17 Facts About Wesley Enoch

Wesley James Enoch was born on 1969 and is an Australian playwright and artistic director.

Wesley Enoch is especially known for The 7 Stages of Grieving, co-written with Deborah Mailman.

Wesley Enoch was artistic director of the Queensland Theatre Company from mid-2010 until October 2015, and completed a five-year stint as director of the Sydney Festival in February 2021.

Wesley Enoch has four siblings and is the younger brother of Queensland government minister Leeanne Enoch.

Wesley Enoch's heritage is Nunukul and Ngugi, but has a mixture of Irish, English and Scottish blood, and Danish and Spanish blood on his mother's side, and Filipino, Pacific Islander and Kandju heritage on his father's.

From 1993 to 1997, Wesley Enoch was founding artistic director at Kooemba Jdarra Indigenous Performing Arts, where he directed a number of his own works.

In 1998 Wesley Enoch became associate artist at the Queensland Theatre Company, then served a term from 2000 to 2001 as resident director at Sydney Theatre Company.

Wesley Enoch had previously directed several plays at the Company, and been an associate artist.

Wesley Enoch started in the new role firstly on a part-time basis from July 2010, and then full-time in January 2011.

Wesley Enoch worked with Tom Wright to develop his play Black Diggers, about Indigenous soldiers in World War I, which under Wesley Enoch's direction premiered at the Sydney Opera House in 2014 to great acclaim and was later performed in other states.

Wesley Enoch left Queensland Theatre to become director of the Sydney Festival in October 2015, and served as director from February 2017 for a five-year term, with his last festival in 2021.

In March 2021 Wesley Enoch was appointed to the inaugural Indigenous Chair in the Creative Industries at QUT.

Wesley Enoch is best-known for The 7 Stages of Grieving, a one-actor play co-written with Deborah Mailman in 1995 and first performed at the Metro Arts Theatre in Brisbane by Kooemba Jdarra Indigenous Performing Arts, with Mailman in the solo role and Wesley Enoch directing, on 1 September 1995.

The concept of the seven phases of Aboriginal history were identified and named as such by Michael Williams, director of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander studies at the University of Queensland when Wesley Enoch was teaching and Mailman was studying there during the 1990s.

The play was during the early years of a formal reconciliation process in Australia, and not long after Wesley Enoch's grandmother had died on Minjerribah and Wesley Enoch had participated in some of the ancient Aboriginal rites associated with death and burial.

In 2002, Wesley Enoch was the recipient of an Australia Council for the Arts residency at the Cite internationale des arts in Paris.

Wesley Enoch was awarded the Member of the Order of Australia in the Australia Day Honours in 2020, "For significant service to the performing arts as an Indigenous director and playwright".