Sarah O'Toole is our new Associate Artist!
The Linenhall Arts Centre is pleased to announce artist Sarah O’Toole as Associate Artist for 2023.
The Associate Artist role is an exciting initiative which offers financial stability to an artist supporting their continuous creative work. This employment is with the purpose of offering an artist ongoing financial security while embracing artistic thinking and energy into the culture of the organization.
This is particularly fitting for theatre artist, Sarah,, who moved back to Mayo just before global lockdown in 2020. Originally from Tourmakeady, Co. Mayo, audiences may be familiar with Sarah’s work whether as a collaborative dramaturg and performer for previous Linenhall Associate Artist Elaine Mears’ immersive site-specific work If Walls Could Talk or as a performer with the jazz band Queen Street who performed in the Linenhall last summer as part of a fundraiser for OutWest- a social, support and advocacy group for LGBTQ+ people in Connacht.
Sarah is a director and dramaturg, as well as an actor, playwright, singer and DJ who loves collaborating with other artists, often resulting in an amalgamation of mediums with an innovative result, which engages audiences while simultaneously not giving them exactly what they expect.
In 2021 and 2022, she was awarded a Bursary Award to explore incorporating cabaret and drag performance into her theatre practice, and an Agility Award to develop the first draft of a play George which explores these themes and performance styles.
Throughout 2023, Sarah proposes to develop these two projects further. ‘We are excited to have Sarah come on board and look forward to seeing how her practice develops over the next year with solid consistent employment and a space to work and develop her ideas’, says Linenhall Director, Bernadette Greenan.
Sarah's focus will be on building relationships between the Linenhall and theatre artists in Mayo, finding fresh playwriting voices, and creating the foundation for high quality professional theatre work to be created at the Linenhall and disseminated from there to the rest of the country.
Sarah says: ‘Throughout my time with the Linenhall my focus would be to reach out to fellow theatre artists in the county. I am very excited about finding fresh playwriting voices and perspectives on what it means to live in Mayo today.’
