News

Career spotlight: Festival programmer

Artistic Directors get the media profile, but behind the scenes, other staff help to present work and wrangle the artists on show. What else do their jobs entail, and how did they get to where they are?

12 Feb 2018 12:00

Richard Watts

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Writing and Publishing

Image: Perth Festival’s Vessel. Image by Yoshikazu Inoue, copyright Damien Jalet & Kohei Nawa.

At their best, international arts festivals don’t just transform cities – they forever change the lives of those cities’ inhabitants.

Indeed, some of the current crop of Australian artistic directors were shaped and informed by the festivals of their youth.

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Richard Watts

Richard Watts OAM is ArtsHub's National Performing Arts Editor; he also presents the weekly program SmartArts on Three Triple R FM. Richard is a life member of the Melbourne Queer Film Festival, a Melbourne Fringe Festival Living Legend, and was awarded the Sidney Myer Performing Arts Awards' Facilitator's Prize in 2020. In 2021 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Green Room Awards Association. Most recently, Richard received a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in June 2024. Follow him on Twitter: @richardthewatts