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Portland contemporary Irish theater company Corrib Theatre has announced a new artistic director. Holly Griffith will succeed founding artistic director Gemma Whelan, who will step down July 15.
“I’m thrilled to pass on the artistic director position to Holly Griffith, who we found after an international search (Holly is from the U.S. but was living in Ireland),” Whelan said in a statement released by Corrib via email. “Holly’s love of and knowledge of Irish theatre and her commitment to community building, will help to steer Corrib in the years ahead.”
Griffith will serve alongside Karl Hanover (who has been Corrib’s managing director since March). “What excites me most about Corrib is the commitment Gemma has made to producing works by emerging, underrepresented, and diverse Irish playwrights, and I am dedicated to continuing that legacy,” she wrote in the email.
Additionally, Griffith says she hopes “to enrich Corrib’s connections to communities both locally and globally whose stories are represented on our stages, and to use our resources to examine the intersectionality of Irish identity.”
The search for a new artistic director has some twists and turns. Last October, Corrib announced that Justine Nakase, who was the company’s community engagement director at the time, would succeed Whelan in January 2022. However, by the end of 2021, Nakase was no longer working for Corrib and the company was still seeking a successor to Whelan.
Overall, 2022 has been a successful year for Corrib. Writing last month about the company’s most recent production, Kissing the Witch (a new take on classic fairy tales like The Little Mermaid), WW’s Morgan Shaunette called the play “a wonder to behold—unabashedly feminist, fairly queer, and ultimately a reminder of why stories like this matter and continue to resonate centuries after they were put to page.”