2025 Women Of Live: Emily Eavis

Emily Eavis
Organizer | Glastonbury Festival

BIZ ADVICE | “There isn’t much you can learn until you’re thrown into the deep end! So take the dive, don’t worry about making mistakes, go for the big goal.”

Emily Eavis grew up on Worthy Farm in Somerset, England, where her father founded the world-famous Glastonbury Festival in 1970. Since her teenage years, she’s played a vital role in every part of the organization. Today, she runs the event, including its pioneering sustainability initiatives.

Since the mid 1980s, Glastonbury’s Green Fields have been completely powered by solar and wind energy. The 2024 edition was the second to be powered without the use of fossil fuels, including all stages, production areas, and markets. Glastonbury boasts its own solar panels array, an onsite biogas plant, which converts cow poo into electricity, and utilizes temporary wind turbines. And there’s loads in the making, like expanding the use of grid renewables; ecosystem restorations; tree and hedge-planting projects, aimed at supporting the land’s biodiversity, and more. 

“If we can run our pop-up city, in this rural space, without having to rely on fossil fuels, then surely cities and larger businesses, with their more permanent infrastructure, can be powered this way too? The technology is there to be invested in and utilized. We just need to be open to change,” says Eavis.

And, since sustainability pertains to more than the environment, some of the most exciting new projects in Eavis’s view are “ED&I initiatives – like our Fully Funded Volunteer Scheme – which are aimed at providing opportunities to work or volunteer at the Festival for people who would not typically have access to it otherwise, due to social, cultural, financial and accessibility barriers.”

As the first point of contact for the agency world, she notices that “female agents are on fire, it’s been incredible to see the rise in the number of senior booking agents. We have gone from one or two major female live agents ten years ago to so many amazing women who are the best in their fields.” 

And while the increase in women in senior roles across the whole industry has improved, “we still have a way to go,” she says, adding, “I want to see a day that there are as many female senior execs as they are male.