Meet the WOW Foundation's Founder and Director Jude Kelly CBE

Jude Kelly is the founder of WOW - Women of the World Festival, which celebrates the achievements of women and girls and confront gender injustice across the globe. She started the festival “to ensure there was a high-profile cultural space where hundreds of women’s stories could be shared”.

As one of four daughters, she’d grown up not thinking about gender limitations but at university was told directing wasn’t something women did. One lecturer memorably told her there were only three female directors: “One’s a lesbian, one’s retired and one’s just killed herself — which would you like to be?”

Rallying on, Kelly went on to have a hugely successful career in theatre. She became South London’s now iconic Battersea Arts Centre’s first ever Artistic Director in 1981, before running the West Yorkshire Playhouse. Talking in a film from 2016, she explained the responsibility towards women she felt then, saying: ”I thought if I don't use this position of power to change or try to change at least to some degree, then I've really squandered the opportunities that were given to me as a girl and as a woman.”

Kelly’s theatre career has seen her direct more than 200 theatre and opera productions, and win multiple awards include two Olivier Awards and a Southbank Award. 

In 2018, Kelly left Southbank Centre to concentrate on WOW full time, founding The WOW Foundation. The charitable organisation now runs WOW Festivals and events across the globe from its HQ in London. Each festival offers people the chance to experience workshops, performances and hear people stories.

"Humans change through stories and it depends what stories you tell about whom and for whom, I’m interested in propelling forward the idea of a human story as a different set of rights and ideas.”

The Festival now takes place in 30 locations across six continents.