Imogen Kinchin Fellowship

Apr 19, 2026

Since you died, your closest friends and colleagues and I have been trying to work out how to honour her professional legacy.

Not by holding onto the past.

Who you were.

What you did.

But by building something in your future image.

What you would have been.

What you would have done.

By finding a way to approximate the impact you would be having were you still here.

And so finally on World Theatre Day 2026, we launched the Imogen Kinchin Fellowship.

A year-long leadership development programme, the Fellowship captures your spirit:

The way you supported

The way you championed

The way you inspired

You were both the light that dazzled

and the light that illuminated.

This fellowship

two years in the making

will offer 6 aspiring cultural leaders:

And that most precious thing - that you had in buckets - belief.

When our friend Sally read about the Fellowship

she told me it reminded her of kintsugi.

Googling it,

I learned it is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with powdered gold.

So the piece becomes whole again.

But the cracks stay visible.

And she’s right.

That’s what this fellowship is.

It takes the fractured pieces of your professional life -

the companies you worked for

the colleagues you cherished

the impact you had

- and it tries to reassemble them.

It is imperfect.

It cannot replace you.

The joins will always be visible.

But if there is any “gold” in it, I hope it is this:

Giving brilliant people the support, community and proper mentorship to make their own mark on the world in the short time we all have.

Just as you did.