Keir Foundation

Before establishing the Keir Foundation Phillip Keir trained as a theatre director, then turned his professional focus to media, publishing Australian Rolling Stone. By the 1990s he established his own company, Next Media with a multi-million dollar turnover.

With his wife Sarah Benjamin (author and former ABC radio manager) Phillip established the Keir Foundation in 2004. As a prescribed private fund, the Foundation has the certainty of annual grants which provide a structure to their support of the arts and human rights.

The Keir Foundation's primary purpose is to foster innovation and excellence in the arts, particularly among new and emerging practitioners. It supports all art forms, with a focus on small to medium organisations, seeking out original projects with the potential to reach varied audiences or with international collaboration.

The Foundation has a focus on projects that would not happen without philanthropic support. Currently the Foundation funds 6-8 projects each year, sometimes as seed grants and sometimes funding whole projects.

Artsupport Australia has been in regular liaison with Phillip and Sarah since 2004 and on several occasions researched and presented arts-based options for their funding consideration. The Foundation has selected several of these projects to support including:

• Kate Champion’s innovative contemporary dance company Force Majeure with The Age I’m In
• the last project of late dancer/choreographer Tanja Liedtke, Construct
• a pilot program to bring contemporary poetry and poets into the classroom developed by The Red Room Company

The Keir Foundation has also supported the:

• production of two Literary Salons for the 2007 Sydney Writer’s Festival, designed to involve younger audiences in current debates.
• Big hART production of Junk Theory, a large community arts project devised in response to the Cronulla riots
• Platform Papers, quarterly essays on issues affecting the arts, published by Currency House.
• Museum of Contemporary Art’s Artist’s Voice initiative, an annual series of interviews with visual artists describing their practice and ideas. These are available on DVD and widely distributed around the country.