Jiggs Thorne

Bio

Jiggs Thorne is a respected festival director with a strong pedigree in creating, developing, and promoting African arts and culture. Jiggs is the founder and creator of House On Fire, the founder and co-Director of the MTN Bushfire international festival of the arts, founder and co-Director of the Standard Bank Luju Food & Lifestyle Festival, a founding member of IGODA, the Southern African Music Festival Circuit, as well as the CollaboNation Pan-African music project. He has recently ventured into content production with the launch of Bushfire Records, a dynamic new label producing the CollaboNation tracks.

House On Fire, in the Kingdom of Eswatini, is a truly iconic venue and performance space that has been lauded as “one of the most eclectic venues in the world.” Home to live performances as well as being a community and cultural hub, House On Fire also plays host to the the annual MTN Bushfire festival, an internationally known and respected festival of the arts built on pillars of inclusivity, tolerance, sustainability and diversity, as well as the annual Standard Bank Luju Food & Lifestyle Festival.

MTN Bushfire, recognized by the BBC as a “Top African Festival” among its many accolades, is well into its second decade and attracts an audience of over 22,000 visitors annually from around the world. The festival is a reflection of Jiggs’ artistic and social development vision and features three days of performances and activations built around a call to social action entitled #BringYourFire.

Jiggs’ most recently developed project, CollaboNation, funded by the European Union supported Sound Connects Fund, an initiative by the Music In Africa Foundation (MIAF) and Goethe-Institut, is a Pan-African music collaboration project that aims to connect and unite the region through a series of unique music collaborations, supporting the weaving together of Africa’s rich and diverse musical genres and building linkages between cultural industries and networks.

Through his diverse creative work, and as a leading Festival Director, Jiggs has had a major impact on the artistic landscape of the Southern African region and beyond.  Jiggs continues to develop creative platforms of expression that provide meeting points of culture and that aid in collaborative processes that address the challenges facing us all, from local to global communities. 

 

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