Claire Doherty is a creative director, writer and producer. She makes ambitious work for specific places — work that unfolds outdoors and over time, and grows from the people, histories and conditions of a location.

She works through House Dog, her studio for new work rooted in place across sound, performance and screen. Most recently, she wrote and directed Still the Hours (2025) for Hampton Court Palace: an after-dark sound work moving through sixteen spaces, co-created with composer James Bulley and performed by Miranda Richardson, Kathryn Hunter, Olive Gray and Ayesha Dharker. Drawing on the lives of the palace’s female residents and workers across four hundred years, the work was developed through a design process led by visually impaired collaborators.

In 2022, she devised and led the creative direction of GALWAD, a story of Wales in 2052 told in real time over seven days, in Welsh, English and BSL, across live performance, social media, film and broadcast. Made with National Theatre Wales and a consortium of Welsh companies, it was broadcast on Sky Arts, nominated for a Rose d’Or and selected as a finalist in the SXSW Innovation Awards.

From 2002 to 2017, Claire founded and led Situations, the Bristol-based producing organisation working internationally. Over fifteen years, she directed and produced work with coastal communities in the South West and across New Zealand, in a forest outside Oslo, on a glacier in the High Arctic and in the shell of a bomb-damaged church. She directed Theaster Gates’ first UK public work, Sanctum; founded and produced Future Librarywith artist Katie Paterson, a hundred-year literary commission for Oslo; and conceived and directed The Tale across three coastal Devon communities with writer Philip Hoare.

As Director of Arnolfini from 2017 to 2019, she rebuilt the artistic programme through new partnerships in performance, music and visual arts, with a particular focus on emerging, LGBTQ+ and Black-led practice. She also initiated Imagine New Rules and the Bristol Culture Standard, two projects asking how a twenty-first-century arts organisation — and the workforce around it — might operate differently.

Alongside her own work, Claire advises cultural organisations, artists and leadership teams on artistic vision, commissioning, partnerships and organisational change. From 2025 to 2026, she was Executive Adviser to LIFT (London Festival of International Theatre) during its transition to Battersea Arts Centre.

She has written and edited books and essays on art, place and public life, including Out of Time, Out of Place: Public Art Now (shortlisted for Art Book of the Year 2015), Documents of Contemporary Art: Situation and Where Strangers Meet for the British Council.

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