Jonathan Holloway
festivals / events
Melbourne International Arts Festival
Artistic Director & Co-CEO, 2016 - 2019
The flagship arts event of Australia’s cultural capital: 19 days of classical and contemporary music, theatre, opera, dance, circus, visual arts and outdoor performances.
Artistic highlights:
Taylor Mac's 24 Decades
(commission/first presentation outside US)
Philip Glass's La Belle et la Bête
Fire Gardens for 30k people
in the Royal Botanic Gardens.
Sydney Morning Herald said of the 2017 Festival
“the strongest Melbourne Festival in years...
if you didn’t see it, you missed a landmark theatrical event”
Perth International Arts Festival
Artistic Director, 2012 - 2015
The longest running international festival in the southern hemisphere and one of the largest in the world: 23 days of festival, 2 months of visual arts, 26 weeks of film, and year-round creative learning programmes.
Artistic highlights:
Commissioning/premiering Philip Glass's final three piano etudes.
Exclusively presenting ENO/Met Opera's Madama Butterfly and Berliner Ensemble/Robert Wilson's
Threepenny Opera.
Opening with an audience of 30,000 people dancing in the streets, as angels and two tonnes of feathers fell from the sky.
Closing with 1.4 million people walking with giants through the city centre.
Norfolk & Norwich Festival
Artistic Director & CEO, 2005 - 2011
At almost 250 years old, the Norfolk & Norwich Festival is the longest running arts festival in the UK, and over Jonathan's six years of direction it grew to be the nation's third largest annual city arts festival: 16 days of classical and contemporary music, large-scale outdoor events, circus, a children's festival, physical and visual theatre and the visual arts. The Festival delivered Creative Partnerships, the UK's flagship education program working intensively with over 15,000 young people year round.
Elemental
France
Creator and Creative Director, 2003
A nocturnal world of visual theatre, circus, film and puppetry to a soundtrack of cutting edge live music and a festival within a festival at Chalon dans la Rue, France's most prestigious street theatre festival. At its heart was a newly created theatre show bringing together Forkbeard Fantasy, Company FZ, Avanti Display and 12-piece club/jazz group Homelife.
National Theatre London
Founder of the public programmes department, and director of the Watch This Space Festival, 1997 - 2004
During the tenure of Artistic Directors
Trevor Nunn and Nicholas Hytner, the
National Theatre’s Events Department devised the artistic vision and delivered a major programme of events throughout the building and beyond, playing a significant role in the cultural transformation of the National Theatre and London’s South Bank.
