CLAIRE DOHERTY

Claire Doherty is a creative director, writer and executive producer whose work moves across art, broadcast and literature. She is known for ambitious, genre-defying projects that unfold over time and place, and for work that foregrounds unheard voices and the hidden histories.

From 2002 to 2017, she founded and led Situations, one of the UK’s most influential arts producing organisations. During this period, she conceived and delivered major international projects, including Sanctum — a 552-hour non-stop public artwork — Theaster Gates’ first UK public project, and Future Library, the 100-year literature project for the City of Oslo. Her work during these years ranged from expeditions to the High Arctic to large-scale civic commissions, situated in public and often unconventional contexts. She authored The New Rules of Public Art and edited three volumes on contemporary art, place and civic life.

Much of Claire’s work has been concerned with public art, not as monument or embellishment, but as a way of thinking about time, attention and responsibility in public space. Her projects have explored what it means to place art in contested landscapes, to work at civic scale, and to remain accountable to place long after the moment of unveiling has passed.

From 2020 to 2022, she was Creative Director and Executive Producer of GALWAD, a trilingual, real-time multi-platform project for National Theatre Wales and Sky Arts that unfolded across live performance, social media and broadcast. The work was nominated for a 2023 SXSW Innovation Award and a 2023 Rose d’Or Award.

In 2025, she made her writing debut with Still the Hours, an immersive audio work for Hampton Court Palace co-created with composer James Bulley. Using spatial sound and performed by Miranda Richardson, Kathryn Hunter, Olive Gray and Ayesha Dharker, the piece gives voice to women and girls across four centuries and marked a turning point in Claire’s practice towards writing. Her current writing draws on this long engagement with public art and place, asking what remains — socially, ethically and emotionally — after the work itself has disappeared.

She was awarded an MBE for Services to the Arts in 2016, received the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Breakthrough Award in 2009, and is a BAFTA Connect member.

Claire’s current work sits at the intersection of writing, sound, place and long-form storytelling.