‘Dream Team’: Meet The Queer Artists Who’ve Taken The Helm Of Adelaide’s Iconic Feast Festival

Ahead of their 30th birthday celebrations in 2027, Feast Festival has marked a new chapter with the appointment of Skye Bee as Executive Director and Katherine Sortini as Creative Director taking dual-leadership of the beloved arts and culture event.

Although the festival has had similar leadership roles in the past, it’s the first time the organisation has appointed both an Executive Director and Creative Director in tandem, and the first time those roles have been occupied simultaneously by queer artists.

“The last time Feast had a dual kind of team at an executive level in this way, we had a queer artist in the artistic role and then not a queer person in the general manager role,” said Sortini. “So we’re really excited that both of us are artists. We both make our own work. We both know exactly what it’s like to be an independent producer or artist and putting on your own shows.”

“We definitely feel like we are the dream team, for sure,” said Bee.

Bee has built a reputation for producing bold, ambitious work that centres creativity, cultural integration, and community safety, and has a distinguished career spanning large-scale event delivery, inclusive arts practice, and organisational leadership.

Meanwhile, Sortini is stepping into her newly created role after years as Feast’s Creative Producer and Artist and Venue Liaison. An acclaimed and award winning artist and theatre-maker, she brings a practice grounded in emotional honesty, storytelling, and artistic integrity, and is known for creating deeply affecting, human- centred work that resonates with audiences long after the curtain falls.

The love the duo have for Feast is evident in our conversation as they discuss the philosophy behind their leadership and share anecdotes from previous festivals, but the importance of events run by community, for community, isn’t lost on them.

“Our community means the world to us, and you know, it’s exciting to welcome and celebrate all the new queer people that are joining us, but also to pay homage, pay our respects, pay our love to all of the queer people that have come before us and who have made [this] more accessible,” Sortini said.

Dirty thirties on the horizon

The pair are already planning the “big, beautiful, gay and fabulous celebration” that will mark their 30th year, with everything over the next 18 months all leading up to the landmark celebration of three decades of queer arts, culture, and community in South Australia.

“The artistic program is looking very robust, very bold, very gorgeous, very fabulous,” said Bee. “We’re really keen to make sure that community is really involved in the festival as well. This is an arts and cultural festival. This is both wonderfully creative and artistic, and also for our people and by our people. That’s really important that we’ve got that right at the front.”

But Feast still has one more year of its twenties left, with the yet-to-be announced programming at the end of the year focusing on the theme of joy as a radical act.

“I think there is literally nothing more powerful today than standing just steadfast in how wonderful it is just to live your life and that there’s so much, so much power in being joyful when people are trying to shrink you and not letting that affect you,” said Bee.

“That’s that’s how it resonated for me when the theme was first brought up and joy was put on the table, I was like, yes, because that is some radical rebellion, right there.”

Sortini agrees.

I feel, you know, that kind of dread every day where you’re just like, ‘Oh my God, why does it feel like the world is kind of falling apart’, and how do we move through that? I think one of them is we find our people in our community, and we fight together, we advocate together, but also we find joy and we find love.”

Feast Festival will run from 1 to 22 November, with further announcements regarding programming, partnerships, and strategic direction to be shared in the coming months.