T:>Works presents
My Life Story: Guided Autobiography Workshop by Normala Manap
The AGEncy Fest: 2026 Public Creative Expressions Workshop
Specially designed for 60+* individuals, this five-part workshop invites participants to become active creators of their own narratives and agencies, to reflect on their choices, turning points, relationships, and values that have shaped their lives, and to consider how these stories continue to inform who they are and who they are becoming.
With facilitator and seasoned gerontologist Normala Manap, participants will be able to approach their life story with the expertise it deserves, and reflect on them in a safe, supportive space. This workshop is conducted in English.
Workshop Details
Session Dates & Time:
16, 23, 30 October
6, 13 November 2026
1–5PM
Venue:
Level 1, 72-13 Mohamed Sultan Road, Singapore 239007.
Nearest MRT Stations: Fort Canning (DT20), Havelock (TE16)
Full fee:
$500 (With limited subsidy of up to $250 available)
Note:
Normala Manap is a gerontologist, yoga teacher, and master coach of Guided Autobiography — a creative writing method that turns memory into a new perspective on living. As Director of Age Matters Consultancy & Training since 2021, she champions the needs of older adults through policy, practice, and research. With over three decades in social development and age care, she has helped shape national frameworks and service standards that continue to guide Singapore’s aged care landscape.
Her voice extends beyond Singapore. She contributed to the Suria documentary Reaching 100 – Ageing in the New Age and shared local insights at the 2024 Guided Autobiography Summit. A Fulbright Scholar with a Master of Public Administration, Normala has spent her career translating older adults’ stories into meaningful policy change — and now brings that same craft to helping others tell their own.
The AGEncy Fest, set up by independent arts company T:>Works, is an enabling platform to nurture capacities of 60+ individuals and foster intergenerational collaboration. It recognises that mature individuals still have decades of wisdom to contribute and share to Singapore’s cultural and wider landscape, and champions a future where creativity knows no age.
One of the objectives of The AGEncy Fest is to explore the potential of intergenerational complementation. The AGEncy Fest primarily supports processes as opposed to products.
The AGEncy Fest commissions, catalyses public creative expressions workshops and facilitates the AGEncy Day where projects by mature individuals through The Open Call, juried by a Peer Panel working in diverse disciplines and spaces, will be showcased. The AGEncy Fest is a programme of T:>Works, a major grants company of the National Arts Council, and is supported by The AGEncy Fund, funded in part by the public and by the Cultural Matching Fund, MCCY.
Centring the agency to act and make choices as the transformative experience of ageing, the AGEncy Fest opened in 2026 with its Inaugural 60+ Commission: Who Knows Where The Bird Goes – Dana Lam: Six Decades of Practice, an exhibition tracing the writer, gender equality advocate, grandmother, and visual artist across a lifetime of making works.
The AGEncy Fest: Inaugural 60+ Commission
Who Knows Where The Bird Goes
Dana Lam: Six Decades of Practice
22 July – 8 August 2026
Tues to Sat: 12 – 8pm, Sun: 12 – 6pm, Mon closed
Free, entry by registration.
72-13 Mohamed Sultan Road, Singapore 239007
Dana Lam works across writing, drawing and performance. She is indebted to her feminist sisters in the fields of writing, research, theatre and visual art. Lam served as President of AWARE from 2000–2002 and again from 2009–2011. One claim to fame is being part of the core group that initiated the reclaiming of AWARE in May 2009. She has worked as a reporter for The Straits Times.
Lam was awarded Silver in the Established Artist Category at the 43rd UOB Painting of the Year competition in 2024. In the same year, her visual journal, The Art of Being a Grandmother: An Incomplete Diary of Becoming (published by Checkpoint Theatre) was nominated for the Singapore Literature Prize.
Lam’s publications include Days of Being Wild: Walking the line with the Opposition (Ethos Book, 2006) on the General Elections of 2006, described as “a remarkable act of service to our understanding of the struggles of opposition political parties.”
Introducing the AGEncy Ticket
Join the Commons To Support Wellness And Ageing
The AGEncy Ticket
Join the commons with The AGEncy Ticket and support wellness and ageing.
Every AGEncy Ticket will fund The AGEncy Fest 2027, an enabling platform to
provide vital resources for 60+ individuals.
Each ticket comes with an entry to Women of AGEncy: An afternoon with Dana
Lam and friends as well as a digital print signed by the artist.
On 25 July, Women of AGEncy: An afternoon with Dana and friends will begin at 4pm with an intimate conversation among friends shaped by a shared narrative and commitment to feminist thought and activism. Long-standing advocates of AWARE (Association of Women for Action and Research), Dana Lam, Constance Singam, Dr. Kanwaljit Soin, Dr. Teo You Yenn as well as AWARE’s Executive Director Lim Shoon Yin will speak from lived experience and creative practice, reflecting on and with one another’s work, and on how agency is reconfigured within the conditions that shape and sustain our life and practice.
The house will open from 3pm with an exhibition walk–through and performance by Dana.
The AGEncy Ticket
Join the commons with The AGEncy Ticket and support wellness and ageing.
Every AGEncy Ticket will fund The AGEncy Fest 2027, an enabling platform to
provide vital resources for 60+ individuals.
Each ticket comes with an entry to Life • Time • Practice: An afternoon with Dana
Lam and friends as well as a digital print signed by the artist.
On 1 August, Life • Time • Practice: An afternoon with Dana and friends will begin at 4pm with an intimate conversation with theatremaker Claire Wong and artist-curator Shubigi Rao whose practice spans international art, research, and publishing, discussing what becomes possible through a lifetime of practice. Speaking from and to one another’s work, Dana with Claire and Shubigi will consider what it means to sustain a practice and what becomes visible through decades of making, thinking, and living. What emerges with time? How should we understand artistic value beyond innovation and novelty? And how might a fund for 60+ individuals support, reveal and amplify these possibilities?
The house will open from 3pm with an exhibition walk–through and performance by Dana.
Free entry by registration
– Celebrate the opening of the AGEncy Fest with Dana Lam, the inaugural 60+ commission over drinks, supper and conversations. Exploring themes of renewal, gender, more-than-human relations, grief, and memory, Dana’s work inaugurates The AGEncy Fest, as a fitting demonstration of the indomitable spirit of 60+ individuals.
7.30pm Performance by Dana Lam: A Homage
7.30pm Performance by Dana Lam
8pm Drinks till late
– Join us for a closing performance by Dana Lam, followed by drinks as we gather in support of wellness and ageing with The AGEncy Fest.
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