Aspiring for a better future through creativity, leadership, and research
Biography
Trudeau Scholar
Recognized as one of Canada’s Top 100 Most Powerful Women by WXN, Dr. Charlie Wall-Andrews is a creative industries leader and impact scholar.
With over a decade of executive leadership experience in Canada’s creative industries and proudly serving as the Executive Director of SOCAN Foundation, Wall-Andrews holds a Ph.D. from the Ted Rogers School of Management (specializing in Strategy, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship). She has served on faculty at the University of Toronto, Massachusetts’ Northeastern University (USA), University of Toronto, and is currently a faculty member at Toronto Metropolitan University. She spearheaded the creation of the TD Incubator for Creative Entrepreneurship and Women in Music Entrepreneurship Accelerator Program, among other training programs offered in the community.
Additionally, she served on the Board of Directors of WorkInCulture and the TELUS Community Investment Board for six years, and is currently the inaugural Vice-Chair of Music Canada’s Advisory Council since 2019. In 2022, she was appointed Board Director of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Wall-Andrews is also an Associate Composer at the Canadian Music Center, where she writes avant-garde and instrumental music.
Rothschild Fellow
In addition to a BA in music and an MA in ethnomusicology from York University, Wall-Andrews completed an MBA at Ivey Business School and the Association of Fundraising Professional’s inaugural Diversity and Inclusion Fellowship in Philanthropy program and is a graduate of Banff Centre’s Cultural Leadership program. In 2020, she was named a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar, the most prestigious scholarship for Canadian Doctoral students, while continuing to research through the Diversity Institute. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals, and she received the SSHRC Joseph Armand Bombardier Doctoral Scholarship, which allowed her to complete an academic exchange at Stanford University. Wall-Andrews also earned her CCIP Designation (Canadian Certified Inclusion Professional).
In 2023, Wall-Andrews received the YWCA Toronto Women of Distinction Award for advancing gender equity in the music industry and was later celebrated in 2024, as one of the Billboard Canada’s Women In Music honourees. She also received a national leadership award from the Universal Women’s Network in 2021. Before this, her community-engaged leadership and impact were recognized as one of the ‘Top 30 Under 30’ by Corporate Knights, the ‘Top 40 Under Forty’, received an ‘Alumni Leadership Award’ from her alma mater, and the Social Science Award from the Edmond de Rothschild Foundations. She has also been appointed a Legacy Fellow by the prestigious Ariane de Rothschild Fellowship.
Community Leader
Wall-Andrews has also been invited as a keynote speaker around the world, such as SONIK Philippines in Manila, in addition to being a panellist or moderator at events such as Canadian Music Week, the Measure of Music, Focus Wales Music, the Netherlands’ International Jazz Conference, FIMPRO and BIME-PRO in Mexico and Spain, respectively. She has presented her research at conferences such as AOM, EGOS, ASAC, EURAM.
She has completed her Doctoral consortium at the USASBE, and was a fellow at the PhD Sustainability Academy with Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability (ARCS). She has also been a reviewer for blind peer-reviewed academic journals.
As a published scholar, her research explores various subjects: entrepreneurial ecosystems, innovation in the creative industries, critical study of diversity and leadership in organizations, and community-engaged research to address grand challenges. Most recently, she received a Mitacs Award to study Canada's music industry's enablers, barriers, and challenges with the Diversity Institute.
Wall-Andrews aims to build a better future for the creative industries through creativity, leadership, and research.