Projects that bridge the apex of cultural pursuit and commercial appeal.
Live Ideas is a bespoke production company and consulting service creating projects that bridge the apex of cultural pursuit and commercial appeal.
We are storytellers engaging your audience, through a diverse range of performance platforms, embracing big vision to create experiences of any scale, anywhere in the world.
From creative producing and concept design, event planning, investment raising, arts management consultancy, sponsorship and tour brokering, Live Ideas can grow your profile, increasing partner engagement and audience demand.
Some of Australia's leading cultural and civic partners have trusted Live Ideas with their audiences. Previous clients include:
Olivia Ansell is a curator, producer and director who has spent more than two decades turning cities into stages.
Olivia doesn't just program festivals, she changes how cities gather. Olivia Ansell is currently the Artistic Director of Luminato Festival – Canada’s largest international performing arts festival. In June 2027, she will present her third edition in Toronto, curating over 54 events to a free and ticketed audience of 1 million +. She previously led Sydney Festival, Australia’s flagship international arts festival, through a period of post pandemic recovery, before achieving record-breaking visitor growth and renewed precinct innovation across the city’s broad portfolio of public and private space. Olivia spent three years as Head of Contemporary Performance for Sydney Opera House Presents, driving commercial revenue through blockbuster events and world premiere exclusives. A graduate of Queensland University of Technology, the Australia Council’s Executive Leadership Program and Chief Executive Women Leadership Program Sydney, Olivia was voted one of Vivid Sydney’s Top 100 Creative Catalysts. She sits on the selection panel for ISPA NYC’s Pitch New Works program and was previously a selection panelist for Jazzahead in Bremen Germany.
Olivia has extensive connections across the local and global cultural sector, commercial and nonprofit, and enjoys cultivating these networks to broker premium event assets that drive significant state-wide GVA and international visitation.
She founded Live Ideas to make work that is both culturally ambitious and commercially successful. Highlights include HOME, the opening spectacular of the 2016 Perth International Arts Festival, featuring Tim Minchin, Tim Winton, John Butler Trio and The Waifs and seen by 50,000 people; Hidden Sydney: The Glittering Mile, a sell-out immersive cabaret about Kings Cross that returned for Vivid Sydney; and the Sydney Comedy Festival's Sydney Town Hall program. The company also brought broadcasters to the stage, including James Valentine's sell-out Afternoons Tonight!, Richard Fidler's Conversations and Yumi Stynes' Ladies, We Need To Talk.
Olivia was most recently the creative producer for the new commission and world premiere of Siegfried & Roy – The Unauthorised Opera, and conceived the concept for A Model Murder – a sell-out immersive play and true story staged in a NSW courthouse that featured in the 2025 Sydney Festival.
Olivia is a co-producer of CLO Creations (Australia), an entity in partnership with Layers of Reality (Spain) that represents World of Eric Carle’s Very Immersive Experience globally. She is also a co-producer with Sleight Entertainment, a production company in Las Vegas, Nevada that develops Broadway-bound theatre.