Local Arts

The Verbal Arts Centre is an educational charity founded in 1992. In 2000 the Centre moved its premises to the beautifully refurbished First Derry School, a listed building which occupies a prime location on the city’s walls. The Centre’s underpinning purpose is the promotion of the language arts, celebration of commonality and diversity, development of knowledge, understanding and excellence in creation, performance and critical practice across the verbal arts forms, together with research, publication and provision of information.

The Award Winning The Playhouse is based in Artillery Street, Derry and was established by Pauline Ross in 1992 with a grant of just £300. Since then it has grown to become one of Ireland’s leading Award Winning multi-disciplinary Community Art Resource Centres based on a neutral site with the city centre. It is a self-help, grass roots, bottom-up community development project which is people centre with charitable status. The Playhouse comprises two theatres (860 and 129 seats), an extensive Education and Outreach Department, a Dance Studio, the Source Arts Resource Centre, a gallery and is home to several cultural/art based groups and tenants. The Playhouse filled (and continues to fill) a large gap in the provision of the arts in the North West. It also is one of only a handful of venues commissioning, producing and touring theatre in the island of Ireland The Playhouses runs a large selection of in-house and outreach education program -mes and workshops in the North West and across the island of Ireland

Willie Doherty was born in Derry in 1959 and he continues to live and work in that city. He first came to prominence in the 1980s when he exhibited a series of powerful photographic works overlaid with text. These works, like all his subsequent photographic and video work, explore the complexities of living in a divided community, especially in his native Northern Ireland. Much of his work refers to an undercurrent of fear, oppression and uncertainty that for many was a daily experience of life in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Doherty has twice been shortlisted for the Turner Prize, once in 1994 and again in 2003.

The Nerve Centre was established in 1990 as a focal point for youth culture in Derry, Northern Ireland's second city. By bringing popular music, film, video, animation and interactive multimedia together under one roof, the Nerve Centre promotes creative collaboration and fusion between artists and provides a cultural outlet for many young people who feel excluded from what is traditionally regarded as the "arts sector"

Since its conception in 1993, the gallery has promoted and encouraged emerging Northern Irish artists and presented their work alongside emerging and established international artists. The gallery presents off-site projects, performance, film, audio-arts and cross-disciplinary projects and has a proactive outreach and education programme producing cross-cultural initiatives and dissemination of contemporary art within the community.