Executive Director, Co-Founder, Artistic Director Everybody NOW!
Executive Director, Co-Founder, Artistic Director Everybody NOW!
Kate Baggerson is a bold arts leader and cultural strategist known for creating large-scale, participatory projects that connect communities through storytelling and creativity. As Co-Founder and Executive/Artistic Director of the award-winning organisation Everybody NOW!, she’s led its national growth and delivered powerful community-driven arts experiences across Australia.
With a career spanning MONA FOMA, Woodford Folk Festival, Bleach* Festival, and HOTA, Home of the Arts, Kate blends creative vision with strategic leadership. Her work lives at the intersection of art and community, where audiences, artists, and everyday people collaborate as co-creators.
Kate brings people together, builds meaningful partnerships, and uses storytelling to transform spaces and spark connection. Her approach is inclusive, ambitious, and deeply people-focused.
How long have you been a Gold Coast local?
Since a kid. We moved to Palm Beach from Cronulla when I was 8, so while I still am genetically obliged to wear blue at State of Origin, I am a Gold Coaster through and through.
What do you love the most about the Gold Coast?
Firstly, I’ll go the predicable and say the natural assets. How can you go past our incredible beaches and hinterland. Last school holidays we decided to have a ‘staycay’, and every day was filled with some kind of incredible outdoor adventure. Bushwalks in Springbrook, a beach day at Talle, rock hopping at Mt Cougal National Park and bike rides along the oceanway. It is just so easy to be out with your family and surrounded by beauty.
Secondly, I’d say community. I’ve grown up on the Southern Gold Coast and I love being an active part of my community, knowing its history, people and story and having relationships that are embedded in place.
Also, in my work with Everybody NOW! we engage across the Gold Coast and it’s that hyper-local sense of community I love seeing right across the City. It’s something we need to treasure and nurture as the City continues to grow.
Tell us a little bit about yourself
I live in Currumbin with my little family. My kids are five and almost ten. I love cooking, camping, and being in nature. I have worked in the arts for 20 years and have been fortunate to work within some incredible organisations and cultural institution across Australia however I was very happy to move home 15 years or so ago and be a part of the cultural evolution of the City that we have seen over the last decade, and in that time become the founder of Everybody NOW!
We get the 1990’s vibe of C+C Music Factory’s Everybody dance now but what is Everybody NOW! the arts organisation?
We do dance a lot at Everybody NOW! and we do love the 90’s, but as you say, we are an arts organisation based on the Gold Coast. We create large-scale artistic projects with, for and by communities in collaboration with amazing artists.
The best way to get to know us is to take a look at our videos or socials because the work we make is really very diverse and covers lots of different art forms, whether that’s theatre, dance, music, visual arts and writing.
What is at the heart of all our creative projects is amplifying individual stories and celebrating place. We believe that through participating in the arts we can have more connected, healthy, vibrant communities.
What inspired you to start Everybody NOW!?
It started organically as three creative collaborators who just loved working together. My Co-founders and I created a show for Bleach* Festival in 2015 which we thought would be a one-off project, but then we discovered a pretty special artistic synergy between us, and a way of working that we thought could be of great service to communities as well as result in great art.
Following some early natural momentum, the inspiration for me then turned to creating a sustainable organisation that could make a strong cultural, artistic and social contribution to my community on the Gold Coast and for the communities we are invited to work with across Australia.
The inspiration continues to be; accessible, joyful, artistic and cultural experiences that tells local stories and ignites creativity and change.
Everybody NOW! has worked with over 78,000 people across Australia and you’ve scored yourself an Impact Award for your work Everybody NOW!. What’s been one of your proudest moments along the way?
Recently our organisation turned 10 and that was a pretty proud moment. Getting a not-for-profit organisation up off the ground and building a team of artists, collaborators, partners, funders, and communities that all share in our vision and purpose has been an amazing, fast-paced, roller coaster of a journey.
I’m really proud that we can hand-on-our-hearts say that our organisation has delivered on its mission to Move Communities through Transformational Arts Projects.
I love it when people tell us that they felt seen and heard for the first time when they were a part of one of our projects, or you see that spark of creatively switched on for someone that didn’t think it was for them, or simply the collective joy of creating something that didn’t exist before. I am really proud of the significant impacts our work has made to individuals and to communities over the last decade and we’re so excited about our next decade ahead.
What does collaboration mean to you and how do you keep it genuine when working with so many different communities and creatives?
Great question! You keep it genuine by truly respecting what everyone can bring to the table, by calling out any bias, and by being curious in people’s stories and experiences.
I work by the ‘better together’ and ‘sum of our parts’ philosophies.
So much of my work is being a mobiliser of great people and great ideas. While Everybody NOW! is a multi-arts organisation, we are theatre-makers first which is an inherently collaborative artform and informs everything we do from day-to-day operations to actually ‘making a show’. We only exist in collaboration, so for me collaboration means everything.
The CLOUD PLAY Wonder installation sounds like a showstopper. What can you tell us about your involvement in this project?
This is a great example of collaboration! Cloudplay is a massive temporary art installation to be a part of Wonder Festival coming up at HOTA. The Artwork consists of 10,000 messages from Gold Coasters written on specially created white ‘Sky Ribbons’.
Our role was to collect the messages through a City-wide community engagement program which is what we do best. Our artists took the sky ribbons into schools, the hospital, cultural groups, youth meet ups, we set up in the park, shopping centres and on the street and asked Gold Coasters why they were grateful to call the Gold Coast home.
We love these kinds of projects, and are often invited by local governments and cultural institutions to get out-and-about in communities, and engage people in the arts in ways that are super inclusive, accessible and fun.
What excites you most about the year ahead for Everybody NOW!? Any top-secret projects you can hint at?
It’s not top, TOP secret but it is pretty exciting and we haven’t really started sharing it with the world just yet but for you Inside GC, here’s the scoop!
This year we are so excited to embark on our first International collaboration with global design sensation Morag Myerscough from the UK.
Morag creates big, bright and bold temporary installations that optimistically speak to belonging and happiness. Her work has been experienced by millions of people worldwide from Coachella to the Paris Olympics, to Shanghai, Cape Town, India and right across the UK. We’ll be bringing her to the Gold Coast in November for an exclusive Artist Residency where she’ll run public workshops and talks. The outcomes from the workshops will lead to a new commission especially for the Gold Coast in the following years.
What are your Gold Coast Favourites:
Café: Custard Canteen
Restaurant: Our offices are at HOTA and as a team we love going to Fu Manchu Oriental Kitchen across the bridge at Chevron Island
Bar: Controversially, perhaps but anywhere that sells a Heaps Normal (or the likes). The Christmas before last I picked up a book at the local library on their ‘curated Christmas table’ which made me laugh, called Love your year of Sober: A Seasonal Guide to Alcohol-Free Living. It was written by women for women and after 40, drinking wine just did not agree with me so I gave it a crack for 12 months. It was so good, and while I do drink on occasion now, being able to go to a bar and not drink but enjoy the vibe and company has been a revolution.
Beach: Currumbin Creek
How do you choose to spend your days off?
Ummm …..food prepping for the week ahead – kids lunches, dinners, treats. Something in nature and a family movie or games night. “Let’s play actors” as my son says which means a night of charades is ahead. (That’s maybe when I need a wine!)