August 30, 2018 – This Summer, WeTransfer is sending six creative students from around the world on six fully-paid surprise trips to somewhere in the world they’ve never been. The trips, organized in collaboration with The Jaunt - a project that wants to create opportunities and possibilities for artists - aim to spark new ideas by pushing the students out of their comfort zones.
During the trip, each artist keeps a travel blog to document the discoveries they come across. This way everyone will be kept up to date with the travels and adventures of the artists, allowing a degree of familiarity with their perspective, and the hope is for them to find inspiration to do new work that will be featured on WePresent.
The six students are Alexander Cromer (USA), Lesego Seoketsa (South Africa), Sébastien Robert (France), Juan Pablo Mejía (Colombia), Fiona Brown (Argentina) and Natalia Poniatowska (Poland). Their profiles can be found here.
Furthermore, WeTransfer has partnered with Lecture in Progress to showcase eight unique arts institutions across the world — questioning what it means to deliver an outstanding creative education today. The profiles can be found on WePresent in the series called Pioneers 2018.
The eight schools are Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne (Switzerland), Gobelins, l’École de l’image (France), National Institute of Design (India), Uppsala University, Department of Game Design (Sweden), Berklee College of Music (USA), d-school, University of Cape Town, Hasso Plattner Institute of Design Thinking (South Africa), Kyoto Seika University, Faculty of Manga (Japan) and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (Australia).
Finally, this September the University of the Underground will welcome back its first group of students for their second and final year of the free, two-year accredited full time Master of the Arts (MA Design of Experiences) in Design of Experiences. The ambitious and innovative education program was launched last year with WeTransfer announced as one of the Founding Partners. Led by designer Dr. Nelly Ben Hayoun, the University of the Underground runs in collaboration with Amsterdam's Sandberg Institute and offers a unique postgraduate curriculum which encourages students to use multidisciplinary design thinking to make a difference in the world.
These new and ongoing initiatives dovetail WeTransfer’s long-term commitment to supporting arts and education. Since it was founded in 2009, WeTransfer has supported the creative communities by globally giving away 30% of its background imagery – advertising space worth millions of dollars – to creative projects.
In 2014 WeTransfer started its first bursary programme with Central Saint Martins and in March 2017, the company started offering free premium WeTransfer Plus accounts to all Creative Arts students in the United States, to support the creative leaders of tomorrow.