Brett Sheehy

Brett Joseph Sheehy AO (born 23 November 1958) is an Australian artistic director, producer and curator.

He is currently the CEO of the Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC).

He was also appointed to direct three of the five international arts festivals in Australia's State capital cities, namely: Sydney Festival, Adelaide Festival and Melbourne Festival.

Sheehy was born and raised in Brisbane, Queensland, one of five children of Gabriel Joseph Sheehy, a retired civil and structural engineer, and founder of the consulting engineering firm, Sheehy & Partners Pty Ltd., and Joan Sheehy (née O'Sullivan), a homemaker and charity worker, particularly with the Vietnamese refugee community who arrived in Brisbane following the Vietnam War.

Sheehy was educated at St. Joseph's Christian Brothers College, Gregory Terrace, Brisbane and then at University of Queensland where he studied arts/law.

Several of his family have been involved in law and public service in Queensland.

The first was a celebration of preservation of Indigenous languages with Miles Franklin Award-winner Alexis Wright; the second an international collaboration by contemporary Indigenous singers and musicians including the legendary Gurrumul Yunupingu joined by Sinéad O'Connor, John Cale, Rickie Lee Jones and Meshell Ndegeocello; and the third saw Mavis Staples, Joss Stone, Emmanuel Jal and Paul Dempsey join Black Arm Band to celebrate protest music from the 1960s through to contemporary Indigenous songs of activism.

His grandfather Sir Joseph Sheehy KBE served as senior puisne judge of the Supreme Court of Queensland, as administrator of the State of Queensland in 1965 and 1969, and as deputy governor and acting governor.

Sheehy's maternal grandfather John Roger O'Sullivan also served the State as architect of public and community housing for the Queensland Government, while another great-uncle, two uncles (including District Court Judge Leo McNamara ), his sister and several first cousins all practised law.

As a boy, Sheehy lived with a third uncle, property developer Rick O'Sullivan, and his family on several occasions when Sheehy's mother endured lengthy illnesses.

O'Sullivan was co-owner of the racehorse Think Big which won the Melbourne Cup in 1974 and 1975.

Despite several family members' legal background, Sheehy completed only three years of his law studies and his articled clerkship at Short, Punch & Greatorix Solicitors on Queensland's Gold Coast, before abandoning law and moving to Sydney in 1983.

In Sydney, Sheehy became a theatre critic for the now defunct Sydney City Express newspaper and in late 1984 joined the Sydney Theatre Company (STC) under the stewardship of Richard Wherrett.

At STC he held various positions over a ten-year period including Artistic Associate, Literary Manager and Deputy General Manager, and he was dramaturg of a dozen productions.

While at STC, Sheehy is credited with helping give Sydney the now often-used moniker and nickname of 'Emerald City' by suggesting this as the title for playwright David Williamson's 1987 play about the city, which Williamson accepted, adding a line of dialogue "The Emerald City of Oz. Everyone comes here along their yellow brick roads looking for the answers to their problems and all they find are the demons within themselves."

The play Emerald City was produced nationally and later toured to the West End in London.

Sheehy's dramaturgy credits at STC included Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart (for the Australian premiere production directed by Wayne Harrison, who succeeded Wherrett as STC's artistic director & CEO); Romeo and Juliet (see Personal life below), Arthur Miller's The Crucible, and Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband starring Richard Roxburgh (all directed by Wherrett); and Michael Hastings' Tom & Viv starring Ruth Cracknell and Robyn Nevin.

Sheehy was also assistant to the director on Wherrett's production of Hedda Gabler starring Judy Davis.

In 1991 Sheehy was involved in challenging the automatic attribution of world-wide English-speaking rights in American plays to US producers, which could prevent their presentation in Australia for several years following their Broadway premieres.

In 1995 Sheehy left STC to become Administrator of Sydney Festival (Sydney's international arts festival, and Australia's largest arts festival ) under the leadership of Anthony Steel and in 1997 became deputy director to Steel's successor, Leo Schofield.

Sheehy completed four Sydney Festivals as Schofield's deputy (1998 to 2001) and succeeded Schofield as festival director and CEO in February 2001.

Sheehy's four Sydney Festivals (2002 to 2005) included 37 world premieres, saw the festival double its box office attendances, posted four successive financial surpluses, recorded a 30% increase in attendances to free outdoor events, established satellite festival precincts at Fox Studios Australia and in Greater Sydney, developed a following in the 18 to 35 age group, was voted Sydney's Best and Most Popular Event by the Sydney Chamber of Commerce, and was twice named the Best Event in New South Wales (2003 and 2005) by NSW Tourism (since renamed Destination NSW).

