Midnight Oil Collective piloted an experimental impact investment portfolio, the Spark Fund, making our first investment into creator-driven work in June 2022. In the two years since, we’ve supported and invested in the formation of 12 companies built around creative IP and led by the creators themselves. The portfolio has collectively created hundreds of jobs, generated compelling proofs of concept, raised additional round of funding, and brought impactful creative IP to audiences.
Featured Ventures
The Bridge
Led by Kathleen Wrinn, this venture is a musical retelling of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, with a focus on the unsung labor of the caisson drillers, wire hangers, their supporting communities, and the wife of the Chief Engineer, Emily Roebling, who secretly took the reigns of the project when her husband became ill and led it for the remaining eleven years.
The team is taking an innovative approach to structuring and funding the work, working very closely with MOC Innovations and Makerstate teams to sustainably launch their venture and maintain control as they scale.
Upcoming Public Showcase: November 21, 2024, Yale University
Stargazers
Set at a haunted family farm, Stargazers aims to illuminate the tensions underlie our polarized society. As 2023's Page 73 Playwriting Fellow, Majkin Holmquist based the comedy on her own experience of growing up in central Kansas. The play is about a piece of land and a story about women who love the land and the agricultural communities who have no place for them. But most of all, it’s about the land.
Tony winning Page 73 produced the world premiere of Stargazers Off-Broadway in 2024.
Alien of Extraordinary Ability
A comedy-drama TV series by Edwin Joseph, Sola Fadiran, and Rishan Dhamija. After graduating from Juilliard, Catholic South Indian Edwin Thomas is ready to be a leading man on stage and screen; now he just has to secure the “Alien of Extraordinary Ability” visa and avoid career-ending deportation in a single year, without destroying his relationships or sacrificing his humanity. Atlanta meets Ramy meets Birdman. AoEA is a comedy-drama series about immigrating to America TODAY. This show asks, if the perseverance it takes to immigrate to the US is not extraordinary enough, then how do you become an “Extraordinary Alien”? What does it cost? Is it always worth it?
Tesleon Media
Founded by Sarah Fiete, Tesleon a media production company that uses strategic partnerships with artists and climate advocates to create multi-platform shows centered around impact narrative. Tesleon’s first show in production, “Captain Moriah’s Map of the World”, is a steampunk animated series that follows Captain Moriah on her quest to create the first map of their new world after a not-so-natural disaster.
Project Untitled
Led by Keith Hamilton Cobb, Project Unititled is a collective of working artists and educators from a diversity of backgrounds discovering how to converse constructively about the critical topics of our time (race, sex, class, and myriad other modes of prejudice), framed by an exploration of Shakespeare’s play, Othello.
Project Untitled pursues a model of theater-making wherein the default is an amplification of all the voices best equipped to interrogate and elevate any given play’s potential to capture illusive truths about our world. The venture offers students the opportunity to study, and engage working professionals in the vocation defined by the ability to metabolize what it means to be human.
