The Arts Council of Northern Ireland is asking artists and organisations that received emergency funding in the last 12 months to complete a short online survey to evaluate its impact on the sector.

With the support of the Department for Communities, the Arts Council has invested over £26m, through more than 3,000 grants, over the past year to support artist and arts organisations through the Covid-19 pandemic. 

The survey will help the Arts Council to build a complete picture of the current stability of the sector and support a case for future investment.

Artists and arts organisations in receipt of emergency funding will receive a link to the survey via an email from Social Market Research, inviting them to complete the survey. Respondents have until the 31st May to complete their survey.

The Arts Council has rounded up just some of the fantastic creative activities and performances you can enjoy online, most of which are funded by the Arts Council, the Dept for Communities and the National Lottery.

New highlights include: 

AVA May Festival 2021, supported by the Arts Council's Stability and Renewal Programme for Organisations, is a day of online performances and conversations on 28th May for electronic music fans and aspiring industry professionals. The main AVA festival takes place 24-25 Sept.

Seamus Heaney HomePlace presents 'The Great Book of Ireland; documentary screening and panel discussion' on 21 May. This 278-page single volume vellum manuscript contains the original work of 121 artists, 144 poets, and 9 composers. It includes poems by Seamus Heaney and  Michael D. Higgins.

Watch the Arts Council's Head of Community Arts & Education, Gilly Campbell, with her weekly roundup on NVTV here.

Building on the General Population Survey (November 2020) which looked at arts and culture engagement levels in Northern Ireland during the Covid-19 Pandemic, the Arts Council wanted to know more about people accessing the arts; in particular, those from socially deprived backgrounds, those with a disability, and ethnic minority groups.  
 
Thrive were commissioned to carry out this research to:

• Establish levels of engagement with the arts;
• Better understand the preferred methods of engagement; and
• Identify chill factors.

Belfast Book Festival returns from 10th-13th June with an online programme of live events for book lovers, covering everything from love and politics to Cinderella as a zombie!

Presented by the Crescent Arts Centre, highlights of the festival include Annie Macmanus (BBC Radio 1) unveiling her debut novel 'Mother, Mother' which is set in Belfast; Ian McElhinney ('Derry Girls') and literary biographer Roy Foster exploring the work of Seamus Heaney; Glenn Patterson ('The Northern Bank Job') in conversation with author Conor O'Callaghan; Colm Tóibín ('Brooklyn'), reading from 'Queer Love: An Anthology of Irish Fiction' and a special recorded performance from the official poet of the 2012 London Olympics, Lemn Sissay.

After being closed for most of last year, Belfast Exposed reopens its doors to the public with three show-stopping exhibitions (3rd June – 17th July).

The three exhibitions – 'Aeon', 'A Lightness of Touch' and 'Street View: Yan Wang Preston' - celebrate both international and local artists. Rickli's and Preston's work is underpinned by a concern and reverence for the environment and affirms Belfast Exposed's commitment to show work that focuses on environment issues.

Belfast Exposed, despite the covid-19 pandemic and multiple lockdowns, has spent the last year supporting and promoting new talent. The exhibition 'A Lightness of Touch' is a continuation of that commitment and essential work for the development of the photographic and art infrastructure of Northern Ireland.

The Arts Council NI has partnered with BBC Arts and The Space Arts to offer Northern Ireland artists, Alice McCullough, Shannon Yee and Joel Simon the opportunity to create new work as part of BBC Arts' Culture In Quarantine initiative.

The commissioning programme was established in a partnership between BBC Arts, Arts Council England, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Arts Council of Wales and Creative Scotland to mark the 25th anniversary of the passing of the Disability Discrimination Act into law. The commissions will champion the work of disabled artists by helping them produce work when some may have been self-isolating, and provide a platform to explore their experiences of living through Covid-19.

For the first time in Northern Ireland local authors who have experienced sexual violence will discuss how writing has offered them a form of trauma therapy in an online discussion hosted by Nexus, Northern Ireland's specialist sexual counselling charity.

A distinguished panel of local and international authors will speak of transforming their own lived experiences of sexual violence and abuse into different forms of literature, with a specific focus on the Northern Irish context. Jo Egan, Hilary McCollum and Shelley Tracey will be in conversation with author and activist Winnie M Li, who was violently raped in Belfast in 2008.

The free-to-attend event, on Thursday 20th May at 5pm, is part of a collaboration between Nexus and Clear Lines, the UK's first-ever festival dedicated to addressing sexual assault, abuse, and consent through the arts and discussion, and has been made possible by funding from the Arts Council NI. 

Arts Care, one of the leading arts, health and well-being organisations based in Northern Ireland, has been providing an online arts training programme to healthcare workers with the aim of upskilling staff and giving them the confidence to deliver arts activities to vulnerable older people in residential care settings. 

To date, 150 healthcare staff have signed up to take part in the training which is funded by The National Lottery, Baring Foundation and Public Health Agency, through the Arts Council of Northern Ireland's Arts and Older People Programme.

Watch the short Arts Council video

Music WorX incubates four teams and helps them to introduce new technologies into the music industry. The three-month incubation programme aims at start-ups and founders from the music and tech industry, from all over Europe. It supports four young companies to experiment with emerging technologies and applications. Music WorX focuses on the early stages of the idea generation process. It helps each team in fine-tuning their ideas and makes them ready for business. The teams also receive a financial grant.

Application deadline is 6 June 2021.

Keep up to date with the latest Coronavirus updates from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, including a list of potential funding sources which might be helpful to artists and arts organisations at this time. We will update this list as we go along. 

If you know of any other sources, please contact us at and we will share with the sector.