Fran Sanderson leads the Arts & Culture Investments and Programmes team at Nesta, including Arts & Culture Finance, which manages over £30m of impact capital making loans of between £25k and £1m to arts and culture organisations.

Recent initiatives include Amplified, a grant and structured support programme helping cultural and creative organisations to use digital ideas to generate social impact; an Innovate UK-funded performance demonstrator project, with an RSC-led consortium to investigate what the Audience of the Future will look like; a Creative Immersive Mental Health fellowship programme with StoryFutures looking at the role of creatives in engaging users; and Alternarratives, a prize designed to bring the short story form into the 21st century.

In a previous life, Fran was a fund manager at JPMorgan. She started working in impact investment at the birth of Big Society Capital in 2012 and moved to Nesta in 2015.