New Sydney Festival director wants us on the edge of our seats

Sydney Festival has named Canadian-born Kris Nelson as its next artistic director.

The first festival he will program will be in January 2026, which is also the 50th anniversary of the event.

Current Sydney Festival director Olivia Ansell is preparing to unveil her fourth and final festival, which will be staged from January 4 to 26 next year, before taking up the top job at Toronto’s Luminato Festival.

Kris Nelson is “over the moon” to have been chosen as the next Sydney Festival director.Credit:

Most recently, Nelson, 43, has been artistic director of the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT), a major biennial event staged in the UK capital since 1981.

Nelson said he was “over the moon” when he got the call to say he had been chosen for the gig over more than 100 hopefuls worldwide.

Before helming LIFT, Nelson directed the Dublin Fringe Festival, Ireland’s largest multidisciplinary arts festival.

“I’ve been a festival director and producer my whole career,” he said, speaking from the West Midlands in the UK. “Coming out of theatre school, it was the thing that landed with me.

“The thing that keeps me coming back into the festival world is that thing of different voices coming together, different stories coming together and bringing different challenges, provocations and gifts to an audience.”

Nelson said Sydney’s annual summer event was one of the “great” worldwide festivals.

“One of the things I love about the Sydney Festival is that it ranges across the city from the great venues to some of the more unusual corners,” he said. “I can’t wait to make Sydney my home and lead the team to create future-facing festivals that shape the times and resonate with audiences in every corner of the city.”

And while his ideas for Sydney are only in the very early stages, Nelson said a great festival should combine “A mix of celebration and feeling like you’re on the edge of your seat because something is so captivating or challenging or daring.

“It’s about reckoning with the times and imagining the future. It’s about celebrating all the stories within the city that are diverse, that are multicultural, that are First Nations-led but also about connecting it to the world.”

Inevitably, Nelson has given plenty of thought to the challenge faced by all festival directors of balancing ticket sales with being artistically bold.

“The kind of balancing point for me is between making the popular experimental and the experimental popular,” he said.

“For me, that’s a good action. That tells me if my compass is right. Is this someone who’s known to Sydney audiences who’s going to go out on a limb and do something they never would’ve been able to do without the Sydney Festival? Or is this a local artist who’s going to be on a new scale, who’s going to make work that’s commercial, who’s going to up their game?

“My dream is to be able to say to an Australian artist, ‘What do you want to do with the keys to the Sydney Festival?’ Let’s make something quite magical happen.”

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