Robert Sirman

Robert Sirman has been Director of the Canada Council for the Arts since June 26, 2006.

After graduating from the University of Toronto with a Bachelor of Arts and a Master’s of Arts in sociology, Mr. Sirman joined the Ontario Government as a speechwriter and policy advisor, helping to establish Ontario’s first ministry of culture in 1975 and designing a wide range of lottery-funded grants programs. In 1980, he moved to the Ontario Arts Council, where he served for 10 years as Director of Operations and Director of Research and Policy Planning. While at the Ontario Arts Council, he undertook an independent study tour of England and Wales under the auspices of the British Council to study the funding practices of the Arts Council of Great Britain. He also spent five months in France, including three months as an intern in the research department of the French Ministry of Culture and Communications in Paris, where he studied the relationship between funding and cultural practices in both France and the other nations of the European Union.

In 1991, Mr. Sirman was appointed Administrative Director of the National Ballet School. During his 15 years in that position, he stabilized the School’s finances and oversaw a $100-million capital expansion program to triple the School’s physical plant and re-animate the North Jarvis community in which the School had operated since 1959.

Mr. Sirman was a founding member and vice-chair of the Cultural Human Resources Council, chaired the advisory council of the University of Toronto’s Co-Op Arts Management Program at Scarborough, is past president of Peggy Baker Dance Projects, past chair of the Toronto People With AIDS Foundation, and board member of the George Cedric Metcalf Charitable Foundation. In 2002, Sirman was librettist for James Kudelka’s full-length ballet, The Contract, and in December 2004 was featured by the Toronto Star as one of the city’s top 10 “leading lights” in arts and culture. In November 2005, Mr. Sirman was honoured by having a Toronto street – Sirman Lane – named after him, and in June 2006 was presented with an Urban Leadership Award by the Canadian Urban Institute.