Arifa Akbar is chief theatre critic for The Guardian. She was previously the literary editor of The Independent where she also served as news reporter and arts correspondent. Her first book, Consumed: In Search of my Sister, was shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards, PEN Ackerley Prize and Jhalak Prize, and long-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize. Her second book, Wolf Moon: A Woman’s Journey into the Night, published in July 2025, was selected as a BBC Radio 4 ‘Book of the Week’. She has judged various literary and stage prizes including the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Costa Biography Award and the UK Theatre Awards. She is a former trustee of English PEN and the Orwell Foundation, where she co-administered its book prize.
Ben Brantley was a fashion critic for Women’s Wear Daily, a film critic for Elle Magazine and, most lastingly, a theatre critic for the New York Times.
Nancy Durrant is a culture journalist and broadcaster with more than two decades of experience. She is co-host of The London Theatre Review podcast and writes The London Culture Edit, a Substack newsletter reviewing and highlighting current and upcoming cultural events in London from theatre to art and the rest. She was formerly the Culture Editor of the Evening Standard, where she also hosted Cultural Capital, a weekly YouTube London culture show, and prior to that spent 16 years as an arts writer and editor at The Times. She writes features, interviews and reviews across the cultural landscape, from dance to theatre, art to opera and everything in between, for publications including The Times, The Observer, The Sunday Times, The London Standard, Opera Now, W Magazine, Plaster, Art Quarterly and others, and regularly pops up as a commentator on BBC Radio 4, Times Radio, Monocle Radio and others. She is a proud trustee of Dundee Contemporary Arts, and also provides a consultancy service, helping cultural organisations such as the Royal Ballet and Opera to more effectively tell their stories.
Jimmy Fay is Executive Producer at The Lyric Theatre in Belfast. He is a former Associate Artist and Literary Director of the Abbey Theatre. He was the founder and Artistic Director of Bedrock Productions with whom he founded the Dublin Fringe Festival in 1995. As a director, his work at the Abbey Theatre includes The Risen People, Quietly (also toured to Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2013 and The Soho Theatre, London), The Government Inspector, Curse of the Starving Class, Macbeth, The Playboy of the Western World, Ages of the Moon, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, The Seafarer, The School for Scandal, Howie the Rookie, True West, Henry IV, The Muesli Belt, At Swim-Two-Birds, Melonfarmer and The Papar. He won an Irish Times Theatre award for his production of Saved at the Peacock Theatre.
Karen Fricker is adjunct professor of Dramatic Arts at Brock University in Toronto and editorial director of Intermission Magazine. Her monograph The Original Stage Productions of Robert Lepage: Making Theatre Global won the Canadian Association of Theatre Research’s Ann Saddlemyer Award for the best book published in 2021. She is co-leader of numerous projects around equitable theatre criticism including the free online course Youareacritic.com; and is co-director of Circus and its Others, an international research network exploring difference in the context of contemporary circus. She is on the core team of Staging Better Futures/Mettre en scène de meilleurs avenirs, a nationwide partnership addressing systemic inequities in theatre higher education in Canada.
Katy Hayes started her journalism career with a humorous fortnightly comment column for the news pages of The Sunday Times in 2009. She became their Irish film critic in 2012 and has extensively reviewed Irish film and written about cultural matters for Culture magazine. She became the theatre critic with the Irish Independent in 2015, where she also reviews books, conducts interviews, and writes occasional comment for the news pages. She has been twice shortlisted as Critic/Arts Journalist of the Year in the Irish Journalism Awards. She co-founded Glasshouse Productions theatre company in the 1990s, directing work by women writers, including Angela Carter, Emma Donoghue and Clare Dowling. She has published three novels: Curtains; Gossip; and Lindbergh’s Legacy, and a collection of short stories, Forecourt. She has taught creative writing for University College Dublin, Trinity College and the University of Iowa.
Jennifer Krasinski is a writer and cultural critic whose work can be read in the pages of 4Columns, Artforum, Bookforum, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, among other publications. Her essays have been published in numerous books and catalogs including Reza Abdoh, Jill Johnston: The Disintegration of a Critic, Hilton Als’s Andy Warhol: The Series, and Richard Foreman: No Title. Jennifer was an art columnist for the Village Voice from 2014 to 2018, and served as both senior editor at and digital editorial director for Artforum. She currently a senior editor at Bidoun, and is the recipient of an Amant Research Residency in Siena, an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, a Rauschenberg residency, and a MacDowell fellowship.
Cristín Leach is a leading Irish art critic, broadcaster and author of the critically acclaimed divorce-art memoir Negative Space. A contributor to The Sunday Times Ireland for 20 years, her journalism, essays, short stories, collaborative and hybrid texts have been widely published, including in the literary journal Winter Papers, RTÉ Culture, Irish Arts Review, and broadcast and exhibited in Ireland, France and the UK. Her writing explores tensions between public and private voice, themes including anxiety, sexuality and fidelity, and connections between words, bodies and art.
