Thomas Brooman

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Thomas Brooman CBE (born in Bristol on 1 April 1954) is a festival organiser and promoter of music, best known for his role as co-founder and artistic director of the WOMAD (World of Music Arts & Dance) festival organisation.

Born in Bristol in 1954, he attended Bristol Grammar School and spent time during his childhood in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He attended Oxford University, reading English Language and Literature at Exeter College under the tutorship of Jonathan Wordsworth, graduating in 1976. The second child in an academic family, his father Frederick S. Brooman was an author and economics lecturer at Bristol University, subsequently Professor of Economics at The Open University.

Returning to Bristol after graduation from Oxford, Thomas took a path in music, firstly as a drummer during the heyday of punk music in the late ‘seventies with several bands in Bristol, including The Media, The Spics and The Tesco Chainstore Massacre. In 1980, with a group of friends, he established a record magazine publication called The Bristol Recorder, and through this project made contact with the English artist Peter Gabriel with whom the concept of WOMAD was born.

In early 1981, with Peter Gabriel and a group of colleagues, including Martin Elbourne, chef Jonathan Arthur, Stephen Pritchard and Bob Hooton, Thomas devised and organised the first WOMAD Festival in 1982. Over the following twenty six years he then worked as Festival and Artistic Director of the WOMAD Festival, leading the establishment of WOMAD as an organisation and its affiliated charity, the WOMAD Foundation, in 1983. WOMAD Festivals helped to establish a wider audience for many international artists and contributed to the identification of world music as a description of music from a global context.

As Artistic Director of WOMAD, through until 2008, he programmed and collaborated in the production of more than one hundred and forty five WOMAD Festivals and events in twenty-four countries and islands; in Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe and North America.

In 1987 he co-founded Real World Records, a label conceived as a creative partnership between Peter Gabriel and the WOMAD organisation.

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