Toni Sant

Toni Sant is a Maltese award-winning writer, broadcaster, and academic based in the UK. He is an Associate Professor and Director of the Digital Curation Lab at MediaCityUK with the University of Salford and the former Artistic Director of Spazju Kreattiv, Malta’s national centre for creativity in Valletta.

His broadcasting career spans back to the 1980s when he started out as a music and drama producer with Radio Malta, eventually moving into television as a presenter of music and light entertainment shows on TVM such as Mill-Garaxx, Blast! and Tutti Frutti. In 1994 he left Malta to pursue postgraduate studies in the USA where he was eventually awarded an MA from the Tisch School of Arts and a PhD in Performance Studies at New York University.

He continued broadcasting even after leaving his full-time career in radio and television. In the late 1990s he started exploring ways to use the Internet as an interactive broadcast medium and established the MaltaMedia Online Network, which produced some of the world’s first Maltese-language multimedia content on the worldwide web. This work eventually led to his weekly podcast Mużika Mod Ieħor, which has been his flagship production since 2005.

In 2020 he returned to radio, producing and presenting a weekly series about Wikipedia for the University of Malta’s Campus 103.7, which was followed by other programmes on performance historiography and the Malta music scene.

In 2010 he co-founded the Malta Music Memory Project (M3P) with the aim of developing a collaborative database of Maltese music and associated arts. This also led him to becoming an active contributor to the global Wikimedia Movement. After a two-year period working with Wikimedia UK in London, he became a founding member of Wikimedia Community Malta, promoting open knowledge resources across the Maltese islands and around the world.

He was awarded a Career Recognition Award at the 2020 Malta Music Awards.

Toni is also an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media (published by Routledge) and a published author. His books include Franklin Furnace & the Spirit of the Avant Garde (Intellect – University of Chicago Press, 2011) and Remembering Rediffusion in Malta (Midsea Books, 2016). More recently he has also produced Documenting Performance (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2017), and The Spazju Kreattiv Art Collection (Fondazzjoni Kreattività, 2020). Maltese-language publcatons include Ejjew Nidħku Ftit Ieħor ma’ Charles Clews (SKS, 2019), the 2021 National Book Prize winner Jien-Noti-Jien: Ħsejjes u Stejjer co-written with Immanuel Mifsud (Klabb Kotba Maltin, 2020), and his first novel Varjetà: L-istorja kważi vera tal-kumpanija Stage Commandos (Klabb Kotba Maltin, 2021). Other writings have appeared in various peer-reviewed academic publications and the popular press. He is currently working on two new book projects, including his second novel.