Next Stage 2025 Participants

Dee is a neurodivergent writer and performer living in Dublin. She is a Next Wave Playwright at the Abbey Theatre, and an alumnus of ITI’s Attic/Virtual Attic and the Mill Theatre’s Mavens Programme.

Her play amelia debuted as part of the 2024 Dublin Theatre Festival; an offgrid solarpunk performance about birds, migration and leaving home, directed by Claire O’Reilly and presented with the support of the Arts Council, Dublin City Council, Fishamble’s New Play Clinic, Irish Theatre Institute and the Pavilion Theatre. It received a 5-star review in the Irish Times and was listed in Best of 2024.

Dee regularly mentors and teaches for organisations including the NTAA, Creative Skillnet, IWC, and Cartoon Saloon -including courses specifically for blind/VI, disabled, and neurodivergent writers. She has been a speaker at X-pollinator and recently co-designed and facilitated a week-long cross-disciplinary residency for neurodivergent artists at IMMA with the support of DCC, Creative Skillnet and ADHD Ireland.

In 2023 she set up The Pit Collective, a community of professional artists exploring creative exchange supported by an Arts Council Theatre Bursary.

Other work includes her short play an angel in centra which won Scripts Ireland 2024 and is currently being developed into a full-length piece. Her first film The Colonist is being produced as a Screen Ireland Focus Short with Promenade Films, she has been shortlisted for Druid Debuts and her RTEjr radio series for children ‘Mr. Wall’ was nominated for an IMRO award for Best Radio Drama.

For many years Dee was a member of the award-winning Loose Canon Theatre Company. Performances include The Seagull, Phaedra’s Love, The Maids, Duchess of Malfi, and Macbeth. Acting experience also includes Not I for Bedrock Productions, Julius Caesar, Comedy of Errors, Brothers and Sisters, At-Swim-Two-Birds at the Abbey/Peacock Theatres, Amanda Coogan’s Yellow at both Dublin Theatre Festival and Dublin Film Festival, and Singlehood by Una McKevitt (Vicar St., Olympia and National Tour).

Dee also writes/script edits for children’s animation. Companies/broadcasters she has worked with include Turnip & Duck, Daily Madness, Cartoon Saloon, RTÉ, BBC/CBBC, JAM Media, Amazon Studios, Ink & Light, TG4, Telegael, and SLR.

Jean Butler, dancer, choreographer, and Artistic Director of Our Steps, works across performance, theatre, and archival practice. Her acclaimed work, What We Hold, premiered at Dublin Theatre Festival in 2022 and at Irish Arts Center in 2024 with a sold-out 30-show run. In 2024–25 she was a consultant on the Gate Theatre’s revival of Dancing at Lughnasa, and in 2025 published Irish Dance: History, Form and Freedom with Dance Index.

Her work has been supported by institutions including the Arts Council, Abbey Theatre, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Dance Cork/Firkin Crane, Danspace Project, Dublin Dance Festival, Dublin Theatre Festival, Irish Arts Center, Project Arts Centre, among others. Through Our Steps, she created Our Steps, Our Story: An Irish Dance Legacy Archive with the New York Public Library’s Jerome Robbins Dance Division, generating over 200 hours of video and audio resources spanning seven decades across six countries. Butler received TG4’s Gradam Ceoil lifetime achievement award in 2024.

Photo: Mark Mann

Thomas Collins is an Irish actor from Dublin. He is a full time Graduate From Bow Street Academy. He is known for his performances across film, television, stage, and radio. His screen credits include The Gone (Season 1 & 2, Keeper Pictures) and Love/Hate (RTÉ), as well as feature films such as Thank You Come Again (Top Floor Films), Nails (Fantastic Films), and Urban Traffik (October Eleven Films).

On stage, he has appeared in productions for the Abbey Theatre, Fishamble, The Dublin Theatre Festival and The Dublin Fringe Festival. His radio work includes the award-winning No Love Lost (RTÉ Radio One), which earned him a New York Festivals Radio Award.

Alongside acting, Thomas is currently writing his debut feature film The Weight of Silence, which has received an Axis Bursary and an Arts Council Agility Award for development. He is also developing the stage play Across the Fence, with plans to advance it next year.

Kyle English is a performer, writer, director, and designer across multiple disciplines.

His work looks at societal presumptions, and what makes people tick the way they do. He enjoys using surreal humour as satire-medicine for a difficult world. Previous writing-directing work includes, ‘The Show We Put On’, a 4-person musical tragi-comedy about people-pleasing, and ‘The Call Of’, a collaboration with composer Wike Schippers, and a string quintet to make an immersive storytelling show inspired by the phenomenon known as ‘l’appel du vide’ and self-exploration through self-destruction.

