CEO MESSAGE

The Cape Town Festival started as a response to the Hollywood Bombing at the Waterfront in 1999 as the One City Many Cultures Project and was founded in 2000 by Ryland Fisher who at the time was the editor for the Cape Times Newspaper.

In 2003 I joined the CT Festival As CEO and until 2007 successfully created many brands including the CT Performing Arts Festival, the CT Youth Festival, CT Community Arts Festivals, Jou Ma Se Comedy Festival. Local is Lekker and the CT Visual Arts Festival. Each year we used 10 venues including Artscape, Baxter, Iziko Museums, District 6 Museum, Intimate Theatre and the Waterfront for the CT Short Film Festival. 

These events created income opportunities for more than 1800 artists, events organizers, vendors, crafters, volunteers and more. 

I left the CTF in 2008 to follow my own career as a singer and from 2012 to 2019 touring 20 countries as a universal world music singer, extending this deep passion to bring unity, understanding and cultural tolerance through the power of music. 

In 2020 Covid brought everything to a standstill including the Cape Town Festival as well as my own international career. In 2021 after witnessing the socio economic suffering of so many artists it was a natural step for me to continue this quest for universal hope and peace once again through the arts and the CT Arts Festival was born again. 

This time around we are working with a different consciousness, an awareness of the need to create sustainability to all our projects and the first project we developed was the Beyond Busking Project, a project to reimagine Busking in South Africa and develop buskers to go beyond busking to the big stage, locally and internationally. 

I look forward to the next few years as we recreate an iconic festival into a sustainable arts development organization that can transform and produce ambassadors for hope, peace and a value system based on our common humanity. 

In a World of Difference, Music Unites……