After 12 years as the CEO and Festival Director of Sydney Fringe Festival – during which time the Fringe has grown from a small community event into New South Wales’ largest independent arts festival, featuring 2000 artists, attracting over 100,000 audiences and contributing over $34 million in economic impact to the city – Kerri Glasscock has decided it’s time to call it a day.
Her decision to move on – and her appointment as the new Executive Director of Create NSW, the NSW State Government’s arts and cultural driver – was announced earlier this year. In the intervening months, Glasscock has assembled the program for her final Sydney Fringe – including new programs focused on independent works from Canberra and Wollongong creatives and, of course, cerebrating the work of Sydney’s thriving independent artists across a rich array of art forms.
ArtsHub spoke with Glasscock on her penultimate day at Sydney Fringe, to ask her about her time at the Festival and to encourage her to share some of her key learnings with the wider arts sector. Here’s what she had to say.
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Why have you decided now is the right time to move on from Sydney Fringe?
“Working in the independent arts sector or in the arts in general – but certainly in festivals that are ever evolving beasts – it’s very easy to set a set a timeline for yourself, where you say, ‘When the project gets to “insert certain point”, I’ll be ready to hand it over’. But the reality is that it’s growing every year and changing every year, so unless you really do make a choice to do that, you end up being here for 12 years.
“It was always going to take a really incredible opportunity for me to step aside from Fringe, but also I always knew that the next decade of Fringe would take a very different type of leader with a different set of skills than I have. Fortunately, those two things have converged. The opportunity to lead Create NSW was incredibly exciting for me, and all the groundwork is in place now for Fringe to fly into its next chapter under new leadership, so it just felt like the right time.”
What are some of your key learnings from your time with Sydney Fringe that you’d like to share with the sector?
“I think the number one thing is that resilience matters and that it exists within all of us in the sector, but particularly, it exists under immense hardship in many times with the independent art sector and artists… I think we learned that when we went through COVID, certainly in Sydney. We’d had quite a hectic few years prior to COVID, and with lockout laws and the like that had done significant damage to the sector, and so the resilience of our artists and our community – to come back and to continue to fight for their voice to be heard – has been one of the most inspiring things that I have seen and learned along the way. And so I think resilience shouldn’t be underestimated, but it should also not be taken for granted.”
I’d hazard a guess that another of your key learnings has been the importance of lobbying, managing and working with a broad range of key stakeholders?
“Absolutely. So on any given day here at Fringe in my role – but also for all of the members of Fringe – you’re dealing with multiple stakeholders, most with very conflicting needs and requirements as well. What I learned along the way, particularly in managing stakeholders and advocating for our organisation and for the sector more broadly, is that data-driven advocacy is the best. That’s something I’ll take away with me.
“So, look at the facts, create a story, and then advocate to the stakeholder that you need [to bring] on board to create change. I think one thing that I learned is that where you have success in bringing stakeholders on board and in advocating is when you have a convergence of a need, the evidence to back it up, and a willing coalition to get behind it. To identify all three of those things, takes skill and experience, but once you do get the hang of it, then advocating is much easier.”
You wrote an opinion piece for ArtsHub in 2018 called ‘Sydney, you’re killing my optimism‘, about a local council voting down a proposal for the Sydenham Creative Hub and, in doing so, walking away from five years of sector research, development and consultation. What have you learned in your time at Sydney Fringe about working with local government and making them an ally?
“Having the evidence that can undeniably create a story and an opportunity for them to create difference within [that story], I think, is the key learning for me. I mean, we would not have been able to grow [the Fringe] in the decade that we have in the way that we have, had we not had all of those additional projects with local governments and with state government as well. I’m thinking about all the activation of space work we’ve done, for example. All the regulatory reform work we’ve driven and contributed to both on a local government level and a state government level has come from us identifying the tension points within the sector and policy or regulation and then going back to our community, analysing it, testing out pilot projects, gathering data and building an evidence base that can advocate up through the multiple levels of government.
“The thing I’ve learned most is that that deep work takes time, and you have to be committed to the end game – which may take half a decade to achieve. But if you stick with it and continue to build your evidence base, then chances are you will be successful. You just have to have an organisation that can work in a long lead timeline while facing the day-to-day urgency of the needs of your sector. And that goes back to the optimism and despair piece, right? You have to maintain a healthy level of optimism and belief in the work versus your daily crisis solving of pressures within the sector.”
How valuable have conversations with peers and colleagues at other fringe festivals been in your time at Sydney Fringe – indeed, how important is networking generally?
“So my very first year was, I think, also the very first World Fringe Congress, which is our biannual gathering when we all get together from around the world. There are 300-odd fringe festivals around the world now, and that network has been fundamental in the growth of [Sydney] Fringe and in my growth as a leader as well over that time. Because being able to connect across jurisdictions – nationally, but also globally – into places that have long-established fringe festivals, and really varied types of fringe festivals and scales of fringe festivals, meant that you could learn in a really different way and build those partnerships. And whether they’re award-sharing partnerships or whether they’re just exchanges of information, they have been incredibly valuable.