Some features of Sheehy's Sydney Festival programs included the first precinct-wide special effects lighting of historic buildings, titled Neon Colonial, which was later mirrored and extended by the Vivid Sydney festival; the curation of chamber music programs by guest composers Michael Berkeley (now Baron Berkeley of Knighton) and Brett Dean; large-scale outdoor visual art installations (including those by Michael Riley and Nam June Paik); outdoor concerts (including two concerts annually in Sydney's Domain, playing to audiences of between 70,000 and 100,000 each); expansive indoor and outdoor theatre performances including the Australian debuts of Théâtre du Soleil, Compagnia Di Valerio Festi, Les Arts Sauts (with Ian Scobie's Arts Projects Australia) and Transe Express, as well as Improbable theatre's Sticky and La Fura dels Baus's OBS Macbeth; and the epic outdoor Indigenous productions Crying Baby and Eora Crossing.

Heiner Goebbels' Hashirigaki, Osvaldo Golijov's La Pasión según San Marcos, Sir Ian McKellen in Dance of Death, London Sinfonietta, Jon Lord's Concerto for Group and Orchestra, Asian Dub Foundation and the performance-poetry Broadway hit Def Poetry Jam also saw sell-out performances, along with the festival's co-commission of the international production of The Black Rider by Tom Waits, Robert Wilson and William S. Burroughs, directed by Wilson.

Sheehy's final Sydney Festival event at the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall, the Came So Far For Beauty Leonard Cohen tribute concert starring Jarvis Cocker, Beth Orton, Nick Cave, Rufus Wainwright and Antony Hegarty among others, was filmed and recorded for the international documentary and album Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man.

During Sheehy's Sydney Festival tenure, two of Sydney Festival's corporate partnerships received Australian Business Arts Foundation (ABAF) Awards including Australia's Corporate Partnership of the Year.

In 2003 Sheehy was appointed artistic director of the then-biennial Adelaide Festival to succeed Stephen Page following Page's 2004 festival.

Previous Adelaide Festival directors had included Sir Robert Helpmann; Anthony Steel; George Lascelles, 7th Earl of Harewood; Barrie Kosky; Robyn Archer and Peter Sellars.

Other features of his Adelaide programs included the Australian debut of the Schaubühne of Berlin (see Festival milestones below), the pairing of Akram Khan and Sylvie Guillem, the creation of the Northern Lights installation, The Persian Garden venues and clubs, the reconstitution of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, DV8 Physical Theatre's To Be Straight With You, Pat Metheny, the Royal Shakespeare Company's Indian version of A Midsummer Night's Dream (presented with Ian Scobie's Arts Projects Australia), Jonathan Dove's opera Flight, Osvaldo Golijov's opera Ainadamar (which won two Grammy Awards for Best Contemporary Classical Composition and Best Opera Recording) and the multi-gallery Video Venice survey featuring highlights of the 2005 Venice Biennale.

In Adelaide, Sheehy's team secured with Adelaide Bank the largest arts sponsorship in the State of South Australia, at $3 million over three festivals with an option on a further two festivals.

Sheehy directed the 2006 and 2008 Adelaide Festivals.

The reception of the 2006 festival was positive.

Australian media claimed Sheehy had restored Adelaide Festival's status as the pre-eminent arts festival of Australia.

The Murdoch News Limited press headlined "Festival back as best in nation", and the Fairfax Media echoed these sentiments.

One of Sheehy's first Adelaide Festival productions was the festival's co-commission Here Lies Love by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim (Norman Cook) which premiered as a song cycle in Adelaide on 10 March 2006.

The subsequent 2008 festival broke box office and attendance records for Adelaide Festival's 48-year history, and was claimed to have been the world's first carbon-neutral international arts festival, achieved in concert with the South Australian Government.

In 2008 Sheehy was appointed artistic director and co-CEO of the annual Melbourne Festival (then the Melbourne International Arts Festival) where he directed the 2009 to 2012 festivals.

His predecessors in the position included Gian Carlo Menotti, Academy Award winner John Truscott, Sir Jonathan Mills and Robyn Archer.

At Melbourne Festival, the commissioning and presentation of the three premiere productions of Dirtsong (2009), Seven Songs to Leave Behind (2010) and Notes from the Hard Road and Beyond (2011) by the Indigenous music ensemble Black Arm Band were significant events, directed by Steven Richardson.

A concert version was later performed at Carnegie Hall and it was then developed into a rock musical premiering at The Public Theater in New York in 2013, and opening at the Royal National Theatre in London in October 2014.