Jorn Weisbrodt is the Artistic Director of ALL ARTS, a 24 hour not-for-profit TV channel and streaming platform created by New York’s PBS member station WNET and WLIW. He also manages the career of his husband singer songwriter Rufus Wainwright.
Between 2016 and 2018 he was the artistic advisor to The Music Center where he was brought in to expand the programming footprint of LA’s major performing arts campus where he organized two 8 hour sleep over concerts by Max Richter and a major 75th birthday celebration of Joni Mitchell that was broadcast and presented thousands of movie theaters worldwide.
Weisbrodt brings an international reputation for collaborating on landmark projects with some of the most prestigious arts organizations around the globe, including La Scala di Milano, the Spoleto Festival, the Barbican Centre in London, the Bolshoi Theatre, the Lincoln Centre Festival and the Manchester International Festival.
Between 2012 and 2016, Weisbrodt served as the artistic director of the Luminato Festival in Toronto, North America’s largest multi-disciplinary arts festival. He is credited with transforming the Hearn Generating Station, a decommissioned power plant three times the size of the Tate Modern on the shore of Lake Ontario, into the largest temporary multi-arts venue in the world for the 10th anniversary of the Luminato Festival in June 2016. The festival attracted nearly 100,000 visitors in 17 days. The Globe and Mail wrote, “Inside the generating station, the festival finds a way to make the populist contemplative and the avant-garde accessible.”
During his time at Luminato, Weisbrodt collaborated and developed new work with artists such as Marina Abramovic, Matthew Barney, Geoffrey Farmer, Laurie Sansom, Richard Florida, Ohad Naharin, Saint Genet, Tim Hecker, Kid Koala, Terence Koh and Anohnistation, among others. In 2013, Weisbrodt produced the 70th birthday tribute concerts for Joni Mitchell at Toronto’s Massey Hall. The legendary Los Angeles-based musician performed several of her own songs with a band for the first time in more than 10 years. He also worked with Samoan choreographer and artist Lemi Ponifasio on a new staging of R. Murray Schafer’s “Apocalypsis” station, an epic oratorio in two parts about the destruction of the universe and the possibility of a new vision. The piece, which was called “an artistic triumph” by the Toronto Star, was staged with 1,000 musicians and performers, most of whom were non-professionals, on the stage of Toronto’s Sony Center. In a profile piece, the Toronto Star called Weisbrodt “Luminato’s visionary-in-chief.”
Prior to joining the Luminato Festival, Weisbrodt was the executive director for RW Work Ltd., representing and managing the work of legendary visual artist, theatre and opera director Robert Wilson. As director of The Watermill Center, he was responsible for incubating exciting cross-disciplinary performances and installations, establishing partnerships with the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Kampnagel Hamburg, the Donaufestival in Krems, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, the Purnati Arts Center in Indonesia, and Columbia University, among others. He also oversaw the launch of an international artistic residency program for emerging artists.
Weisbrodt held numerous positions in Germany, including artistic production director at Staatsoper Unter den Linden, co-founder of Zwischenpalastnutzung, a temporary cultural program at the former GDR parliament “Palast der Republic,” and assistant director at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. In Berlin, he developed new work and worked with artists such as Pascal Dusapin, Herzog and de Meuron, Tony Oursler, Dan Graham, Jonathan Meese, Gregor Schneider, Olafur Eliasson, Elmgreen & Dragset, and Hans Werner Henze.
An active leader within the contemporary arts scene, Weisbrodt has served on the artistic advisory committees of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Trust, the French American Cultural Exchange, the Culture Shed among others. Weisbrodt studied opera directing at the Hanns Eisler music conservatory in Berlin and worked for McKinsey and Company.