Read: Edinburgh Festival Fringe: blood, sweat, tears and a truckload of money
“I haven’t missed a Fringe Congress in my 12 years here because it’s so important. In fact, they’re so important that I flew to Orlando just after COVID for only [around] five days, because I didn’t want to miss it. It’s so important to get into a room together and talk through our problems, and you realise how unifying the problems are across the whole globe, right? And you also get an immense amount of perspective when you’re speaking to colleagues. You know, we just had [a World Fringe Congress] last year in Stockholm and, of course, all of our European colleagues who are sitting around the borders of Ukraine and Russia, their perspective of freedom of speech, of artistic expression – the rising political environments that they’re operating in are so, so different to what our issues are here as well. So you get a really broad perspective on art-making globally through those connections.
“Locally as well. I mean, community is everything, whether it’s the other fringe festivals, whether it’s arts organisations and companies within your city, or whether it’s the owners that you find through the business networks or through government, across other agencies, or through philanthropic networks or the artistic community, really, especially for a fringe festival… They really are the most collaborative of arts projects. You can’t do anything without your networks. We don’t make the Festival, it’s there for community. So it’s nothing without those deep connections into network and community.”
When ArtsHub interviewed Mitchell Butel about leaving State Theatre Company South Australia to head to Sydney Theatre Company, one of the things he said was, “You can’t really know what it is to be an Artistic Director until you are an Artistic Director”. Learning on the job, therefore, is clearly important. Does the same hold true for you in your time as Director and CEO of Sydney Fringe Festival?
“Kind of. I’d say my time at Sydney Fringe has made me the art leader I am… I expanded the knowledge I needed based on the needs of our organisation at the time of growth. And so I’ve had a very close connection to the Fringe professionally and personally as I’ve developed as a human and found my place in the world alongside it, finding its place in, you know, ‘the scene’.
“So, yes, when I came to the role, I certainly hadn’t directed a festival before, but I’d certainly had the nuts and bolts experience of all the components of it. I’d been a performer. I’d owned and operated venues. I put programs together. But it’s a different beast, running a festival, because of the scope and scale of it. I was very lucky that I met it at my level. The scale of [the Fringe] at the time of me starting was right and I’ve been able to grow alongside it, which is why – as I said earlier – why I’ve always thought that the next phase of growth of Fringe will require a different type of leader. It will require someone with a different commercial acumen than I have, and a different set of skills than I have because, yes, I’ve grown up with it, to the point that it is right for me to leave now.”
Will you miss Sydney Fringe?
“I will miss the incredible team here. I will miss the community and the connection to community. I’ll miss seeing the immediate impact of the work you do. I’m moving into a space where that impact is operating on a larger scale, through different structures, and I imagine that the result may not be as immediate. The beautiful thing about working at a festival and working at Sydney Fringe that has all of the year-round projects, and the underlying work that we do outside of the Festival, is that the impact we make is visible and tangible in the moment to community, and I’ll miss that. But I had a similar feeling when we closed down our venues, 505, after nearly 20 years, the loss of that immediate connection to community, and I have that same feeling of loss on leaving this role.”
And now you get to help strengthen, support and grow the arts ecology of the entire state of NSW, not just the independent artists of Sydney.
“It feels completely right. I’m really excited about the opportunity. I don’t take it for granted. I’m really aware of the responsibility that comes with it, and also the weight of expectation and belief in me from the sector that I carry with me into that role. But I would say, as much as I love our Festival, it’s bedded in now and it ticks over. The work that really excites me is the additional work we’ve always done here, which is that advocacy and policy work – making real lasting change. Using our data and our connection to community to drive that change and to look at the levers that we need to tweak things and make things better for the sector. So that’s why it’s so exciting to be able to now pick from what I’ve learned on a kind of citywide [level] and move to a statewide remit is really exciting for me.”
Any closing remarks before we wrap up?
“I’d love to acknowledge the tens and tens of amazing people who have contributed to the growth of the Sydney Fringe Festival over the last 12 years who I’ve worked with. When I started, we had two of us working part-time out of a little storage cupboard, and we now have an extraordinary team. We speak a lot of about legacy here in the team around the fact that our festival team are caretakers, really – that the Fringe belongs to the city. There have been many amazing staff members that have contributed and put their blood, sweat and tears into growing this Festival. So I’d love to just honour them. And, of course, the tens of thousands of artists that I’ve had the privilege of working with over the last decade. They really do make the festival, and it’s a wonderful thing.”
Kerri Glasscock’s final day at Sydney Fringe was Wednesday 11 June. The 2025 Sydney Fringe Festival runs from 1-30 September.
