DIRECTORS & STAFF

Jim Digby, co-FOUNDER & immediate Past PRESIDENT

Jim Digby co-founded the Event Safety Alliance after the August 2011 Indiana State Fair stage collapse, and served as its president from the organization's founding until 2025.

Indiana was not the first tragedy of his career. A patron was killed on the opening night of his first professional assignment in 1983, when a special-effects fixture fell from the ceiling. He was on stage in 1992 when James Hetfield was seriously burned by a flame effect and 55,000 people rioted at Montreal's Olympic Stadium. He was one of the stage managers on the main stage at Woodstock '99, where rioting broke out among a crowd of nearly 200,000. He was working with Marilyn Manson in the aftermath of Columbine. And there were other tragedies.

Indiana brought all of these inflection points into stark reality for him personally and drove him to act. Others were similarly compelled, making it relatively easy to identify those who, in the wake of Indiana, could no longer sit on the sidelines. He and a small cohort of others brought together touring professionals, engineers, riggers and safety specialists who had reached the same conclusion. The conversations began at Tour Link in January 2012. What came out of them was the Event Safety Alliance.

Under his leadership the ESA published the Event Safety Guide in 2013 — the first of its kind written for live events in the United States, and now the basis for a growing body of ANSI standards developed with ESTA. He founded the Event Safety Summit and the Severe Weather Summit, and led the organization for fifteen years.

Jim is President of Show Makers and Tour Director for Linkin Park. Across four decades he has worked with artists including Genesis, Phil Collins, Blues Traveler, INXS, Hootie and the Blowfish, the Bolshoi Ballet and The Killers. He delivered Saudi Arabia's first international music festivals beginning in 2018, and served in 2020–21 as Executive Director of Operations for MDLBeast, producer of the Soundstorm Festival. He is a certified Project Management Professional, and serves on the board of the Behind the Scenes Foundation and the advisory council of the Peter Arkley Institute for Risk Management at USC Marshall, where he lectures each semester.

His commitment remains to the people who work in the shadows, and to adding one word to the oldest phrase in the business — the show must go on, safely.