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Paisley, Brian

Brian Paisley

Founder of the Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival in Alberta in 1982, a summer celebration inspired by the Edinburgh Fringe in Scotland, and the prototype for Fringes in Canada and the United States (See Fringe Movement).

Brian Paisley was born in 1946 in Belfast, Northern Ireland; died in Escondido Mexico July 4, 2026 of pneumonia at 79. He grew up in Vancouver and graduated from the University of British Columbia, then taught theatre and English for three years in Great Britain. After travelling through Europe and Africa, he moved to Fort St. John in 1977 to establish a theatre program at Northern Lights College. With his partner, Ti Hallas, he formed a travelling theatre company named Chinook Theatre. They then relocated to Edmonton to join a thriving theatre scene.

As Liz Nicholls wrote in her theatre site: Twelfth Night (5 July 2026):

”Armed with a modest left-over grant, Brian’s summertime inspiration of 45 summers ago, too simple and too crazy to resist, was to invite artists to a dusty warehouse district called Old Strathcona to do a show, their heart’s desire, whatever they wanted to do, no matter how uncommercial, off-centre, idiosyncratic or just plain nuts — and see who showed up. It was unpredictable; it was a low-risk gamble. That was the fun of it. And artists and audiences couldn’t get enough of it. Partly it was sustained by the way the casual, improvising spirit of the Fringe reflected the breezy, offhand charm of its founder. Brian was a master of inverse marketing: “We have shows for people of every taste, and shows for people with no taste at all,” as he was fond of saying. He was an indefatigable supporter of artists, a congenial comrade to audiences, with a high tolerance for chaos and almost none for bureaucracy. In the 10 years Brian ran the Fringe, before he left to take up writing and directing for film and TV, it grew so fast it constantly outpaced its infrastructure and resources and left its organizers scrambling madly to keep up.

I still remember Brian’s office in the dank basement of the old Princess Theatre, with an incomprehensible scheduling board covered with stickie notes. A constant stream of people would stumble downstairs in the dark and pitch him a succession of loony ideas, and he’d always say “well, make a show, try it out….” The guy was a born experimenter, and a generous enabler of other people’s experiments. And people loved him for it. His mantra: “our artistic mantra is to have no artistic mantra.” It sounds so simple and it’s so, well, profound.”

In April, 2010, Paisley was invested to the Order of Canada. He received an Honorary PhD from Athabasca University in 2010, and from the University of Alberta in 2012.

Reference: Liz Nicholls. 12thnight.ca 5 July 2026.

Last updated 2026-07-22