Irish Times Theatre Award judges for 2010

The nominations for the 2009 Irish Times Theatre Awards will appear in Weekend Review on Saturday. In the meantime, this year’s theatre awards judges are:

Christine Maddenis a writer, translator, dramaturg and arts journalist. She works as dance and theatre critic, primarily for The Irish Times,as well as reporting on the performing arts.

She has also worked within the theatre sector as literary manager at Rough Magic Theatre Company, and as new playwrights programme manager (designing and curating the first year of the programme) for the Abbey Theatre.

Additionally, together with Theatre Forum and the Dublin Theatre Festival, she conceived and curated the professional further-development programme The Next Stage, which she also led in 2007 and 2008.

She has also translated numerous film and theatre scripts.

Jack Gilligan,recently retired Dublin City Arts Officer, has seen about 2,000 professional theatre performances. His involvement in professional performance began 25 years ago, as a Local Authority employee, promoting professional theatre and dance in community venues and schools in Co Dublin, many in association with the Dublin Theatre Festival.

As Dublin city’s first Arts Officer from 1993, he worked on making arts and culture an integral part of Dublin City Council, restructuring the council’s arts funding and supporting new and established arts organisations in the city, including theatre and dance companies. His office appointed the city’s first Dance Artist in Residence.

He organised opera and classical music appreciation courses, leading to the Opera in the Open series, and established the highly successful Dublin Writers Festival, which has brought theatre giants such as Tom Stoppard and the late Harold Pinter to Dublin.

He was pivotal in establishing the Red Stables Artists’ Studios in St Anne’s Park in Dublin 3, and the purpose-built Lab arts centre in 2005 on Foley Street. He was a key supporter of the first-ever Dublin Fringe Festival in 1995, and he was also on its judging panel.

Bernadette Maddenremains from the 2009 judging panel. She was born in Dublin, and has been working as a painter and printmaker since graduating from the National College of Art and Design.

She works mainly through the medium of batik, an ancient Asian method of dyeing fabric using wax as a resist. She exhibits regularly in Ireland and has also had solo shows throughout the world, including in Australia, Norway, the US, Germany and the UK.

Her work is included in the collections of Axa Ireland, the Arts Council, ESB, Aer Lingus, and the Ulster Museum, among others.

An interest in the theatre has led to her work being used on stage and on film sets, the largest piece being a 50m length of silk batik for the Gate's production of George Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House.