Creativity for a better world
Biography
Rothschild Fellow
Her research has attracted nearly $1 million in funding and has been published in peer-reviewed journals including Cultural Trends, Artivate, and the International Journal of Arts Management. She has led three national studies examining who Canada's music industry works for and who it leaves behind. For Music Canada (2023), she surveyed music workers across the country and found financial instability to be the sector's dominant barrier, with precarious part-time work and persistent income gaps by gender and race leaving more than half of respondents considering leaving the industry altogether. For ADVANCE, Canada's Black Music Business Collective, she led the first national effort to measure the economic value of Black music in Canada, showing that it drives roughly two-thirds of the country's top streaming charts while Black professionals remain underrepresented in executive roles and underserved by funders. For Speaking Non-English(2024), she examined Canada's fast-growing Latin music community and identified the absence of targeted funding, executive representation, and awards recognition; the report's central recommendation — a dedicated Latin category at the Juno Awards — which was inaugurated 2026. Her work explores entrepreneurial ecosystems, innovation in the creative industries, leadership, and community-engaged research addressing grand challenges. She has presented at conferences including Academy of Management (AOM), European Group of Organization Studies (EGOS), Administrative Sciences Association of Canada (ASAC), and completed her doctoral consortium at United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE), and a fellowship at the PhD Sustainability Academy with the Alliance for Research on Corporate Sustainability (ARCS).
Trudeau Scholar
Recognized as one of Canada's Top 100 Most Powerful Women (WXN), one of the 25 most influential people in the global music industry (SPIN Magazine), and a Billboard Power Player, Dr. Charlize Wall-Andrews is a creative industries leader and impact scholar.
With nearly two decades of executive leadership in Canada's creative industries, Dr. Wall-Andrews is the Executive Director of the SOCAN Foundation, where she empowers the next generation of Canadian music creators. There she spearheaded the TD Incubator for Creative Entrepreneurship, the Equity X Production program for women in music production, and the Women in Music Canada Leadership Accelerator, among other national training programs. She holds a Ph.D. from the Ted Rogers School of Management, specializing in strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship, where she was awarded the university's Gold Medal for outstanding academic achievement. She has served on faculty at the University of Toronto and Northeastern University in Massachusetts, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Industries at Toronto Metropolitan University.
In addition to obtaining a degree in music at York University, Wall-Andrews completed an MBA at Ivey Business School and the Association of Fundraising Professionals' Fellowship in Philanthropy, and is a graduate of the Banff Centre's Cultural Leadership program. In 2020, she was named a Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar, the most prestigious award for Canadian doctoral students, while continuing to research through the Diversity Institute. She also received the SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Doctoral Scholarship, which allowed her to complete an academic exchange at Stanford University.
Aga Khan Global Leader
In 2025, Wall-Andrews received the King Charles III Coronation Medal for service to Canada. In 2023, she received the YWCA Toronto Women of Distinction Award for advancing gender equity in the music industry, and was later celebrated as one of Billboard Canada's Women in Music honourees. She received a national leadership award from the Universal Women's Network in 2021. Earlier, her community-engaged leadership was recognized in Corporate Knights' 'Top 30 Under 30' and Billboard's 'Top 40 Under 40'. She has also received an Alumni Leadership Award from her alma mater and the Social Science Award from the Edmond de Rothschild Foundation, and was appointed a Legacy Fellow by the Ariane de Rothschild Fellowship.
Wall-Andrews has been invited to speak around the world about her research and strategic insights, delivering keynotes at SONIK Philippines in Manila and the Arts and Cultural Management Conference in Bilbao, and appearing as a panellist or moderator at Saudi Arabia's Cultural Investment Conference, Canadian Music Week, the Measure of Music, Focus Wales Music, the Netherlands' International Jazz Conference, FIMPRO in Mexico, and BIME-PRO in Spain. She is part of the Aga Khan Foundation Canada Global Leaders Program.
In 2022, she was appointed a Board Director of the Canada Council for the Arts, the federal body responsible for public investment in Canadian arts. She has been the inaugural Vice-Chair of Music Canada's Advisory Council since 2019 and became Chair of the NXNE Advisory Board in 2025. In 2025, she was appointed to the International Advisory Board for the City of Rotterdam to advise on their cultural strategy and infrastructure. She previously served six years each on the Board of Directors of WorkInCulture and the TELUS Community Investment Board.