Luminato Festival Toronto selected Australian Olivia Ansell as its new artistic director in a signal the festival looks to return to showcasing global work alongside local and national productions.Luminato
The Luminato Festival Toronto has found its fifth artistic director in a familiar place.
Olivia Ansell, current director of the Sydney Festival, will become the second Australian to take the reins at Luminato, after having run one of the city festivals down under that was an inspiration for the Toronto international arts and culture event, which was founded in 2007.
In a phone interview ahead of today’s announcement of her appointment, Ansell, who will relocate to Canada with her family in February, 2025, spoke of the way large-scale city-based cultural events such as the Sydney Festival and Luminato can transform urban spaces for citizens and tourists alike.
“These summer festivals they really do enable residents and visitors to see the city differently,” she said, referencing the geography and increasingly vertical architecture of Toronto. “We can bring that temporary public-art wow factor across a range of artistic disciplines.”
Though she will continue to run the Sydney Festival until the 2025 edition is over next January, Ansell will also start working part-time on programming the 2025 edition of Luminato immediately. The artistic director role she will eventually assume full-time has been vacant since previous artistic director Naomi Campbell left in July at the conclusion of the 2023 festival.
Celia Smith, CEO at Luminato, said the festival’s hiring committee, which engaged headhunters Caldwell Partners to run a local, national and international search, had decided on Ansell and reached an agreement with her last spring, but could not announce until after the most recent Sydney Festival, which runs annually in January in what is summer in Australia, concluded. “This has required a great deal of patience,” she said, noting the 2024 Luminato festival’s programming has been curated by the current staff and will be announced in April.
Appointed to lead the Sydney Festival in 2020 after several years as head of contemporary performance for Sydney Opera House Presents, Ansell led that city-wide arts festival out of the COVID-19 pandemic and through a 2022 edition roiled by a boycott related to a sponsorship agreement with the Israeli embassy that disrupted more than two dozen shows.
The Sydney Festival’s 2023 edition was widely considered a critical and popular success and saw a huge rise in attendance. The 2024 edition, which just ended, did not received quite the same level of acclaim but led the Sydney Morning Herald to praise her “surprising” programming and to write: ”Olivia Ansell has proved a shrewd appointment.”
The Luminato Festival Toronto’s last international hire as artistic director was also an Australian: Josephine Ridge spent nine years as the executive director at the Sydney Festival and also ran the Melbourne Festival as artistic director.
But Ridge’s tenure was short. She resigned after just two years on the job in 2018, citing an inability to fulfill her vision with the festival’s then declining financial resources. (She remained in Toronto and quickly moved to a role as vice-president of programming with TO Live, a city agency that runs three civic theatres.)
Ansell, by contrast, arrives at Luminato with a full knowledge of its current circumstances – an annual budget that stands around $7-million compared to $11-million a decade ago.
She also takes over at Luminato at a moment when it is on sturdier ground – with an accumulated deficit retired over the pandemic, a couple of small surpluses since having left the festival with a modest financial buffer, and a clearer need in the local performing arts scene for an international-minded festival after the disappearance of smaller competing ones such as Harbourfront Centre’s World Stage and the SummerWorks Festival spin-off Progress.
Smith said Ansell was hired in part owing to her “personal experience and relationships with creators all around the world” – and agreed that it signals the festival’s desire to return to showcasing global work alongside local and national productions after recent editions have been dominated by the latter.
The challenge of running an international arts festival at time of global instability and war was recently highlighted by controversy at the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival in Vancouver, which saw a Canadian play set in Israel cancelled amid threats of protest and artist pull-outs.
Despite that, and her own experiences running the Sydney Festival during a boycott, Ansell said she continues to believe that festivals can unite rather than divide. “These are really complex times, but, fundamentally, art is an expression of what it means to be human and art has the power to bring people together,” she said.