Jonathan Holloway

International Cultural Strategist, Festival Director & Creative Leader

By harnessing arts, creativity, and big thinking, Jonathan Holloway transforms seemingly impossible concepts into tangible outcomes, creates unforgettable experiences with lasting impact, and helps everyone involved unlock their full potential.

Quick Contact


Jonathan Holloway is an internationally recognised cultural strategist, festival director, and creative leader with over 30 years’ experience shaping transformative cultural experiences. He has led major international festivals, advised Fortune 500 companies, and collaborated with cities worldwide to reimagine their cultural identity, consistently delivering innovative projects that merge artistic vision with strategic impact.

Throughout his career, Jonathan has partnered closely with creatives, senior leaders, and delivery teams, turning ambitious ideas into tangible outcomes. By harnessing arts, creativity, and bold thinking, he creates experiences that inspire, engage, and leave lasting legacies. From large-scale public events to strategic cultural initiatives, his projects generate social, economic, and cultural value while empowering everyone involved to reach their full potential.

Jonathan’s work reflects a deep commitment to innovation, collaboration, and the power of creativity to transform communities, organisations, and audiences. His expertise spans cultural programming, festival curation, strategic consulting, and experiential design, making him a sought-after speaker and advisor on the global stage.

When mission-driven cities or organisations seek breakthrough thinking, transformational results, and extraordinary possibilities within their most complex challenges, they turn to Jonathan. His insights and experience elevate audiences to think bigger, achieve more, and embrace creative solutions. He brings warmth, clarity, and imagination to high-stakes environments, igniting conversations and events that resonate with both hearts and minds.

Jonathan combines “giant thinking” methodology with transformational leadership to help organisations solve seemingly impossible problems and craft experiences with lasting impact. He has hosted major events across cultural, academic, corporate, and not-for-profit sectors, including UNESCO’s Mondiacult, The Festival Academy in Africa, Yale University, and cultural dialogues in the Middle East.

His international work spans humanitarian, civic, and public sector settings—from leading organisations to designing transformational events; from inspiring people to achieve their personal best to unlocking the potential of each team’s unsung heroes.

Topics

Inspiration Is Everything

Inspiration transforms good ideas into great ideas, it lifts people and unities teams, unlocking happiness and success. Inspiration not only creates the first spark, but also propels the development of the vision, and fuels the strategy that drives every great success story.

It is inspiration you need to plant the seed, to keep it growing, help it reach for the sky, to nurture the roots and branches until you have created a new Amazon. It is inspiration that you must give to those around you to truly achieve your goals.

You can’t wait for inspiration … you have to hotwire your systems if you want to truly achieve success.

Whilst leading some of the largest festivals in the world, Jonathan Holloway identified that inspiration has a series of distinct stages, each one requiring a different set of tools and tricks.

In his keynotes and workshops Jonathan shares the secrets that guarantee increased inspiration for you and your teams, and how you can use them to transform all your interactions and collaborations.

The Alchemy of Experience

Alchemy transforms ordinary encounters into extraordinary memories, turns good events into legendary moments, and converts base-metal interactions into pure experiential gold. The Alchemy of Experience doesn’t just create memorable moments – it forges the kind of transformational encounters that people talk about for years, that unite communities across any divide, and that turn participants into passionate advocates.

Like the precise moment when heat transforms simple ingredients into something complex and irresistible, there is a specific chemistry required to turn your next meeting, launch, or gathering from “really quite good” into absolutely unforgettable. It is this alchemical formula that you need to ignite the spark, sustain the reaction, and create the conditions where ordinary people become extraordinary collaborators.

Organisations mastering experience alchemy become magnets for talent and loyalty, create movements that extend far beyond their walls.

Jonathan Holloway has identified how extraordinary experiences follow a precise alchemical formula. To transform simple ingredients into gold, experiences require specific elements combined in precisely the right way. In his keynotes and masterclasses, Jonathan reveals the experience alchemy secrets that guarantee transformation for your events, teams, and stakeholders – and how you can use them to turn every interaction into an opportunity for extraordinary impact.

MC / Facilitator

Jonathan Holloway can work with you on how to structure and design your conference or meeting or event, advising on the best platform, ideas, schedule and potential guests, in order to make the event totally unforgettable and utterly effective.

During the event, his energetic and enthusiastic style puts energy into the room and excites the participants in a way that ensures the messages last long after the event has finished.

Online, Jonathan plays Zoom like Jean-Michel Jarre plays keyboards: improvising between imaginative camera use and real-time polling, interactive chat and Q&As, great imagery and energising musical stings, in order to create the excitement normally reserved for a major conference stage.

At the end of the event, he will humorously and smartly wrap the whole thing up by re-landing the key points from the event, making a line through the whole thing, suggesting how to use what you’ve learned, and ultimately make the audience leave on an incredible high, with action points to carry them into the next months.

Post-event, Jonathan Holloway will do a five minute to-camera piece with a more prepared summing up, reflecting on the event and restating key points and learnings, that can be distributed to attenders and other interested parties.

Jonathan has been an absolute live wire in the arts community and has been really good for entertainment and culture in Perth. He has brought his own flair and his personality has been a big factor in his success. The Giants were the culmination of Jonathan's four years at the Festival. One of the untold stories of the Giants was when Jonathan came to a meeting in my office with me and some of the corporate sponsors and he just won us over with his enthusiasm for the Giants. He just got us all on board. He was so enthusiastic that no one could argue with him. Hon Colin Barnett MLA, Premier of Western Australia
I’ve worked with Jonathan for over three years. Jonathan is a great orator and teller of stories. He has that unique ability to create wonder in audiences. His blue-sky thinking is a huge talent that he then translates into reality and delivers these wondrous events for audiences to talk about for years to come. Jonathan has presented to our employees on many occasions and they always come out saying ‘that was amazing, really enjoyed the presentation and the humour’. Jonathan captures the audience from the start and brings them on the journey with him – through funny anecdotes and his indisputable knowledge of his subject matter. No one leaves the auditorium feeling bored! Rio Tinto
I have always found Jonathan to be an engaging and passionate speaker – a storyteller like no other. He understands how to connect with his audience and dazzles them with new ideas and innovative thoughts. We appointed Jonathan as the Artistic Director of the Perth International Arts Festival because we knew that his unique talent and internationally acclaimed reputation for public engagement would build the festival’s special quality – the results have been fantastic and we are so grateful for Jonathan’s work. University of Western Australia
Jonathan’s passion for the arts and his tenacity have helped him make an important and wide-ranging contribution to the Perth International Arts Festival. Under his inspired artistic leadership the Festival’s international excellence program and collaborations with the local arts have both expanded. Thousands of artists from around the world and from around the corner have brought art of the highest quality to Western Australian audiences. Perth International Arts Festival