Next Wave Festival
Australian arts festival
Next Wave is a biennial festival based in Melbourne, which promotes and showcases the work of young and emerging artists. Next Wave encourages interdisciplinary practice and fosters the creation and presentation of works by emerging artists working across a broad range of art forms, including dance, theatre, visual arts, performance, new media, and literature.
Next Wave is also an artist development organisation and in non-festival years, it runs a development program called Kickstart Helix (formerly Kickstart) with the potential of their works being performed in the following year's festival program.
In August 2007, Next Wave presented Free Play: The Next Wave Independent Game Developers' Conference, at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image.
History
Next Wave was established in 1984, under the direction of Founding Director Andrew Bleby. The first Next Wave Festival took place in 1985, and established its focus on developing and presenting work by young Australian artists. From 1998 onwards, the festival has occurred biennially.
Next Wave is supported principally through Arts Victoria, the City of Melbourne, and the Australia Council for the Arts. In 2006, the then Minister for the Arts, Mary Delahunty, announced a funding increase to Victorian festivals (following a strategic funding review), with Next Wave receiving $350,000 in annual funding.
The COVID-19 pandemic forced the 2020 festival to go virtual.
The public source identifies “Next Wave Festival” as australian arts festival. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Next, Wave and Festival.
Why this record matters
A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Next Wave Festival”, the useful work is to connect “australian arts festival” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 5, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7021165. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2007, 1984, 1985 and 1998.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
- Search vocabulary
- Locating named sources
The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Next Wave Festival”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Next Wave Festival primary sources, Next Wave Festival archive and Next research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Next Wave Festival”?
- Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
- Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Next Wave Festival” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.