British Council Ireland are pleased to announce 22 artists across Ireland and the four nations of the UK are funded through 11 UK-IRL Culture Connects 2026/27 partnerships awards in association with Arts Council Ireland/ An Chomhairle Ealaíon.
The selected proposals span a range of artforms, including visual arts, performing arts, participatory arts, film, literature, music, circus and outdoor spectacle, with themes including climate crisis and ecology, technology, place-making, justice, language, race, gender and rurality.
The UK-IRL Culture Connects 2026/27 grant call was designed to support artistic collaboration and relationship building between Ireland and the four nations of the UK. At its core, the grant aims to connect artists and creative practitioners to develop ideas, research and projects and spend time together to further their artistic practice. Focused on emerging artists, and with an emphasis on partnership-building, this grant encourages meaningful connection and creative exchange across borders.
The projects include:
- Kathryn Ashill (WAL), collaborating with Siobhán Mooney (IRL): Cultural exchange between Wales and Ireland to explore shared interests in art and the climate crisis.
- Gill Byrne (IRL), collaborating with Nikki Rummer (ENG): A one-week international artistic exchange to develop practice in landscape and site-responsive performance.
- Kim Crowley (IRL), collaborating with Esyllt Lewis (WAL and SCOT): Cardiff-based residency aims to research and develop new multidisciplinary work around the notion of the artist as bureaucrat.
- Maya Rose Edwards (SCOT), collaborating with Rosie Lynch (IRL): a research visit to Callan, developing new approaches to rural cultural exchange between Scotland and Ireland, exploring the legacy of Hedge Schools.
- Julie Griffiths (IRL), collaborating with Claudia Zeiske (SCOT): exploring the relationship between walking and knitting as ways of engaging with the rhythms of life and land.
- Willow Hamilton (ENG), collaborating with Safire Hikari (IRL): Artist mentorship in low-fly harness, a specialised form of vertical dance, to develop technique and research motion-tracking technologies for performance.
- Benjamin Malcolmson (IRL), collaborating with Laura Onions (ENG): Bridging ecological and political divides through collaborative artistic exchange to forge multimedia toolkits.
- Zoe Ní Riordáin (IRL), collaborating with Gavin Peden (NI): Collaboration between Cork, Ireland and Belfast, Northern Ireland to explore robotics technology in theatre as a character on stage.
- Christy Eóin O'Berine (ENG), collaborating with Christopher Steenson (IRL): Fieldwork, archival research and the collection of oral testimony in Co. Kerry will be combined to investigate Irish peat bogs as living archives of political violence and community memory,
- Michael Pigott (ENG), collaborating with Dan Callanan (IRL): A multi-disciplinary project to research and document the history of amateur community television provision between the 1980s and early 2000s in rural north Co. Cork by engaging individuals involved in original broadcasts.
- Ishy Pryce-Parchment (ENG), collaborating with Clodagh Assata Boyce (IRL): a collaboration drawing on Black study to develop experimental methodologies for collective artistic research and the transmission of cultural and political knowledge across grassroots cultural networks, archives and artist-led spaces in London and Dublin.
We are excited to watch these partnerships develop across the next six months, and look forward to furthering knowledge, connection and bilateral collaboration in arts, culture and heritage across these islands over the next few months.
