Jonathan Campbell

Background

About Jonathan Campbell

An arts leader dedicated to creatively bridging distances cultural and geographic via programming, outreach, and partnership, Jonathan Campbell is a lifelong advocate for connecting, supporting, and creating space with communities through live presentation, industry and community engagement, and professional development. Rooted in a decade immersed in Beijing's nascent arts scene and built up working at and with many of Toronto's most important arts organizations, Jonathan Campbell's career has taken him through all sides of stages of many shapes, sizes, and kinds, and work with a diverse variety of artists and communities. Over his decade in Beijing, he played in bands, wrote for local/international media, organised tours of China for overseas bands, brought Chinese bands to the West, worked for music festivals, and more. He co-founded-presented and -produced the Time Arts Jazz Series, which, from 2005 to 2012, presented a range of artists in Peking University’s theatre, as well as in venues around Beijing and across China. His book Red Rock: The Long, Strange March of Chinese Rock & Roll (Earnshaw Books), was released internationally in late 2011, and he contributed to the 2013 collection Unsavory Elements: Stories of Foreigners on the Loose in China (Earnshaw Books). His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, CBC Music, LA Review of Books, Foreign Policy, Globe and Mail, Maisonneuve, National Post, Exclaim, NOW, Paste, Toronto Star, South China Morning Post, Wire and more. Since moving back to Toronto he has worked at and with Aga Khan Museum, Massey Hall/Roy Thomson Hall, Harbourfront Centre, TIFF, Luminato Festival, and others. At Small World Music, an organization that presents and works with equity-deserving communities onstage and behind the scenes, he was part of the leadership team strategizing public programming, the Music Incubator artist-development program, international showcase/conference Global Toronto, outbound and international collaborative projects and more. He co-founded Good Kind Productions in 2015, with a vision of bringing people together under the banner of music, and was part of Cohort IV of the APAP Leadership Fellows Program (2018-20). Specialties: cross-cultural understanding and collaboration, outreach, arts/culture, publicity, communications, live music, film, promotions, booking, writing, editing, China, Chinese culture, rock, drums.