Toni ready to transform Oistins Festival

Being creative isn’t a hobby for Toni Thorne. It’s a way of life. Everything she does is in some way associated with the creative industry and more often than not, everything she touches turns to gold.

She has been dabbling in the creative industry as an entrepreneur since she was 22 years old.

“I do events, I do consultancy with some public agencies. I think being creative was something I always liked, anything creative I was always interested in. Being in culture was always important to me and I was always exposed to the arts.

“I always knew that what I wanted to do was within the arts. When I left UWI at 21 having studied Economics and Accounting, I went straight into the oil industry and spent a year there. Then I realised that wasn’t what I wanted to do. You come to a crossroads in life where you have to find out how to make money from the things that you love,” the 32-year-old explained.

Toni said everything she does now is creative but with the mind-set that money had to be made from it.

“I heard a lot of artists saying that people want to make too much money out of art but we have to encourage our artists to make money from their art. Look at our very own Rihanna. She is a very good example of someone who is creative and is making money from it. She was the first example that we had that you could do something creative and make a living from it,” she said.