Brett Bailey is a South African playwright, designer, director and installation artist, and the artistic director of the performance company THIRD WORLD BUNFIGHT. His iconoclastic theatre interrogates the dynamics and contradictions of the post-colonial world.
His work includes the musical dramas BIG DADA, IPI ZOMBI?, iMUMBO JUMBO, ORFEUS and SAMSON; a radical reworking of Verdi’s Macbeth; and the performance installations BLOOD DIAMONDS: TERMINAL, EXHIBIT A, EXHIBIT B and SANCTUARY. His productions have been presented across Europe, Africa and Australia, as well as in the USA, Latin America and Asia, and have received numerous awards, including a Gold Medal for Design at the Prague Quadrennial in 2007.
Bailey has played a significant role in the international theatre and arts landscape. He directed the opening production of the World Summit on Arts and Culture in Johannesburg and the opening productions of the Harare International Festival of the Arts from 2006 to 2011. He was curator of Cape Town’s Infecting the City festival from 2008 to 2011 and chaired the Curatorial Committee of South Africa’s National Arts Festival from 2016 to 2020. In 2014, he wrote the International Theatre Institute’s World Theatre Day message for UNESCO.
He has also served on international theatre and arts juries and led workshops on his methodology in Europe and the USA. In 2018, he curated a two-month component of the MA programme at DAS Theatre in Amsterdam. In 2019, he was made Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.
