of this role, you will also be contributing to other projects requiring curation across various platforms and initiatives within the brand.

What You’ll Actually Do:

Outreach & Talent Locking

• Research & Outreach: Identify the right Thought Leaders (TLs) and talent to bring to the festival. This is about finding the best fit, not just the most famous names. Pitch the value of the Under 25 Summit as a platform that’s about empowering students, not just showcasing well-known speakers.
• Pitching & Locking TLs: You’ll be responsible for negotiating, securing, and confirming TLs for the festival. This involves managing multiple conversations, often balancing the expectations of agencies, managers, and internal teams.
• Building Relationships: Establish and nurture long-term relationships with agencies, managers, and student leaders. Be the go-to person when it comes to securing participation and managing expectations, especially when dealing with last-minute changes or difficult conversations.
• Handling Student Expectations: Students will often demand famous people or specific speakers. You’ll need to navigate their expectations, explaining why some may not be possible while ensuring they still feel valued. You’ll need to balance being firm yet empathetic in these conversations, making sure students understand the festival’s value proposition.

Curation of Festival Content

• Creating the Festival Flow: Design the full festival flow, from segment creation to transitions. You’ll curate festival segments, develop talking points, and ensure they align with the festival's theme while engaging the audience.
• Collaborating with TLs: Once TLs are locked in, you’ll help curate their segments, develop talking pointers, and ensure their segment is exciting, educational, and resonates with students.
• Segment Creation: Work closely with TLs to come up with dynamic stage segments and audience questions. This needs to be hyper-local, so having a good understanding of the college and student culture in each city is key to making the content relatable and effective.
• Scriptwriting: As the curator, you’ll also write Emcee scripts and organize the festival schedule, ensuring smooth transitions between segments and keeping the audience engaged.

Managing Event Logistics

• Finalizing Student Talent: Review student submissions and finalize performers to ensure a mix of talent that reflects the festival’s focus on empowerment.
• Event Coordination: Oversee the festival schedule, ensuring everything runs on time and within the framework you’ve set. Last-minute changes are inevitable, and you’ll need to adapt quickly.

Promotional Support

• Creative Coordination: Work with the creative team to ensure launch creatives (reels, posters, promotional material) are aligned with the festival’s message and look.
• Supporting the Launch: Ensure launch materials (reels, posters, promotional content) are ready and go live with the marketing campaign.

Skills Needed:

1. Over Communication: You’ll be managing hundreds of messages daily — from students, team members, and talent. You need to be on top of all communications, acknowledging and responding promptly without missing a beat. Given the high scale of the event, working on a national level IP, you must synchronize everything across a massive team.
2. Creativity and Understanding of Pop Culture: You need to stay on top of global IPs and festivals, not just in India but around the world. This includes shows, upcoming movies, and song or show launches. Knowing what's trending allows you to integrate these elements into the festival and keep the content fresh and relevant. Being aware of everything happening around you ensures you know exactly when to plug what, keeping the festival content engaging and on point.
3. Great Understanding of AI: It’s not just about copy-pasting content. You must have a solid understanding of prompt engineering and be able to make the best use of AI tools. This will help you increase team efficiency, generate insights, and conduct research that enhances your decision-making process and curates better festival content.
4. Leading with Limited Context: As part of a large team and an expansive IP, you won’t always have every detail laid out for you in meetings. You’ll need to pick up insights from your team and other sources, and conceptualize with limited context. Your ability to be proactive and intuitive will help drive things forward, especially when things aren’t explicitly explained.