Performance credits include; Satan in ‘Phil and Satan’ (Dir. Ryan Lacey, 2024), Hamlet in ‘Hamlet’ (Dir. Peadar Odonohoe, 2024), Deckie in The Local (dir. Donal Gallagher, 2023),

Recently supported by The Everyman, Cork Midsummer, Bristol Old Vic and Bristol MAYFEST, Kyle is currently developing a new non-verbal interactive one-man show ‘Wee Beasts’, about how the things that make us all animals make us all the same.

Miles Harrigan is a creative producer – based between Cape Clear Island / Oileán Chléire in County Cork and Dublin – working in English- and Irish-language theatre, dance, and performance.

He works as Associate Producer with Attic Projects, Luke Murphy’s Cork-based dance company (Scorched Earth: Dublin Dance Festival and Galway International Arts Festival 2025l; Volcano: American Dance Festival 2025).

Miles is also part of the Producer Programme for freelance theatre producers at Once Off Productions (Line Producer on Foolish Flame, by Peter Power and Leon Butler, at Ars Electronica Festival 2025; Assistant Producer on The Quiet Men, written by Morgan C Jones and directed by Conall Morrison, and on the Spring 2026 Ireland tour of Grace, by Jody O’Neill).

He has also worked as Line Producer, with Thisispopbaby / Wake Entertainment, on the Spring 2025 UK tour of WAKE.

Miles has finished all work for an MA in Drama and Performance Studies in UCD (expected graduation: December 2025).

Danielle James is an award-winning Irish playwright and performer based in London. Her writing has been compared to Sarah Kane and Anthony Neilson and has been described as “exquisitely written”, “bold and passionate” and “triumphant”.

Her work has been shortlisted for the Bill Cashmore Award (people watching people…, 2025), the Theatre503 International Playwriting Prize (Schizogenesis, 2025), and long-listed for the Bruntwood Playwriting Prize (Three Boys, 2025). She was a part of the Royal Court Writers Group in 2024 and was a recipient of an Acorn Bursary from An Grianán Theatre in 2025.

She is a two-time recipient of funding from the Arts Council of England. She is currently developing work with the Bush Theatre, The Royal Court Theatre, and An Grianán Theatre.

As a performer, her work has taken her to Carneige Hall, The Southbank Centre, The University of Oxford, Glastonbury, and the National Theatre.

Ran Jiao is a Chinese interdisciplinary performance-maker based in Prague, working at the intersection of theatre and dance as a director, dancer, and performer.

A graduate of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (2020), she has presented works at leading European festivals and institutions, including the Bazaar Festival of Dance and Performing Arts, Tanec Praha (Dance Prague) Festival, Prague Quadrennial, and Berliner Festspiele.

She has collaborated with acclaimed directors and choreographers, such as Wayne Jordan (The Ceremony & The Acts, 2019) and Alice Chauchat (Museography Choreography, 2024). Her debut piece, Spider Turtle We (2023), supported by the European National Recovery Plan grant, premiered at the National Theatre’s New Stage in Prague.

Ran approaches performance as a social experiment, blending movement, text, costume, and participatory formats into transformative encounters that challenge human and non-human perspectives. Rooted in her experience as a visible foreigner in Central Europe, her work explores urgent social, ecological, and political questions through embodied, cross-cultural storytelling.

Bob Kelly is an Irish actor and theatre-maker trained in the Lecoq School, Paris.

He has received glowing reviews from critics for his performance work in Ireland and abroad; his most recent play, The Hare, a collaboration with Clare Monnelly, was described by the Sunday Independent as “profoundly disturbing, almost viciously violent, and absolutely terrifying…. a wild extravaganza.” It toured nationally and won the Green Room Award for Best New Play.

Bob has written for Landmark Productions, Blue Raincoat, the Hawk’s Well, Once Off Productions, and is currently under commission to the Everyman, Cork. His one-man-show Tintown was selected by the Sunday Independent as one of the year’s highlights of Irish theatre; he has shared the Irish Times Theatre Award for Best Ensemble, and been nominated for Best Supporting Actor.

Bob has been Artist in Residence at the Hawk’s Well Theatre, and at Baboro Children’s Festival.

Luke Murphy is a writer, director, choreographer and performer originally from Cork and working internationally.

Through his company Attic Projects Luke has produced over twelve original works since 2012 ranging across the mediums of dance, theatre, film and performance installation. His work has been presented at all major Irish festivals and internationally across the UK, US, Australia and Germany. Luke’s 2021 production Volcano was winner of four Irish Times Theatre Awards including Best Production along with three further nominations.

He recently premiered his latest production Scorched Earth at the Abbey Theatre co-produced by Dublin Dance Festival and Galway International Arts Festival. He has been funded by the Arts Council Arts Grant Award since 2018.

