“Georgia Hendy has a talent for getting herself into rooms where things are happening.” Arts editor HELEN MUSA meets the new boss of the Canberra Theatre Centre.

A formidable, multiskilled performing arts manager, Georgia Hendy is the first woman to lead the Canberra Theatre Centre venue in its 60-year history.

When I catch up with the centre’s new executive director, she arrives with the kind of convivial focus and energy that suggests this role was never accidental. 

We discover a point of connection straight away, her bachelor of arts in arts and media from Charles Sturt University in Bathurst overlaps with my own early teaching days there, albeit before her time. 

Raised in Sydney and educated at Wenona, she once wavered between law and the performing arts before choosing the latter.

At university she studied under the late Bill Blaikie and threw herself into student productions, including Fractured Fairytales, where she relished playing the witch, Baba Yaga.

“I made the most of it and had the best time,” she says. “It was a time of great friendships.”

She also studied the well-honed Bathurst art of beer-drinking, and can hold her own.

Hendy has a talent for getting herself into rooms where things are happening.

After graduating, she inveigled her way into work experience on Buddy and The Lion King in London, then returned to Sydney and talked her way, via an old friend who was stage manager there, into a foothold at the Ensemble Theatre during Sandra Bates’ tenure.

There, she worked everywhere she could, box office, subscriptions, marketing, learning the mechanics of theatre from the inside while also touring nationally with Brainstorm Productions.

Restless, she wrote to 10 organisations she admired. Only two replied, the Sydney Opera House and The Australian Ballet. The advice she received from the Opera House was blunt: “Get in any way you can, then move around.”

“I took that advice,” she says. “I saw a job in marketing, went for it and got it.”

Her years at the Opera House became a kind of apprenticeship. She worked across production, particularly in dance, then moved into children’s and family programming, gaining a broad understanding of audiences while completing a master of management at the University of Technology Sydney. It was there, too, that she met her husband, Josh.

In 2015, the couple moved to Brisbane when Hendy took a role at Queensland Performing Arts Centre, where she spent more than eight years as director of programming, major projects executive producer: commercial programming and venue hire, also working on the centre’s new venue development. 

Along the way, she added a graduate certificate in accounting from Southern Cross University, “to prove I had the knowledge,” she says, and undertook leadership training through the Venue Management Association, earning scholarships and completing a US leadership program.

From there came her first chief executive role, leading the Darwin Entertainment Centre and the Darwin Amphitheatre. She expected to stay longer.

“I was very happy there,” she says. “But when the Canberra job came up, I couldn’t resist.”

What drew her south was not just the role, but the city itself. Canberra’s cultural infrastructure, its proximity to national institutions, its galleries and museums, all made an immediate impression.

She describes a weekend walk with autumn leaves turning red, then makes a surprisingly practical observation about fireworks, that a great city is one where you can actually get to them.

“In Sydney they’re magnificent but hard to access. Here, it’s easy,” she says.

There are personal reasons, too. With two young children, she and her husband see Canberra as a place to put down roots. And that word, roots, comes up more than once.

“My time at QPAC showed me how important it is for a venue to become part of a city’s ecology,” she says. “That’s super important. I’m here for the long haul.”

It is early days, but Hendy is already thinking expansively. She talks about relevance and ambition in the same breath, about making the theatre centre a place where the city feels welcome. A key focus is young audiences, building relationships with schools, educators and families, and giving young people real, hands-on experiences of theatre-making.

“We want to celebrate Canberra’s arts ecology,” she says, “to create opportunities for local artists, and at the same time to create major moments of impact by bringing the best productions here. Canberra deserves that.”

The planned new Lyric Theatre looms large in her thinking. Its technical capacity, she says, will be “phenomenal, absolutely stunning,” opening the door to major national and international productions. But she is equally focused on the audience, imagining a wide regional catchment that draws people into the city, while ensuring locals feel a strong sense of ownership.

“People might come for the national institutions, stay the night and see an amazing show,” she says.

After six decades, the Canberra Theatre Centre has history on its side. Hendy sees that as a foundation, not a limit. She is already thinking about what the opening of the new theatre will look like.

Whatever form it takes, one thing is clear.

“We want Canberrans to know,” she says, “it’s theirs.”