Romilly Walton Masters Awardee Announcement

We are delighted to announce that Venus Patel is the 2023 recipient of the Romilly Walton Masters Award for Experimental Performance, supported by the Centre Culturel Irlandais and Dublin Fringe Festival.

Working primarily in performance and film, Venus Patel graduated from TU Dublin with a BA in Fine Arts (First Class Honours) in 2022. She utilises humour, absurdity, and abjection to create multifaceted performances and experiences. Together with two other collaborators, Ciarán McGannon and Shauna Harris, Venus will work on a queer reimagining of the end of the world during her residency at the CCI. Drawing on their religious backgrounds, it is to be a transgressive work, subverting the hegemonic expectations of established religious and societal orders. A queer-led vision of a new world will be proposed, emphasising community and banishing conformity. 

Venus will be able to show the embryonic performance piece as a work-in-progress, before developing the final work with CCI and Dublin Fringe Festival in 2024.

This award, established in 2016 in memory of the late director, producer, scriptwriter and friend of the CCI, Romilly Walton Masters, supports the making of bold, innovative, experimental performance work in the fields of theatre, music, dance, film or visual art to be experienced by audiences in France and Ireland. The award is intended to enable experimental theatre and performance makers in their early careers.