In the news...
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On the Couch with Sheena Boughen OAM, 14 October 2021
Q&A with Sheena Boughen on her appointment as Chair-Elect of the Australian String Quartet
Sheena Boughen radio interview on ‘Kaleidoscope’, Radio 6 and 9 October 2021
Emily Sutherland interviews Sheena Boughen on her appointment as Chair-Elect of the Australian String Quartet.
Sheena’s new appointment raises eyebrows, Canberra City News, 6 October 2021
Sheena Boughen maintains that national arts organisations do not have to be city-based to be successful. The Australian String Quartet is proof of this.
Sheena Boughen live radio interview, Radio ABC South East NSW, 1 October 2021
Emily Sutherland interviews Sheena Boughen on her appointment as Chair-Elect of the Australian String Quartet.
Passing the baton, ‘Green Room News’, InDaily, Adelaide, 29 September 2021
Announcement of Sheena Boughen as Chair-Elect of the Australia String Quartet.
Cello! String quartet announces new Chair, InDaily, Adelaide, 27 September 2021
Changing Chairs at ASQ, On the move: latest sector appointments, Arts Hub, 27 September 2021
Sheena announced as new string quartet chair, Canberra City News, 23 September 2021
The Australian String Quartet has announced NSW south coast arts identity and cultural advocate, Sheena Boughen, as the successor to chair Nicholas Callinan, who will retire from the role at the end of the year.
Australian String Quartet announce Chair-Elect Sheena Boughen, Broadway World, 23 September 2021
Sheena Boughen, who joined the ASQ Board earlier this year, has been appointed Chair-Elect effective immediately and Chair from January 2022.
Living Arts Canberra, 25 June 2018
Barbie Robinson interviews Sheena Boughen.
Four Winds celebrates gong for Sheena, City News, 14 June 2018
FOUR Winds in Bermagui is still savouring the news that its life ambassador, Sheena Boughen, has been awarded an Order of Australia Medal (OAM) for service to the performing arts through administrative and executive roles in the recent Queen’s Birthday Honours list.
The full list of recipients of 2018 Queen’s Birthday Honours, The Australian, 11 June 2018
Ms Sheena Margaret BOUGHEN Barragga Bay NSW. For service to the performing arts through administrative and executive roles.
'Don't be frightened by the size of your ambition': Sheena Boughen receives OAM, Bega District News, 11 June 2018
Sheena Boughen of Barragga Bay has been awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia, in part due to her decades-long commitment to the Four Winds Festival. “I’m over the moon to be recognised; I am delightfully surprised and I’m thrilled to bits!” she said over the phone on Friday while in France.
How strong partnerships made a regional festival a national event, ArtsHub, 31 January 2018
‘We don’t feel disadvantaged being in the regions. In fact, we see this as an opportunity,' says former Four Winds Chair Sheena Boughen.
Neilma Gartner interview 2017 Founder of Four Winds and David Batty
Creative Partnerships Australia Arts Leadership Award, 12 July 2017
The Creative Partnerships Awards celebrates the dedication, passion and leadership of inspiring Australians who are bringing arts, philanthropy and business together to create great art and culture. Our 2017 awards ceremony in Melbourne on the 26th of June was a celebration of five remarkable leaders who are championing the arts in Australia.
Sheena Boughen: Four Winds of Change, The Weekend Australian, 27 June 2017
Is it just the imagination, or does music sound better in nature? The Four Winds festival at Bermagui, on the NSW south coast, was started by Neilma Gantner and friends a quarter-century ago with the idea of giving locals and visitors chamber music concerts as an alternative to the other local pastime, fishing.
Former Four Winds CEO wins Arts Leadership Award, Limelight, 27 June 2017
Sheena Boughen, pro bono CEO for Four Winds Bermagui for a decade, honoured at the Creative Partnership Awards. Sheena Boughen has been awarded the Arts Leadership Award at the 2017 Creative Partnerships Awards. Boughen, who was the pro bono Chief Executive Officer of Four Winds Bermagui for a decade, joined four other awardees from Australia’s philanthropic, cultural and business landscape, in a ceremony in Melbourne last night.
Four Winds Bermagui: Chair Sheena Boughen to step down, Four Winds, 16 November 2016
The Board of Four Winds, Australia’s renowned fine music organisation, has today announced that Chair, Sheena Boughen, has advised she will be stepping down from the role at the AGM in December 2016. Ms Boughen has served as Chair for over a decade and was a founding member of the Board when Four Winds held its first Easter festival in 1991. Under Sheena’s leadership, Four Winds has developed from a biennial festival with makeshift facilities into one of Australia’s most recognised music organisations, attracting the best Australian and International artists. Sheena has overseen the creation of the exquisite Four Winds’ site, Nature’s Concert Hall, that provides outdoor and indoor facilities of international standing and was the driving force attracting significant private philanthropic support and grants from both State and Federal Governments.
First sounds in the Four Winds Festival's new recital hall, ABC South East NSW, 10 March 2014
The new Windsong Pavilion being completed on the Four Winds Festival site is a purpose built, acoustically designed recital hall. This significant indoor performance venue compliments the festival's outdoor Soundshell, the main stage of the biennial festival, set in a bush amphitheatre known as Nature's Concert Hall. Shellie Morris, who will feature at the 2014 festival next Easter, played the first sounds in the Pavilion.
What are arts festivals really all about?, ABC Radio National, Weekend Arts, 28 September 2013
We look at how arts festivals are driving international cultural tourism and then focus on two small fine music festivals that have grown up in rural Australia and contributed greatly to the local communities: the Bangalow Music Festival and Bermagui’s Four Winds Festival.
Stage is set for classical festival, The Weekend Australian, 2 April 2012
For almost 20 years, Sheena Boughen has had an enduring, if frustrating, love affair with an empty paddock on the far south coast of NSW. Ensconced in lush bushland near the tiny fishing village of Bermagui, the venue for the biennial Four Winds classical music festival, of which Boughen is chairwoman, had no power, water or even a permanent stage for performers.
Grassroots Festival grows into the big league, The Sydney Morning Herald, 9 December 2011
YOU couldn't have stage managed it better. Just as the audience was lulled into a meditative state by shakuhachi grandmaster Riley Lee's haunting flute playing, the ducks that had been circling high over head suddenly landed on the lake with a flutter of wing tips in water. "Beguiling'' is how the Melbourne Festival chairman and philanthropist Carrillo Gantner described the scene played out several years ago at the Four Winds Festival in the spotted gum bushland of the south coast's Bermagui.
In other places...
Four Winds Bermagui
Four Winds held its first concert on 7 April 1991, in the very same landscape that would later be expanded and developed to its renowned current day facilities called Nature’s Concert Hall. Over the next 25 years, this initial event, which originally drew an audience of 200 people, grew in scope and scale, attracting thousands of music lovers to its biennial Four Winds Easter Festival.
Clinton Murray Architects: The Windsong Pavilion
Neilma Gantner visited me over a decade ago shadowed by her dynamo sidekick Sheena Boughen. They were plotting. They were ‘checking me out’!Neilma and her family’s philanthropy had given the community of Bermagui the ‘Four Winds Festival’, a biannual classical music festival. The festival had grown from humble beginnings to the point that a new pavilion was considered essential to assist with performing and production. Sheena’s focus was to apply for government funding available for regional cultural projects. My focus (I was told) was to embrace their philanthropy and generously assist them! The irresistible ‘dynamic duo’ got their wishes. And so began a delightful journey of helping Neilma, Sheena and the Four Winds committee realise their dreams for a new pavilion. The Windsong Pavilion.