Luke is Dublin Dance Festival Associate Artist 2023-2025 and Dance Artist in Residence in Cork 2024-2026.

Lianne O’Hara is a playwright and poet.

Her play BABY won the 2024 Little Gem Award and played Bewley’s this spring to four-star reviews. FLUFF was selected for Fishamble’s New Play Clinic and had a sell out run at Dublin Fringe 2022.

The Patients All Seemed Happy (2025) ‘a powerful evocation of forgotten voices from Grangegorman asylum’ is published by Writing Ireland | New Dublin Press. Other writing has appeared in Winter Papers, Poetry Ireland Review, The Rialto, The London Magazine, and elsewhere.

In 2024 she received the Mairtín Crawford Award for Poetry and a Theatre Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland to fund mentorship with Open Clasp Theatre Company and develop her practice in co-creating theatre from lived experience. Lianne is a participant of Irish Theatre Institute’s Six in the Attic programme.

Mar Parés Baraldés is a scenographer from Barcelona, now based in Dublin.

She holds an MFA in Stage Design from The Lir Academy and a BA in Design from the University of Art and Design of Barcelona. Her practice explores narratives through space, image, and performing bodies, drawing on a background in visual arts and design research. She strives to create striking performative spaces and design-led theatre through collaboration and a multidisciplinary approach.

James Riordan is a theatre maker from Galway.

He is Artistic Director of Brú Theatre- recent directing credits for Brú include Somnium, based on the myth of Philomela (Galway Int’ Arts Festival ‘24), Not A Word, a full mask piece based on the Irish navvies (Galway Int’ Arts Fest ‘23, Barbican,London ‘25) and Ar Ais Arís- a merging of Irish language literature on immigration and VR, which recently toured to the US and Canada.

In 2023, he directed the flagship Macnas parade on the streets of Dublin and Galway. He was a Resident Director with the Abbey Theatre last year.

In 2026 he will premier new work based on the life and work of Pádraic Ó Conaire.

Elton Sebekhona Sibanda is a vibrant theatre artist originally from Zimbabwe, now living in Ireland.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in Communications and has attained substantial training in story creation, script writing, directing and acting for stage. Throughout his career in Zimbabwe he has been involved in high schools drama training, community theatre training programs, theatre competitions adjudicator, directing stage plays, acting on stage nationally and international.

He is passionate about topical social issues hence most of his personal artistic works are themed around race, gender and human rights. He believes that the stage is a safe space where audiences can engage is social discourse thus he is hoping to collaborate with theatre artists with the same vision.

Aoife Sweeney O’Connor is a performer, writer, and maker from Donegal.

Their autobiographical theatre-cabaret show An Evening with Wee Daniel premiered to a sold-out run at Dublin Fringe 2024, winning the Theatre Lovett Award and earning a Little Gem nomination. It’s now touring Ireland and the UK.

Aoife is the producer and host of the acclaimed queer cabaret EGG. Their show EGG: The Proclamation of the Irish Republegg won the Beyond the Pale Award at Dublin Fringe 2023. This September, they debut The Future is EGG at the festival.

A trained actor, Aoife has appeared in Bicycle Thieves: Pumped Up, the award-winning animation To Break a Circle, and Stacey Gregg’s Disco Dykes. Most recently, they starred in Síomha and the Otherworld, a new play exploring folklore and grief with young audiences.

Aoife is a 2024 Dublin Fringe Artist in Residence and a recipient of the Axis Assemble Bursary and Arts Council Agility Award.

Their work has been supported by An Grianán Theatre, Outburst Queer Arts, Xnthony—and Daniel O’Donnell himself.

Caoimhe Whelan is a live performance producer, based in Wicklow, Ireland. Her producing practice is focused on creating high-quality theatrical experiences for a diverse range of audiences, working across theatre for young audiences, sensory dance theatre and contemporary theatre.

Caoimhe is an Associate Producer with Field:Arts and she is Company Producer with Run Of The Mill Arts. Selected Producing credits include Malaprop Theatre’s National Tour of HOTHOUSE (2025), Emmet Kirwan and Eoin French’s Accents (National Tour 2025), the World Premiere of Other Worlds by Jess Rowell Dance (Riverbank Arts Centre 2025), World Premiere of amelia by Dee Roycroft (Dublin Theatre Festival 2024), Malaprop Theatre’s HOTHOUSE (Dublin Fringe 2023, Irish Arts Centre NYC) and Jess Rowell’s Making Waves (National Tour 2024).

In 2023 Caoimhe participated in Branar’s Meitheal initiative as Emerging Producer in Residence at the Riverbank Arts Centre, Newbridge. Previous to this, she lived in Toronto, Canada for 5 years, working primary with Luminato Festival Toronto. She is a graduate of Drama and Theatre Studies at Trinity College Dublin.