Senior Arts Program Manager

Wild at Heart creates and supports an extraordinary community of artists who experience severe isolation, exclusion and stigma through mental illness, disability, addiction, trauma and poverty.

Our artists’ work ranges from beginner through to emerging professional standard. The quality of the art is engaging, entertaining and captivating in its musicality and authenticity. The songs are unique and extremely important for Australia’s cultural expression, coming from voices in our community who are never heard and are often not confident in the value of their own stories.

We deliver community based songwriting and music workshops in metro and across regional Victoria. We work in long term partnership with artists and communities in each location to develop a strong sense of friendship, artistic development and engagement with the local arts and music scene.

We have been doing this work for over twenty years.

We employ and train local professional musicians to work with participants to create their own original music, recordings and performances. We engage highly regarded songwriters as tutors, including Dan Sultan, Dallas Frasca, Liz Stringer, Dan Parsons, Leah Senior, John Fleming and many more.

We support our artists to retain ownership and self representation in their creative work and public performances. We work with our artists to advocate for their inclusion in their local communities, the local music industry, local and national media.

Our Board of five Directors includes people with disability. We support full inclusion of our participant group in leadership, co-design and planning of Wild At Heart’s programs, evaluation and strategic direction.

Our Artistic Director, Phil Heuzenroeder OAM, has led community arts and cultural development work with people with disability for over 20 years. He leads a team of three project managers and 20 facilitating artists.

Wild at Heart produced accessible dance party events led by people with a disability in Melbourne for over 13 years which were a cultural phenomenon for a largely invisible community. Events were held at Sydney Opera House and in regional NSW and Victoria. The Bipolar Bears band featured on SBS TV and Wild At Heart recently featured on Radio National.