The Mentorship Curriculum

The OKRA mentorship network is the part of the ecosystem where the lessons the artists have already paid for stop being a private tax and start being a shared curriculum. It is a formal network (not a favour economy) where emerging artists are paired with established ones across sound, film, and the industry itself.

Everyone is compensated. No one works for free. No one is extracted from.

The program runs in cohorts of 6 to 10 emerging artists, each paired with 1 to 2 mentors from the roster or wider network. It runs for six months. Sessions are closed-door; what gets said in the room stays in the room.

The curriculum has five modules:

01 The Money: fees, contracts, splits, late-payment law in Switzerland and the EU. The parts of the career nobody teaches in music school.

02 The Room: reading promoters, crowds, and engineers. Handling the empty room and the full room. Getting the sound right when the system is failing.

03 The Politics: how festivals actually book, avoiding tokenism, learning to say no without burning bridges.

04 The Mind: burnout patterns that hit artists specifically. Building a career that does not destroy the person inside it.

05 The Art: process, creative blocks, finishing things, the discipline of a ten-year practice.

Any artist in the OKRA ecosystem can apply. Priority goes to artists from the margins the rest of the industry is still learning to name. The collective was founded by women, queer artists, immigrants, and working-class musicians. The mentorship reflects that.

We serve DJs, producers, sound engineers, filmmakers, writers, curators, and multidisciplinary artists. If your practice does not fit in one box, you belong here.

Applications open year-round. Submit through the contact page with a note about what you are working on and what you want to build. Applications are reviewed by the collective.

Mentors are paid. Mentees are paid. The whole structure is designed to be the thing we wish we had when we were starting.