I should start seriously by explaining how perfect Ebony Bott is for the role of artistic director of Brisbane Festival. But the first thing that comes to my mind is a poignant story she told me about her goldfish.
It’s the sort of thing you usually get after you have turned off your recording device, but this one happened just before I did that and I’m glad, because it makes me smile.
We’re sitting in Bott’s office in Fortitude Valley – and the subject of pets comes up.
She had a goldfish called Flo. Or Maybe Flow? I’ll get back to you on the exact spelling at a later date.
“Because I’m Ebb, she was Flo(w),” Bott explains. “She was just a goldfish, but I had her for many years, and she would eat little flakes of fish food out of my hand. It’s the only pet I’ve ever had but she didn’t survive COVID.”
I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry at this stage. Then she tells me how when she left Melbourne to move to Sydney to take up a big job at Sydney Opera House, she drove with the goldfish in the car with her. It sounds like a scene from a movie, doesn’t it?
Maybe something like that happened in A Fish called Wanda? I can’t quite remember. It would have suited Steve Martin in his classic film The Lonely Guy, which is funny because Martin and his comedic partner, Martin Short, are on Bott’s wish list as guests for a future Brisbane Festival.
She’d love to get in touch with Steve Martin, she says, and I inform her that a certain local major art gallery director knows him and might put the two in touch. She brightens at that idea.
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she has earned a reputation for programming that is both emotionally intelligent and commercially astute
It’s hard to get to know someone in a half-hour interview. What you tend to end up with is a vignette, a very entertaining vignette we hope.
Bott is charming and while that helps, it’s not enough. At 49 she has an incredible resume and, frankly, you couldn’t imagine anyone more suited to taking over the job vacated by the much-loved Louise Bezzina, who is now ensconced not far from here running Brisbane Powerhouse.
A nationally respected creative leader, Bott brings to the role a rare combination of artistic audacity and strategic precision. With a career spanning two decades across the country’s major cultural institutions – including Sydney Opera House, Adelaide Festival Centre and Arts Centre Melbourne – she has earned a reputation for programming that is both emotionally intelligent and commercially astute. Her work consistently bridges the civic and the spectacular, the local and the globally significant.
In her most recent role as head of contemporary performance at Sydney Opera House, Bott led a portfolio defined by bold reimagining, genre-fluid storytelling and wide public appeal.
Her programming spans theatre, cabaret, circus, comedy and large-scale spectacle, with highlights including Amadeus, starring Michael Sheen and costumed by cult fashion label Romance Was Born; the hip hop dance phenomenon Message in a Bottle, set to the music of Sting; and the Netflix-filmed world premiere of Hannah Gadsby’s Body of Work.
Under her leadership, Sydney Opera House’s contemporary program has drawn more than 120,000 paid attendees annually. Before that, she reinvigorated the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, pairing household names with boundary-pushing new voices to expand the definition of cabaret in the national imagination.
Curatorially, she has described her philosophy as deeply attuned to people and place: “Festivals aren’t just programs, they’re civic rituals,” she says. “They reflect us back to ourselves and open us up to the world. That is what drew me to Brisbane Festival. It has a pulse that’s distinctly local and a platform that resonates far beyond. For me, the most powerful festivals grow from the identity of their city, not simply land upon it. They listen, connect and leave a lasting imprint.”
Bott is, she says, loving living nearby in New Farm. She walks to work. In fact, she walks everywhere – “I don’t have a car,” she says. Occasionally, she rides an e-scooter.
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“I’m very responsible,” she says. “I always wear a helmet, but I admit that I do feel like I am six when I am on one.” She only rides them around her neighbourhood, she assures me.
Bott is an early riser who loves living by the river. When she gets up at 5am she is delighted to find so many people up at the same time. This has inspired her to program very early shows as well as late shows for Brisbane Festival 2026.
The program hasn’t been launched yet but I’m hoping to get a scoop, something that has not been announced yet. But Bott is disciplined in a way that is frustrating to a journalist trying to prise information out of her. Damn.
So we talk in general about what we already know is coming, which includes playwright du jour Suzie Miller’s play, Strong is the New Pretty, a premiere that will be huge and a legacy left by Louise Bezzina.
Then, among other things, there’s Muppets. Celebrating 70 years of creativity and innovation, the exclusive-to-Brisbane exhibition, Make, Believe, Magic: The Worlds of The Jim Henson Company, is coming to Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art in September as part of Brisbane Festival.
I am wondering if this might be a bit lowbrow for her, but she smiles and says … “I love the Muppets.” Who doesn’t, I guess.
She does have a feel for family entertainment, has run a children’s festival and wants to copy the European idea of not talking down to kids by programming things that can appeal to them as well as their parents. The Henson show fits that philosophy perfectly.
She loves storytelling and wants to make that a central plank in her festival.
‘The holy trinity is … programming, marketing and production and how those three work together’
Bott grew up in Western Australia, one of 10 children, and studied media and comms at uni. She has a working knowledge of marketing and a love for it, which is interesting. Some AD’s might leave that to others. So, she understands the details of the job as well as the necessity of having a broad vision. And while she programs on the one hand with a broad brush, she also likes to hone in on the details.
“I love talking to our marketing director,” she says, “The holy trinity is … programming, marketing and production and how those three work together.”
She has quizzed her staff on their favourite Brisbane Festival shows and informs me that two of my favourites -… Invisible Cities (delivered by David Berthold) and Salamander (one of Lousie Bezzina’s flourishes) – came up quite a lot.
She did toy with performance when she was young but doesn’t like to talk too much about that.
“It’s too embarrassing,” she says. “I can tell you that I never really had any talent. When I was doing some performing there was anxiety and then there was relief that there was this other path.”
It’s a bit of a The Road Not Taken tale where Bott, like the person in the Robert Frost poem, comes to a fork in the road and she “took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference”.
It really has. And here she is.
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