My Gurus – Natalie Ibu

Nene Ibu

Forgive me my sentimental start, but I often think about how I came to be here now, doing what I do in the way that I do it and – sometimes in my darkest, fleeting, moments – why on earth I’m not doing something else. The answer to both starts with my mother, who was the first person to believe in me, trust that I knew what I wanted and that I could make a career out of this – relatively naïve – impulse, which career advisors didn’t really know what to do with. Sometimes I blame her for not adhering to the immigrant stereotype – what about Law, Natalie? Medicine? – and not interrogating my 17 year old self more. If she had, she’d have known that I didn’t really know what a ‘director’ did, never mind an artistic director, but I knew – somehow – that that’s who I wanted to be, what I wanted to do. Mostly, I celebrate her practical, hard-working, courageous, feminist (without claiming the word) immigrant, single-parent self for enabling me to start this journey, a journey fuelled by the rest of the people on this list and beyond.