Dee Roycroft is a writer and performer living in Dublin. She writes mainly about dislocation, nature, and neurology. She is currently a Next Wave Playwright 2024/25 at the Abbey Theatre and writer-in-residence at Birr Theatre and Arts Centre. An alumnus of ITI’s Attic/Virtual Attic and the Mill Theatre’s Mavens Programme, in 2023 she set up The Pit Collective, a community of professional artists exploring creative exchange supported by an Arts Council Theatre Bursary.

Her play amelia debuted as part of the 2024 Dublin Theatre Festival; an off-grid solarpunk performance about birds, migration and leaving home, presented with the support of the Arts Council, Dublin City Council, Fishamble’s New Play Clinic, Irish Theatre Institute and the Pavilion Theatre.

Dee won the Scripts Ireland Festival 2024 with her short play an angel in centra. 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. Dee also writes for children’s animation; companies include Daily Madness, Cartoon Saloon, RTÉ, BBC/CBBC, JAM Media, Amazon Studios.

Performances include Anatomy of a Seagull, Phaedra’s Love, The Maids, all as a core member of Loose Canon Theatre Company. Also Not I for Bedrock Productions, Julius Caesar, Comedy of Errors, Brothers and Sisters, At-Swim-Two-Birds at the Abbey/Peacock Theatres, and Amanda Coogan’s Yellow at both Dublin Theatre Festival and Dublin Film Festival.

She also mentors and teaches creative writing and writing for animation, including courses specifically for blind/vi, disabled and neurodivergent writers. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UCD and her prose has been shortlisted for the RTE Short Story Competition and the Redline Book Festival.

Aideen Barry is a conceptual artist based in Ireland with an international multifaceted practice spanning filmmaking, performance, experimental lens-based media, drawing, and sculpture. Her work employs visual trickery to create a heightened suspension of reality, with a central theme of exploring sinister systems.

Her recent projects are intersectional and collaborative, working with artists such as Peter Gabriel, William Kentridge, and The Centre of the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg, as well as Inuit throat singer ᕇᑦ Riit, singe Lukhanyiso Skosana, performer IBOKWE, Llewellyn Mnguni, composers Irene Buckley, choreographers Junk Ensemble, fashion designer Richard Malone, Tropical Popical & Margaret O’Connor, writer Sinéad Gleeson, poet Doireann Ni Ghríofa, composers Tshegofatso Moeng and Philip Miller. Barry engages with a diverse range of collaborators, including artists, pop singers, archives, archivists, historians, scientists and activists, transcending pop culture and visual culture to create massive interventionist artworks. Notably, she collaborated with nearly a thousand Lithuanian citizens to create the feature film Klostės, which is now part of the National Collection at IMMA and contributed to Kaunas receiving UNESCO World Heritage Status.

Her works serve as a Brechtian hammer, while also democratising access to visual culture for various audiences and stakeholders, inviting them to co-author the creative process. Significant projects include: projects and exhibitions at The Bangkok Art Biennial curated by Dr. Apinan Poshyananda, FORMAT international festival of photography, UK, film screenings at the BFI and the IFI, solo at IMMA, solos at Salzburg Kunstverein, Oakville Galleries, Canada The Welt Museum, Vienna, Matucana 100; Chile, the Irish Museum of Modern Art PS; Ireland, CAC Malaga; Spain, The Headlands Center for the Arts; US, Centre for the Less Good Idea; South Africa, Art OMI; US, The Whitaker Museum; UK, NASA Kennedy Space Center; US, Skaftfell; Iceland, Banff Centre; Canada, Centre Cultural Irlandais; France. Selected Solo and international projects at: Galleri Image, Aarhus, Denmark, Zona Maco, Ch ACO; Chile, The Katzen Center at the American Museum; US, Wexner Center: US Elephant Gallery; UK, Moderna Musett; Sweden, Musée des Beaux Arts,Lyon; France, Louise T. Blouin Gallery; UK, Galeria Isabel Hurley; Spain, Artscene Shanghai; China and Project 304 Gallery; Thailand, BAC Geneva; Switzerland, Liste Art Fair; Switzerland, Catharine Clark Gallery; US, NYU DC; US, Crawford Municipal Gallery, Project Art Centre, Temple Bar Gallery, Limerick City Gallery, The RHA, Visual, Mothers Tankstation, The Butler Gallery; Ireland, an An Post EUROPA stamp commission and a collection of edition works with various Kunstverein in Europe and beyond.

Barry is a member of Aosdána and the Royal Hibernian Academy, and her work is held in private collections and public museum collections worldwide.

AlanJames Burns is a neurodivergent, environmental and audiovisual artist, curator and festival maker producing interactive, socially engaged and site-specific projects. The focal points of their highly collaborative practice are disability, climate emergency and a just society.

Their projects include; Disrupt Disability Arts Festival, an annual festival taking place on at Project Arts centre and online; Divergently Together, 2024-26 a national Creative Ireland climate action project exploring the climate crisis through the perspective of disability; Our Place, 2023-25, a collaborative place making visual arts project co-designed alongside adults with intellectual disabilities supported by SJOG Liffey Service.

Jody O’Neill is an autistic theatre maker, producer and disability advocate, based in Dublin. She has spent recent years researching and developing making inclusive theatre that promotes acceptance and social change. Her play What I (Don’t) Know About Autism received the WGI Zebbie Award for Best Theatre Script in the 2021 awards.

In 2024, she received an Arts Council Bursary to reestablish her dance practice, and explore the connection between movement and text in her work. She is actively engaged in artist development. She offers dramaturgical input and practical support in developing work (including advice on applications, development opportunities, etc.). In addition to working on an ongoing basis with a number of individual writers and theatre makers, she recently facilitated the Abbey Begins programme for the Abbey Theatre and runs an online group called The Working Group for neurodivergent artists.

She was Theatre Artist-in-Residence at UCC and Cork Opera House from 2022-24, received a 2022 Markievicz Award, and was shortlisted for the Virgin Media Discovers Award 2022. In addition to theatre work, she writes for children’s animation, working with Cartoon Saloon, CBBC, Little Moon Animation and more.

Tierra Porter is an interdisciplinary creator of Indigenous American, African, and Puerto Rican descent hailing from Cordele Georgia. She is a recent First Class Honors Graduate from the Lir Academy (BA Acting). Credits while studying at the Lir include The Duchess of Berwick Lady Windermere’s Fan , Paulina A Winter’s Tale , Vera in Bulrusher , Delphine in Untitled and Sarah Worth in The Sugar Wife.

Previous to her training Tierra regularly performed and directed for Missoula Children’s Theatre touring internationally.

Other roles include Ronette in Little Shop of Horrors, Rusty in Footloose at the Strand Theatre in Marietta, Georgia and Deloris Van Cartier in Sister Act at the Missoula Community Theatre in Missoula , Montana . Tierra has begun her acting career in Ireland on the Gate stage in a Roddy Doyle Adaptation of J.M Barrie’s Peter Pan. She went on to play Sarah Worth in the Sugar Wife at the Abbey National Theatre , Elena /Rita  in The Jesus Trilogy adapted by Eoghan Quinn. Erica in Beards the Musical written by HK Ni Shriordan. Tierra is also a recipient of the Axis Ballymun ‘Assemble’ bursary to support developing her own written work.