[citation needed] Sheehy was educated at St. Joseph's Christian Brothers College, Gregory Terrace, Brisbane and then at University of Queensland where he studied arts/law.

[13] In 1991 Sheehy was involved in challenging the automatic attribution of world-wide English-speaking rights in American plays to US producers, which could prevent their presentation in Australia for several years following their Broadway premieres.

[17][18] Sheehy's final Sydney Festival event at the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall, the Came So Far For Beauty Leonard Cohen tribute concert starring Jarvis Cocker, Beth Orton, Nick Cave, Rufus Wainwright, and Antony Hegarty, among others, was filmed and recorded for the international documentary and album Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man.

[21] News Limited press headlined "Festival baHeck as best in nation",[22] and the Fairfax Media echoed these sentiments.

[citation needed] In 2011 the premiere production of Notes from the Hard Road and Beyond by the Indigenous music ensemble Black Arm Band, directed by Steven Richardson, was commissioned and performed.

International and national music artists performed in genres as diverse as post-rock, noise rock, psychedelic jazz-hop, R&B funk-rap, synthpop, electroclash and extreme metal, with geographic surveys from Palestinian hip-hop to Chinese indie rock, hardcore and punk to Sri Lankan heavy metal.

[29] For the opening weekend of Sheehy's final Melbourne Festival program he returned to an artist from the Sydney Festival's Came So Far For Beauty concerts, Antony Hegarty, and presented the Museum of Modern Art commission Swanlights[30] – a musical artwork created by Hegarty, Chris Levine and Carl Robertshaw with 44-piece orchestra, based on the Antony and the Johnsons album of the same name.

In February 2011 Sheehy was appointed artistic director and CEO of Melbourne Theatre Company, to succeed Simon Phillips.

[35] At Melbourne Theatre Company, Sheehy's inaugural season in 2013 included MTC's first presentation of an international West End production (with Arts Centre Melbourne), the Royal National Theatre's One Man, Two Guvnors; Australia's first festival of independent theatre NEON;[36] the first stage-play by singer, songwriter, author and actor Eddie Perfect; the MTC debut of director Simon Stone; film and stage actor David Wenham in The Crucible; the family production The Book of Everything; the Company's inaugural Women Directors Program; and the inaugural MTC CONNECT Diverse Artists Program with Multicultural Arts Victoria.

2014 also saw MTC's first mainstage multi-artform production, with dance ensemble Chunky Move, of Falk Richter and Anouk van Dijk's Complexity of Belonging[39] which opened the 2014 Melbourne Festival and opens the Spring Festival in Utrecht, Netherlands, in early 2015, followed by seasons at Schaubühne Berlin and Théâtre national de Chaillot in Paris.

[43] Sheehy's other awards have included:[citation needed] In 2005 Sheehy was named by the Australian Financial Review Magazine as one of the 20 Australians to be watched for their impact on society up to the year 2020,[44] and in 2007 he was named by ABC's Limelight magazine as one of the five most influential arts figures in Australia,[16][18] an attribution repeated in 2011 when the AFR Magazine named him as one of Australia's five leading arts identities – with then-Federal Arts Minister Simon Crean, National Gallery of Victoria director Tony Ellwood, actress Cate Blanchett and Sydney Opera House CEO Louise Herron.