Mentoring schemes offer young women artists the confidence to thrive in a male-dominated industry – and they’re starting to show results
When Titilola Dawudu was 16, an older woman took her out to the theatre for the first time. Dawudu put on an appropriately big, puffy dress and stepped into an alien world. “I was fascinated. I fell in love with the theatre world then.”
That woman was Lucy Neal, co-founder of the London International Festival of Theatre. She was Dawudu’s first mentor, involved in a scheme at Dawudu’s school. Neal would instil in her a belief in the importance of mentors for those who are underrepresented in the arts, which, as a black woman from a working class family, she exemplified.
Dawudu is now a successful playwright and theatre director working at Ovalhouse theatre in London. She credits Neal and the mentors she met as a student in dramatic writing at Central Saint Martins college in London with enabling her to launch her career. “Mentoring isn’t offered much in universities,” she says. “It needs to be, because sometimes for women of colour, or with disabilities, the door might be shut in your face.”
