Brighton Festival has announced that its Guest Director for 2025 will be the Grammy-nominated musician, composer and activist Anoushka Shankar.
Brighton Festival was established in 1967 and is the largest annual curated multi-arts festival in England. Next year’s festival will take place from 3rd-25th May and is a celebration of music, theatre, dance, art, film, literature, debate, outdoor and community events in venues and locations across Brighton, Hove and Sussex.
Anoushka Shankar’s many accomplishments include a series of notable firsts: with nine Grammy nominations under her belt, she was the first Indian musician to perform live and present at the awards and the first Indian woman to be nominated. She was also the youngest and first female recipient of a British House of Commons Shield, recognising her as a pre-eminent musician of the Asian arts, and one of the first female composers to become part of the UK’s A-level music syllabus.
With more than 25 years of performing behind her, she is a singular, genre-defying artist spanning the worlds of classical and contemporary and acoustic and electronic music.
Shankar began studying the sitar and Indian classical music at the age of nine under the intensive tutelage of her father, legendary sitar master Pandit Ravi Shankar. Making her professional debut at 13, she began touring worldwide, embarking on a successful solo touring career at 18 and becoming known for her virtuosic yet emotional playing style, unusual instrumentation and precise rhythmic interplay.
Her touring career has taken her from legendary jazz cafes to iconic symphony halls to large-scale festival stages. A frequent collaborator, she has worked with a diverse range of artists such as Herbie Hancock, Patti Smith, Joshua Bell, Sting, Gold Panda, Rodrigo y Gabriela, Jules Buckley, her half-sister Norah Jones and His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
Shankar has also composed for cinema, scoring the British Film Institute’s restoration of Shiraz, one of the first major Indian silent feature films, and co-composing the soundtrack to Mira Nair’s A Suitable Boy.
Known for her activism, Shankar has been outspoken about her experiences as a woman and a survivor of child abuse, supporting campaigns such as One Billion Rising, which aims to end violence against women and girls. She frequently works with organisations such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Help Refugees and The Walk, to raise funds and awareness for the refugee crisis. In 2020, she was announced as the inaugural President of the F-List – a UK database created to help bridge the gender-gap in music.
Anoushka Shankar will be Brighton Festival’s 16th Guest Director, following in the footsteps of Anish Kapoor, Brian Eno, Laurie Anderson, Kae Tempest, Lemn Sissay OBE and, in 2024, author and screenwriter Frank Cottrell-Boyce. Brighton Festival 2024 enjoyed its highest ticket sales in five years, with more than 50k tickets sold, plus more free and pay-what-you decide events than ever before.
Shankar will work with the Brighton Festival programming team to develop a diverse and inclusive programme of events, which will be revealed at the official launch in February.
Brighton Festival 2025 will take place from Saturday 3rd – Sunday 25 May
Photo by Laura Lewis
