The Problem We Solve
Cultural institutions today face a complex and evolving challenge that demands more than traditional responses. The landscape has fundamentally shifted, creating pressures from multiple directions simultaneously.
Audiences are fragmenting and changing faster than institutions can adapt. Funders demand measurable social impact with clear outcomes. Diversity and inclusion require lived practice embedded in every project, not merely aspirational statements. Technology evolves at a pace that outstrips cultural narratives, whilst marketing often feels disconnected from the deeper meaning and mission that defines these organisations.
Creativity alone is no longer enough. What's required is a systematic approach that integrates strategy, knowledge, experience and authentic engagement—all working in concert to create lasting cultural impact.
Why Our Agency Is Different
Built on CMO-Level Expertise
This agency is not built around production alone. It is built around senior strategic leadership—the kind of expertise that shapes institutional direction, not just deliverables.
Most cultural projects fail not because of lack of creativity, but because strategy is shallow, audiences are poorly understood, meaning remains unclear, and impact is not properly articulated to stakeholders and funders.
Our founders solve exactly these problems. With decades of combined CMO-level experience, they bring the strategic depth that cultural institutions need to navigate complexity, secure funding, and create projects that genuinely matter.
Leadership: Katerina Karp
CMO & Chief Brand Strategist & Creative Director
Katerina is a CMO-level brand and cultural strategist specialising in cultural institutions and public life. Her expertise goes far beyond marketing—it encompasses the epistemological foundations of how institutions create, communicate and validate knowledge.
What makes Katerina's practice distinctive is her integration of multiple disciplines into a coherent strategic framework. She understands that brands are not visual identities, but systems of knowledge: what an institution produces intellectually, how it is perceived culturally, why it is trusted publicly, and how meaning travels across diverse audiences.
01
Brand Strategy as a System of Knowledge
Katerina builds brands as epistemological systems—designing brand architectures, value propositions, narrative positioning and long-term communication frameworks rooted in cultural reality, not abstract models.
02
Anthropology of Audiences
Using anthropological methods, she understands how people actually behave in cultural spaces, how exhibitions are interpreted, how different generations form meaning and trust, and how diasporic and hybrid identities engage with culture.
03
Epistemology for Cultural Institutions
Katerina applies epistemology practically—designing exhibitions that change thinking, structuring education programmes, building institutional credibility, and avoiding manipulative communication. Her work answers: What kind of knowledge does your institution create—and for whom?
04
High-Tier Strategic Leadership
Operating at senior leadership level, Katerina leads cross-functional teams, aligns creative, marketing, curatorial and funding goals, builds communication systems from scratch, and works directly with directors, boards and public stakeholders.
Why This Matters for Clients: With Katerina, institutions gain strategic clarity, cultural accuracy, long-term relevance, and credibility with funders and partners.
Leadership: Debbie Bandara
CMO & Chief Narrative Systems & Immersive Experience Lead
Debbie leads the experiential and narrative dimension of the agency, specialising in how people feel, move and perceive culture—not just how they understand it intellectually. Her practice bridges spatial design, embodied experience and social engagement.
What defines Debbie's approach is her understanding that cultural experiences are not isolated events but narrative systems. She designs exhibitions as journeys, events as emotional arcs, and spaces as storytelling environments where every element contributes to a coherent experiential whole.
Narrative Journeys, Not Events
Designing experiences as narrative systems where each moment builds on the last, creating coherent emotional and intellectual arcs that audiences remember and share.
Immersive & Embodied Experience Design
Integrating spatial design, movement, sound, digital environments and VR/AR technologies. Technology serves as the connector between body, memory and meaning—never the spectacle itself.
Socially Engaged & Inclusive Practice
Working extensively with communities, young people, and vulnerable groups through participatory, ethical processes that are transformative for both audiences and institutions.
Learning Through Experience
Designing learning as embodied process through co-creation labs, immersive workshops and experiential education programmes that engage the whole person.
Why This Matters for Clients: With Debbie, institutions gain emotionally resonant projects, deeper audience engagement, innovative formats without empty spectacle, and experiences that are genuinely remembered and shared.
Planning a Cultural Project That Needs to Matter?
Whether you are developing a new exhibition, repositioning your institution, building a fundable cultural programme, or rethinking how you engage audiences—we start with listening.
Cultural transformation requires understanding the unique context, challenges and aspirations of each institution. Our process begins not with solutions, but with deep engagement with your mission, your people, and your place in the cultural landscape.
We create change that lasts—not decoration, not spectacle, but meaningful cultural transformation grounded in strategic clarity, anthropological insight, and creative excellence.
AelorA Creative AgencyCreativity That Inspires ChangeNot decoration. Not spectacle. But meaningful cultural transformation.