The founder of the Hong Kong Youth Arts Foundation, Lindsey McAlister has dedicated her life to giving Hong Kong youth access to the arts. Originally from the UK, where she worked for the Arts Council of Great Britain and the Gulbenkian Foundation, she moved to Hong Kong in the late 1980s. In 1993 she founded the Hong Kong Youth Arts Festival, providing the city’s young people with opportunities to participate free of charge in the visual arts, drama, music and dance—opportunities that many of them had never had before. In 2006 the festival changed to its current name, and it now engages more than 800,000 young people annually, making it one of the world’s largest youth arts events.

She also runs her own musical theatre company, Lindsey McAlister Productions, that has produced the likes of Sweeney Todd, Blood Brothers and A Chorus Line. She has been named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire and a Justice of the Peace.