Giuliano Levato is a multimedia theatre journalist and producer with over a decade of experience across media, theatre, and dance. As the founder of People of Theatre — a thriving platform celebrating performance and community — he has highlighted more than 400 productions and built a trusted following of over 25,000 followers, reaching a combined audience of around 300,000 viewers each month. In 2025, he expanded the project with the launch of a quarterly print magazine, distributed across London venues and independent bookshops. He holds a BA in East Asia Studies and an MA in Chinese Studies from the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, where his research examined Western cultural biases in the study of China. His academic journey included a scholarship at the University of Beijing and a year at Humboldt University of Berlin. Later, he earned an MA in International Journalism from City University London, with a final project on the emotional toll of asylum processes for queer refugees. Giuliano has produced for BBC World Service and BBC Radio 2, and spent seven years in Beijing as a freelance journalist and TV director for China’s national broadcaster. At the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA), he worked as an international producer, facilitating performances by companies such as Shakespeare’s Globe, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Martha Graham Dance Company, and Stuttgart Ballet. He has also collaborated with the Holland Dance Festival and The PappyShow.
Brendan Mac Evilly is the author of the novel Deep Burn (Marrowbone Books) and At Swim: A Book About the Sea (Collins Press 2016). His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in The Stinging Fly, Winter Papers, Channel, the Honest Ulsterman, the Guardian, the Irish Times, and Sunday Times. He is director and co-editor of Holy Show, an annual arts journal and production company. He is the 2024/25 Emerging Curator in Development at Kilkenny Arts Office.
Dearbhla McCormick was was a part of Young Critics in 2022 and thrives off theatre and the sheer energy of the stage. Currently she is working in Dublin and the Midlands, while keeping up with writing on the bus journeys between the two. She is forever on the hunt for the next interesting show to talk about. Dearbhla is very excited for Mission Critical and the findings we can take from it.
Helen Meany is a journalist, arts consultant and curator. As a theatre critic, she covers Irish theatre for the Guardian and for RTE Radio 1’s Arena, and has contributed to www.theartsdesk.com and Variety, among many other publications. She was Editor of Irish Theatre Magazine from 2005-11, leading its transition from print to an online journal, and Curator of the Arts Council’s Critical Voices programme of public debate on culture and ideas, 2005-06. Previously she was an arts journalist and commissioning arts editor with the Irish Times. Helen was Literature Advisor to the Arts Council from 2011-18 and is currently the Curator of the Classics Now festival, www.classicsnow.ie, with a third edition planned for January 2023.
Fergus Morgan is a freelance arts journalist and critic based in Edinburgh. He is The Stage’s Scotland correspondent and has also contributed to The Financial Times, The Scotsman, The Standard, WhatsOnStage, TimeOut and other publications. He also published The Crush Bar on Substack and produced and presented the podcast A History Of Scottish Drama In Six Plays.
Dr Ciara L. Murphy is Lecturer in Drama at the TU Dublin Conservatoire. Her monograph Performing Social Change on the Island of Ireland: From Republic to Pandemic was published by Routledge in 2023 and she has published extensively on modern and contemporary Irish performance practice. Ciara is currently the Vice President of the Irish Society of Theatre Research (ISTR) and has worked extensively on research that informs Irish arts policy and practice. She is currently the Lead Researcher for the national Safe to Create project which aims to impact change on the culture and practices of the arts and creative sectors in Ireland to provide safer working conditions for all workers. Ciara was formerly a theatre critic with the Irish Times and is currently working with ISTR to develop their new reviewing platform An Chluas/The Ear
Fintan O’Toole is a columnist with The Irish Times and advising editor of the New York Review of Books. He was the Leonard L. Milberg visiting Professor in Irish Letters at Princeton University and has been elected to the Royal Irish Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Philosophical Society . He is the winner of the Orwell Prize for Journalism, the European Press Prize and the Robert L. Silvers Prize for Journalism. He is currently working on the official biography of Seamus Heaney. Fintan has served as drama critic of In Dublin magazine, The Sunday Tribune, the New York Daily News, and The Irish Times and Literary Adviser to the Abbey Theatre. His books on the theatre include studies of Tom Murphy, William Shakespeare, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Bernard Shaw. His most recent book is For and Against a United Ireland, co-authored with Sam McBride.
Berginald Rash is celebrated American-Irish clarinetist and period clarinet practitioner. He curated Berginald presents Bombast! at New Music Dublin, From Antiquity to Modernity – a five-part chamber music series at the National Concert Hall, and will be presenting fractured rhapsody at Kirkos. His curatorial work has led him to guest lecturer at Trinity College Dublin where he shares insight on curatorial practice. A TEDx speaker, Mr. Rash was featured on Classically Black Podcast’s “Black Excellence” segment and has been a reviewer for BBC Radio 3’s Record Review, a presenter on BBC Radio 3’s Inside Music, presented a three-part docu-series on BBC Radio 3 entitled “The American Clarinet”, and a contributor on BBC Radio 4’s How to Play. Berginald has appeared on Full Score with Liz Nolan and Aedín in the Afternoon and a variety of other programmes on RTÉ lyric FM.
Holly Williams is an author, journalist, critic and editor. She is a former staff writer and arts editor for The Independent, and as a freelance writer her work has appeared in The New York Times, The TLS, Time Out, The Observer, The Telegraph and Elle. She lives in Sheffield, and reviews theatre across the north of England for The Times and The Stage, and she is the editor of Exeunt, a Substack about theatre. Her novels What Time Is Love? and The Start of Something are published by Orion.
