Panel - A Guide To Going Freelance

Diljeet Bhachu

Freelance Musician, Educator, Researcher & Activist

Dr Diljeet Kaur Bhachu is a Scottish-Indian researcher-activist-musician based in Glasgow. Graduating from the renowned BA Applied Music programme at the University of Strathclyde in 2011, where she also completed her Masters, she has recently completed a PhD at the University of Edinburgh, with funding from the AHRC through the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities (SGSAH).

Diljeet is an activist with the Musicians’ Union (MU) and University and Colleges Union (UCU), speaking frequently for the MU at trade union conferences and events. She is also the current vice-chair of the MU’s Scotland/Northern Ireland regional committee, the STUC Black Worker’s Committee, and sits on the MU Equalities committee. She is passionate about equality and equity in the creative industries in Scotland, and also about tackling these issues across the arts education sector, which is where her current research is focussed. In 2017 she co-founded the Scottish-Asian Creative Artists’ Network (ScrAN), to address the issues specific to Scottish-Asians working in the creative industries in Scotland.

Diljeet is one half of flutes/taiko/electronics duo Velma, with Georgie Whyte. She is in the live band for Kapil Seshasayee, and features on his debut album A Sacred Bore (2018). She also improvises and writes for her own solo project with flutes and electronics and is currently writing her debut album. You can read some of Diljeet’s poetry in The Colour of Madness, a BAME Mental Health anthology published in 2018.

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