For many young people, the pressure to choose a creative path arrives long before they've had the chance to explore one. YAS Studio, now open on the Ground Floor of our Thompson Street building, was built to close that gap.
Founded by Daniel Fischer, actor, educator, and lifelong creative, YAS offers young people a place to explore acting, animation, filmmaking and photography all under one roof. It's a combination that's relatively rare, and entirely intentional.
Daniel spent over 15 years working across stage and screen, alongside a decade in higher education. In that time, he kept encountering the same problem: young people being asked to make significant decisions about their future before they'd ever had the space to properly discover themselves. Quality weekly training across creative disciplines was hard to find. A genuinely supportive environment to simply try things, without pressure or expectation, was harder still.
It's about creating an environment where they can try, fail, learn, and try again. Where getting it wrong isn't a setback, it's just part of the process.
- Daniel Fischer, founder of YAS Studio.
The Thompson Street space felt right from the moment he walked in. Daniel had history in Kensington, having run a theatre company in the Younghusband building around 13 years ago, and returning to the area felt like a natural homecoming. The building's community-focused character only confirmed it.
"The layout, the light, the scale of it... it just clicked."
Since opening, the response from the neighbourhood has been warm. Local businesses have shown generous support, and families have started finding their way through the doors. Slowly, something is taking shape: friendships forming, confidence building, young people discovering things they genuinely love doing.
That's the quiet ambition behind YAS. Not just to teach creative skills, but to give young people the time and space to work out what excites them, before the world asks them to decide.
"When they find what lights them up, everything else starts to fall into place."
Learn more about YAS Studio below:
