La Boite CEO and Artistic Director Courtney Stewart has been named a QUT Outstanding Young Alumnus for 2025, recognising her arts leadership and her commitment to amplifying underrepresented voices on the national stage.
The honour was announced last night at the annual QUT Outstanding Alumni Awards at the university’s Gardens Point campus in Brisbane.
QUT Vice-Chancellor Professor Margaret Sheil said Ms Stewart’s Outstanding Young Alumnus award honoured her bold pursuit of equity and excellence in the arts.
“A visionary force in Australian theatre, Courtney’s leadership breaks barriers and challenges norms and her diverse storytelling is reshaping the cultural landscape,” Professor Sheil said.
Ms Stewart started her professional career as an actor before honing her talents as an artistic leader, director and change-maker for some of the country’s most prolific organisations, including seven years with the Sydney Theatre Company.
She was appointed Artistic Director and CEO of Queensland’s iconic La Boite Theatre in 2022, becoming the first person of colour to lead La Boite in its 100-year history.
The move brought her back ‘home’ to Kelvin Grove.
The company is located in the QUT Creative Industries Precinct at Kelvin Grove, which is the same campus where Ms Stewart completed her Bachelor of Creative Industries (Drama) in 2008.
“Being recognised as an Outstanding QUT Alumnus is such an amazing honour,” she said.
“I really discovered who I was during my time at QUT, and I found a lot of my amazing collaborators that I still work with, or I still pressure-test ideas with.
“Being recognised by QUT in this way is so humbling, and I’m really grateful to be amongst such amazing thinkers who’ve gone on to do incredible things in their fields.”
Ms Stewart said her drama course had helped her ask ‘those bigger, deeper questions’ about her practice and what she wanted to explore during her career.
“I auditioned for a number of other performing arts courses, but I landed on QUT because the drama course at the time combined everything that I was interested in,” she said.
“I was able to look at performance craft, but then there were whole units that were dedicated to philosophy and the bigger reasoning as to why we have this need within us to share our stories and connect with one another.
“I could also add dance into the mix, because that was, and still remains, a really important part of my practice.
“So I studied dance as a minor and was able to broaden my network of creative collaborators, because I was working with a whole cohort of students who were outside of the drama cohort. That was really exciting for me.
“There were also units on producing and writing and event management, and all of those things I draw on so heavily in my day-to-day practice of being an artistic director and cultural leader.”
Ms Stewart is an ambassador for Stella, the major voice for gender equity and cultural change in Australian literature.
A champion of multicultural dramaturgies, she has been an equity diversity committee chair for the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, and a board member with the Contemporary Asian Australian Performance.
She said, in her experience, forging cultural change was something that often happened through actions and necessity.
“I think that I don't consciously go about thinking ‘I'm going to go break down that barrier’,” she said.
“But I can’t be anyone but myself.
“I’m a mum and I have two young children, and at the time when I was really starting to make some inroads as a director, I had just had my first baby. So I had to figure out how to do be a new parent, but also do something where there was no real pathway.
“I think all of the different elements of my identity that intersect within me an become things that I want to push for, the biggest one is to be able to make it possible for other parents who come from historically marginalised backgrounds to be able to dream big.”
Ms Stewart’s advice to current students is to embrace the journey.
“The time that you have inside your course with your cohort can feel like a pressure cooker, and it can feel like time is ticking and that you have to have everything figured out by the time you graduate,” she said.
“When I recalibrated my thinking from feeling like I needed to be a sprinter to being a marathon runner, that changed a lot for me.
“Everything you do counts – the part-time jobs, the people you meet, the experiences you gather.
“Don’t be afraid to follow where that takes you, even if it feels like a pivot. There’s a reason you’re being drawn in a particular direction.”
Learn more about the 2025 QUT Outstanding Alumni Awards winners here.
Information on studying creative arts at QUT can be found here.
QUT Media contacts:
- media@qut.edu.au
- After hours, 0407 585 901 or media@qut.edu.au
