You’re an artist looking to make headway with your website. You’re a new writer with a finished manuscript trying to figure out your next steps. You’re a million different varieties of an artist and you’re right at the crossroads before you move creatively or professionally to the next level up. It’s such a struggle that you wish there was some way that there was someone out there who could offer you the benefits of their experience and expertise to help you through.
Ah, but wait. That’s where Mentorly enters, billing itself as “the first online arts mentorship platform providing accessible and engaging opportunities to connect with emerging and professional artists from around the world.”
The online platform found at www.Mentorly.co works to help connect virtually any artist with just the right guide. The web business – started in 2016 by St. Albert native Ashley Werhun (now a dancer with Les Ballets Jazz de Montréal) and filmmaker Katherine Macnaughton – has already signed up approximately 300 arts mentors and hundreds and hundreds of mentees. The people who have signed up are in a wide range of categories and subcategories of art including choreography, cinematography, computer animation, songwriting, writing and publishing, arts administration, film and video, visual arts, stand-up comedy, stunt performing, technology, circus, story editing, broadcasting, art history, and, of course, dance among many others.
It’s already establishing itself as a critical component in many creative individuals developments and it’s growing fast. A feature story in Artsy last year resulted in its usership doubling overnight and it hasn’t looked back since.
GAZETTE: What was the genesis of this exciting project? You must have thought about how you could have benefited from it in your own career or how others are in the same position you were in before you became a professional performing artist.
ASHLEY WERHUN: “I, as a professional, want to give back as a mentor. Because of my hectic lifestyle, it's really hard to find that time to teach, give back, and connect one on one. I would come back from tour and get five or six messages every single week asking about auditions or the best way to dance for Les Ballets Jazz or dance for my old company, Trey McIntyre Project, and how to get there and all of these questions. Though those requests were piling up, my ability to really connect with those people and keep the relationships going was not so great because there wasn't a really great channel for it. To ping back and forth on Instagram is not a personal connection.”
GAZ: You said that you met with Katherine to talk about how her own career had stalled. She was having trouble branching out from her steady commercial work into more artistic projects. That must have been frustrating. I could see how a mentor would be able to really help someone along in those situations.
AW: “We really looked at the problem and thought what is the basic solution to this. I think that it's very 2018 to say ‘let's make an app.’ Naively, we thought that everyone would interact with that. Looking a little deeper we thought ‘is that really the solution?’ Maybe the solution is a physical space where people could get together. Maybe the solution is something else.”
GAZ: So you worked it down to the idea of a tech platform that could connect people anywhere in the world? Certainly the two of you were not dealing with situations that were totally unique …
AW: “We very quickly found that mentorship is a little broken in every industry. It’s still very abstract but essential. It’s one of those things that everyone says, ‘Well, this is obviously a key to success … but how do you get there?’ They shrug their shoulders and say networking events or something of that nature. It’s very much up to luck.”
GAZ: Yeah … so much for luck. Now, you’re bridging the gap. People sign up and scan through who has the closest creative experience to their own needs and then they click to link up. It’s probably a big resource that seems way overdue.
AW: “People can really narrow down what they’re looking for really quickly and find who’s there to support them. We’re opening up into different categories too. It’s a place where everyone feels that they have somewhere to fit in. We’ve had a few people say ‘I just wish I had this when I was younger’ because the access to different people in this world are a lot of the times depending on your circle.”
