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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.
