FRINGE WORLD CEO Wins WA of the Year Award

FRINGE WORLD Festival founder and CEO Marcus Canning has won the prestigious Arts and Culture Award at the 2017 Western Australian of the Year Awards ceremony, held on Friday 2 June 2017.

The Award recognises Mr. Canning’s leading role with the Festival in addition to his work behind other successful arts and entertainment initiatives over the last 25 years.

Mr. Canning said that the Award recognised the huge impact that FRINGE WORLD Festival has had in Western Australia across cultural, social and economic spheres.

“It’s a huge honour to receive this award and I hope that I can use the opportunity to help shine a light on the incredible work of the entire WA arts sector. It’s a sector that contributes much to our society and makes life better for so many Western Australians.” Mr. Canning said.

Mr. Canning was appointed as the Director and CEO of Artrage, the Not-For-Profit organisation that produces FRINGE WORLD Festival and has been at the forefront of evolving arts and culture in WA since 1983. In this role he developed and launched the inaugural FRINGE WORLD Festival in 2011 in addition to Rooftop Movies and The Bakery live music venue.

Other key achievements of Mr. Canning include:

• Being a key force behind the Jack Sue Artists Collective. Marcus initiated one of Perth’s earliest and most successful Artist Run Initiatives in the old Jack Sue Diving Academy – a disused warehouse in Murray Street that became a hotbed of creativity and artistic energy through the 1990s.
• Winner of the City of Perth Award at the 40 Under 40 awards in 2007 for his work at Artrage.
• Contributing to a range of state and federal arts funding boards including the New Media Arts Board of the Australia Council and serving as Chair of the federal Festivals Australia Committee.
• Developing a successful concept and pitch to redevelop the long empty heritage Rechabite Hall on William Street into a new multi-arts and entertainment complex in 2016. This involved establishing a new company with Adrian Fini to drive the project. The design was approved near the end of 2016 and works are commencing in 2017 for an early 2018 opening.
• In his own right as an artist Marcus has created two of Perth’s most popular and critically recognised monumental public sculptures – Fremantle’s ‘Rainbow’ sea container sculpture entry statement and Ascalon at St. George’s Cathedral in collaboration with Christian De Vietri.

FRINGE WORLD is the largest annual event in Western Australia and the third largest Fringe in the world. The recent 2017 Festival featured more than 700 events, 3,450 artists at 147 venues around the Perth metropolitan area. The free and ticketed attendance at the 2017 Festival was more than 750,000 and more than $10 million was spent at the box office.

The 2018 FRINGE WORLD Festival will be held from 27 January to 25 February. Registrations for the open-access Festival open in July.

ENDS

For all FRINGE WORLD Festival media enquiries, please contact:

Jo Hos,
FRINGE WORLD Marketing Director
(08) 9227 6288 ext. 111 | Mobile: 0430 552 962
jo@artrage.com.au

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