Frie Leysen

She founded the art centre deSingel in Antwerp, and was a director of the organisation from 1980 to 1991. Together with Guido Minne she founded the Kunstenfestivaldesarts in Brussels in 1993[1]. The first edition of the festival took place in May 1994. Under her direction the festival became an internationally acclaimed major event for Belgian and international performing artists. In 2006 Christophe Slagmuylder took over the direction and Frie Leysen started curating several international projects. In 2007 she organized Meeting Points, a multidisciplinary festival taking place in nine different Arabic cities (Amman, Damascus, Beirut, Ramallah, Cairo, Alexandria, El Minia, Tunis and Rabat), as well as in Brussels and Berlin. She curated the Theater der Welt in 2010, was an artistic director at Berliner Festspiele in 2010-12, and was the theatre director of the Wiener Festwochen in 2013–14.

In 1991 she received the Award ‘Arkprijs van het Vrije Woord’ (Ark Prize of Free Speech). She was awarded the Flemish Community Award for general cultural contributions in 2003, an honorary doctorate from the Free University of Brussels, and the Erasmus Prize in 2014.[2] In 2018 she received the “Bernadette Abraté Award”, given by the French speaking theatre critics in Brussels, Belgium. The Award was given to her and Christophe Slagmuylder for their work at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts[3]. On 28 August 2019 Frie Leysen received the EFFE lifetime achievement award. The EFFE, the European Festivals Association, acknowledged her commitment to artists and her actions for artists’ creative freedom[4].