Mary Hickson
Mary Hickson
Senior Associate Producer
Mary (she/her) is a Creative director and Producer who has been at the helm of such venues and projects as Cork Opera House, 37d03d Events, Sounds from a Safe Harbour Festival (SFSH), Eaux Claires Festival and MusicNOW Festival.
Mary is a Creative Director and Producer based in Cork, Ireland with a particular interest in music. She is the Director of 37d03d Events – an evolving community of artists who come together to collaborate in unique residency projects around the world, founded by Justin Vernon and Bryce & Aaron Dessner. Mary is also Director of the award-winning Sounds from a Safe Harbour Festival (SFSH) in Cork, as well as Eaux Claires and MusicNOW Festivals in the USA. She has worked closely with performers and artists such as Cillian Murphy, The National, Bon Iver, Feist, Jon Hopkins, Max Porter, Damien Rice, Crash Ensemble and many more in producing projects noted for their spontaneity and collaborative nature. Her passion as a producer and director lies in just those elements: collaboration and inclusion of all art forms to produce events that are unique for both artists and audiences alike. She is inspired by the artistic process, and seeks to provide artists with space, time and freedom to create new work, to incubate ideas and experiment to see what might happen. A notable moment in Hickson’s career saw her successfully transform the fiscal and creative health of Cork Opera House during her stewardship as CEO, from 2010 to 2015. Building its reputation as both a producing and receiving house and diversifying the programme to include all kinds of live performance. Current projects include All of This Unreal Time for Manchester International Festival with writer Max Porter, actor Cillian Murphy, film director Aoife McArdle and composers Bryce & Aaron Dessner and Jon Hopkins.
It’s not a festival, it’s something profound…. It’s incredible… — Laura Barton on Sounds from a Safe Harbour
We need our music to surprise us; we need our festivals to surprise us, this is not entertainment, this is a fucking spiritual thing. – Bon Iver on Sounds from a Safe Harbour
Hickson is also Creative Producer on Multitudes, Feist’s project of new songs, which will soon take up residency at the Kampnagel Festival in Hamburg for a series of unconventional, mould-breaking performances.
Hickson has also just completed a new project for Brightening Air in both Cork City and Botanic Gardens in Dublin entitled a city and a garden. These installations involved a series of artistic experiences presented through GPS technology with writers Danny Denton, Lisa McInerney, Louise Hegarty, Melatu Okorie and Gavin Corbett together with musicians Sean MacErlaine, Fish Go Deep, Quiet Club, Kate Ellis, Shahzad Ismaily, Sean O’Se, Tolu Makay and Dorothy Murphy (all brought to life by visual artist Deirdre Breen). Again, process and collaboration and spontaneity were to the fore in making this project something special.
Earlier this year, in a new collaboration with SFSH and Body & Soul, she directed a new film project (Eriu’s Threshold) involving many different artists including Eoin French (Talos), Robyn Byrne, Kate Ellis and others.
Finally, Mary is a Creative Partner of Crash Ensemble, Ireland’s leading contemporary music ensemble.
image:credits
1. ALL OF THIS UNREAL TIME at Manchester International Festival (2021)
2. MULTITUDES by Feist. Image credit: Goodchild Richardson (2021)
3. Bon Iver with Voice Effect Choir at Sounds from a Safe Harbour/Cork Opera House. Photo credit: Brid O’Donovan (2017)
Portfolio of Artists:
Matt Smyth
Matt Smyth
Senior Associate Producer
Co-Founder
Matt Smyth (he/him) is an Obie-award winning theatre producer and festival organiser from Ireland.
He has worked over the years with companies ANU Productions, Collapsing Horse Theatre and Dead Centre, three of Ireland’s leading theatre companies producing work in some of the most globally important festivals and theatres. These include Manchester International Festival, Brisbane Arts Festival, the Young Vic, and the Schaubuhne in Berlin to name a few.
As a curator and programmer he has run Ireland’s oldest and largest comedy arts festival The Kilkenny Cat Laughs for 5 years, as well as the Theatre Stage at Electric Picnic for the last 6 years for Dublin Theatre Festival. He curated the Pitchonomics strand at Kilkenomics (Ireland’s first comedy and economics festival) and programmed and hosted Ireland’s first conference on Massive Open Online Universities (MOOCs) for the Higher Education Authority of Ireland as part of the UA Award Summit (of which he was Summit Director of for 4 years).
As well as forming boards for ANU and Collapsing Horse, he is chair of the board of directors for Project Arts Centre, Dublin – Ireland’s leading contemporary arts centre and Matt is on the board of directors of Macnas – Ireland’s leading street theatre and spectacle company. Matt is formerly a Dublin hub Ambassador for the global network Sandbox.
Matt is also a qualified career coach working with arts practitioners around Ireland and the UK.
