T:>Works presents
My Life Story: Guided Autobiography Workshop by Normala Manap
The AGEncy Fest: 2026 Public Creative Expressions Workshop
My Life Story: Guided Autobiography Workshop is a five-part autobiography writing workshop specially designed for 60+ individuals.
Step into a space where your memories take centre stage, and be guided by seasoned gerontologist and workshop facilitator Normala Manap. Together with peers, discover how to express your own life story through Guided Autobiography, an evidence-based framework for life review.
Across five weekly sessions in October and November, you’ll journey through the major branching points of your life – family, health, career, identity, and more. The sessions are as follows: In Week 1 we open with a warm welcome and an introduction to the workshop. Alongside a look back at a room of your childhood, this session aims to develop confidante relationships with participants. In Week 2, cover the transitions that happen during the major branching points of your life, as well as your family. In Week 3, prepare to delve into self-awareness, through the topics of your career, your body and health. In Week 4, explore the contexts and influences of your gender and sexuality as well as your experiences and ideas about death. And lastly, in Week 5, wrap everything up by venturing through topics of your spirituality, values, goals and aspirations. As you write and reflect alongside fellow participants, you’ll walk away seeing yourself and your life story through fresh eyes.
Developed by Professor James E. Birren over thirty years ago, Guided Autobiography draws on the disciplines of life review and autobiography and offers a rigorous yet deeply human framework for self-exploration and personal growth. The documented benefits include enhanced emotional well-being, greater energy and vigour and a meaningful sense of connectedness and friendship.
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
* Eligible for up to 100% SkillsFuture funding. Learn more here.
* Limited 50% subsidy also available (conditions apply).
Note:
* Applications will be assessed through a selection process.
* Subsidies will be awarded based on both financial circumstances and the overall application.
* Attendance for all five sessions is required.
* Workshop space: accessible via ramp for wheelchair users.
* While this workshop is specially designed for 60+* individuals, participation is open to all ages and experiences.
Also coming up – Write Back: The Quiet Defiance of Authoring Your Life
Who gets to tell the story of a life – and what happens when we take that story into our own hands?
In this conversation, gerontologist Normala Manap, cultural anthropologist Dr. Ad Maulod, and social worker Yap Ching Wi consider the ways we reclaim authorship of our lives.
Normala explores the agency of writing our life stories – and how putting experience into words can become an act of transformation. Dr. Ad turns to the everyday stubbornness of older people as petit resistance: small acts of reclaiming authorship over their lives. Ching Wi draws on her experiences as a caregiver to reframe ageing through the possibilities of joy and fulfillment, even as memory fades and circumstances shift.
Together, they ask what it means to keep writing back: to refuse the scripts written for us, and to shape what comes next.
Learn more and RSVP here.
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.
Ad Maulod is a cultural anthropologist and Principal Research Scientist at the Centre for Ageing Research and Education (CARE), Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore. Working at the intersection of culture, health, and ageing, he focuses on communities too often left at the margins. Ad leads applied and evaluative research that begins with older people’s own life histories, aspirations and their lived accounts of the care and community around them. His team has conducted over 800 in-depth interviews with older adults, turning their stories into programme and policy interventions that make care more person-centred and community-rooted. A committed advocate for health equity, Ad believes in the wisdom of our elders — and in every person’s right to be heard — and works toward a care system, and a society, that is inclusive, culturally responsive, and just.
Yap Ching Wi is a seasoned social worker with over 30 years of experience and a facilitator of 16 years. Trained at the National University of Singapore and the London School of Economics, she founded The Life Story workshop nine years ago, guiding more than 150 seniors and middle-aged adults to complete their life story books. Her work extends to supporting elderly Buddhist nuns aging independently. Grounded by personal experience caring for her parents in their late eighties—including her father with dementia—Ching Wi views aging as a deeply meaningful dance of decline, closures, hope, courage, and a touch of wickedness.
The AGEncy Fest, set up by independent arts company T:>Works, is an enabling platform to provide vital resources and encourage intergenerational collaboration for individuals aged 60 and above. The AGEncy Fest 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.
The AGEncy Fest commissions, catalyses public creative expressions workshops, and presents the AGEncy Day where funded processes through The Open Call will be showcased. The 2026 Peer Panel who is responsible for selecting the processes comprises 60+ Cultural Medallionists: Amanda Heng, Jeremy Monteiro, Meira Chand, Dr. Ong Keng Sen and Som Said. The AGEncy Fest is supported by The AGEncy Fund, raised 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.
Price: $100
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.
Price: $100
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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