S4:E6 From Expo to City… Marjan Faraidooni in conversation with Adrian Ellis
Guest
Marjan Faraidooni
In conversation with
Adrian Ellis
Our host Adrian Ellis speaks to Marjan Faraidooni, Chief of Education & Culture and Chief of HR at Expo City Dubai about how Expo City transformed itself from a major event venue into a vibrant cultural ecosystem unto itself.
Date of Recording
22 April 2024
Date of Publication
6 June 2024
[00:00:00]
Marjan Faraidooni: Of course there are challenges, Adrian, and if there's one thing that we've learned through this process is, you really need to be gutsy and you really need to have grit to plan this long term.
[00:00:13]
[THEME MUSIC]
[00:00:18]
Adrian Ellis: Hello and welcome to The Three Bells. This podcast is part of the fourth season produced by AEA for the Global Cultural Districts Network. The focus is as always, the relationship between cultural and urban life, and the ways in which cultural life contributes to urban vitality, and vice versa. The series and supporting materials can be found at www.thethreebells.net and if you like our content, please subscribe, and give us a positive review on your favourite podcast listening platform.
I'm Adrian Ellis, the chair of GCDN and the director of AEA Consulting. And I'm thrilled to have today's guest, Marjan Faraidooni, who is the Chief of Culture and Education for Expo City, Dubai.
Marjan, welcome to The Three Bells! I’m delighted to have you with us. And I'm delighted and very grateful to have you with us in uh, these circumstances, because I know that Dubai — like other areas in the Gulf, has had an extreme weather event.
And I'd just like to, A, offer our commiserations, if those are the right words, but also for you to tell us a little bit about it, because we've all been reading in the press, and we are, you know, acutely aware of the severity of the storms.
[00:01:33]
Marjan Faraidooni: Well hello, Adrian. Thank you for having me on your podcast. And thank you so much for acknowledging what we've been through in the past week. It's exactly one week tomorrow that we experienced one of the worst storms in our history. So it's been very difficult for us as a city to have seen what it has done to us.
But I'm also very pleased to say that we are in the process of recovery, trying to help the community get back to what we want to — which is normalcy.
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About Our Guests
Marjan Faraidooni joined Expo 2020 Dubai in March 2014 and has been leading the strategy development and execution of the legacy programme since. Prior to joining the Expo team, she served as director of portfolio strategy at Dubai Holding where her responsibilities focused on the development and implementation of strategy across investments and operating companies. +