Last and least, he also ran the official pub crawl at the Dublin leg of the international MuseumNEXT conference after his success at running the unofficial one at the Geneva leg of the same conference.
image:credits 1. Dylan Tighe, Rebecca O’Meara, Liam Carney and Breffni Holahan in Chekhov’s First Play by Dead Centre. Photo credit: Jose Miguel Jimenez (2015) 2. Requiem for the Truth by Collapsing Horse and Stomptown Brass. Photo Credit Ste Murray (2017) 3. Natalie Palamides in NATE at The Kilkenny Cat Laughs. Photo credit: Allen Kiely (2018)
Portfolio of Artists:
Lynnette Moran
Lynnette Moran
Senior Associate Producer
Director and Co-Founder
Lynnette (she/her) is a Creative Director, Arts Producer and Festival Director specialising in Live Art, Theatre, Visual Art and Digital platforms; with distinct experience of producing collaborative and socially engaged arts practice and public art commissions.
Lynnette is a Creative Producer with ANU Productions and Louise Lowe since 2013. In 2019, Lynnette and Louise Lowe co-created Faultline, an ANU and Gate Theatre co-production. Developed as part of Live Collision International Festival 2018 and presented by Dublin Theatre Festival 2019, supported by the Arts Council of Ireland and Dublin City Council. She is one of two core producers on all productions at ANU to date including The Party to End All Parties, Hentown, The Sin Eaters (Dublin Theatre Festival); The Anvil (Manchester International Festival), The Lost O’Casey (The Abbey Theatre and Dublin Theatre Festival), TORCH (Arts Council England Ambition and Excellence Award), Hawknest (The Gate Theatre), Zero-Hour, These Rooms (London International Festival of Theatre), Pals – the Irish at Gallipoli (Dept of Arts and Heritage and National Museum of Ireland), Vardo, Angel Meadow and many more.
In 2009 Lynnette established Live Collision, Ireland’s leading annual curated festival of Live Art and Ireland’s first independent Creative Producing House working with exceptional artists nationally and internationally. Live Collision has produced the work of several independent artists and artworks outside of the festival which include Amanda Coogan’s Talk Real Fine, Just Like A Lady; You Told Me To Wash and Clean My Ears and Amanda Coogan, LONG NOW (Film Doc); Lisa McLoughlin’s The Kindness of Strangers; Athletes of the Heart, Anna Furse – An Anatomy Act and I AM NOT A PIECE OF MEAT (Digital Artwork); The Prosperity Project by Jesse Jones (OPW commission). FAST TRACK TO DANCE is an annual shared audience development initiative between Live Collision and Dublin Dance Festival.
Lynnette was co-founder and Lead Producer for CAPP (Collaborative Art Partnership Programme), an unprecedented four year transnational partnership across six European countries and nine partner organisations co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, focusing on collaborative and socially engaged practice and commissions across Europe between 2014 – 2018. She was also Associate Producer at Create for six years. She has directed over 25 works for theatre and gallery spaces, as well as for screen and digital media. Together with Kate Craddock she co-founded mouth to mouth, an international performance collective based in eight countries around the world, rehearsing and devising online before the performances took place in real time across multiple locations. Noted as the first performance company in the UK to use Skype and other domestic technology as ‘an integrated element of the creation and presentation of performances’, as outlined by Greg Giesekam in ‘Staging the Screen: The Use of Film and Video in Performance.’ A brilliant antidote to all those packaged, commodified and commercialised cultural experiences that make up much of today’s landscape, Live Art is a chance to dip your toe into exciting and sometimes dangerous waters. Yes you run the risk of being alarmed, maybe occasionally bored, discomforted or dismayed. But you may also be exhilarated, excited, enthused, and you just might never look at the world, or yourself in the same way again. — Gemma Tipton, The Irish Times
Lynnette began her career in London, cutting her teeth with some of the UK’s leading arts organisations including LIFT (London International Festival of Theatre) and BAC (Battersea Arts Centre) where she developed her practice as a Creative Producer. She holds a BA Hons Degree in Fine Art from Wolverhampton University and an MA in Performance Art from Goldsmiths College, London. Lynnette Moran is alumni and member of the EFA (European Festival Association) since being selected in 2012 for the EFA Atelier Programme – an international mentoring programme for the ‘next generation’ of festival directors mentored by pioneering festival directors such as Nele Hertling and Hugo De Greef. Live Collision International Festival is an EFFE label recipient for several years.
web:link
www.livecollision.com
image:credits
1. Nandhi Bhebhe in Faultline by ANU Productions. Photo credit: Pat Redmond (2019)
2. Amanda Coogan in COWARDS at Live Collision International Festival. Photo credit: Abigail Denniston (2017)
3. NU ROOTS by Fried Plantains Collective at Live Collision International Festival. Photo credit: Louis Haugh (2019)
4. UXO by Split Britches Live Collision International Festival. Photo credit: Theo Cote (2018)
Portfolio of Artists: