John Edward McGrath (born 5 September 1962) is a British artistic director and chief executive of

Manchester International Festival The Manchester International Festival is a biennial international arts festival, with a specific focus on original new work, held in the English city of Manchester and run by Factory International. The festival is a biennial event, first taking ...

Early life

John Edward McGrath was born 5 September 1962 in

Mold A mold () or mould () is one of the structures certain fungi can form. The dust-like, colored appearance of molds is due to the formation of spores containing fungal secondary metabolites. The spores are the dispersal units of the fungi. Not ...

North Wales North Wales ( cy, Gogledd Cymru) is a region of Wales, encompassing its northernmost areas. It borders Mid Wales to the south, England to the east, and the Irish Sea to the north and west. The area is highly mountainous and rural, with Snowdonia N ...

and grew up in

Liverpool Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough in Merseyside, England. With a population of in 2019, it is the 10th largest English district by population and its metropolitan area is the fifth largest in the United Kingdom, with a populat ...

Education

McGrath gained his Ph.D. from the New York University Graduate School of Arts and Science in 1999.

Career

As a development officer McGrath founded Arts Integrated Merseyside (AIM), a disability arts organisation based in Liverpool, which later became DaDaFest. He also worked as a theatre director in New York, including working as an associate director for

Mabou Mines Mabou Mines is an experimental theatre company founded in 1970 and based in New York City. Founding and history Mabou Mines was founded by David Warrilow, Lee Breuer, Ruth Maleczech, JoAnne Akalaitis, and Philip Glass, at the house of Akalait ...

. He then became the artistic director of the

Contact Theatre Contact is an arts organisation in Manchester, England that focuses on youth leadership. History Contact was founded in 1972 by Barry Sheppard (General Manager of what was then Manchester University Theatre) and Hugh Hunt (Professor of Drama) ...

in Manchester (1999-2008) and the founding artistic director at National Theatre Wales (NTW) (2009 - end of 2015). During his time at the NTW the actor

Michael Sheen Michael Christopher Sheen OBE (born 5 February 1969) is a Welsh actor, television producer and political activist. After training at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), he worked mainly in theatre throughout the 1990s with stage rol ...

starred in and was creative director of ''The Passion'', a 72-hour secular passion play staged in Sheen's hometown of

Port Talbot Port Talbot (, ) is a town and community in the county borough of Neath Port Talbot, Wales, situated on the east side of Swansea Bay, approximately from Swansea. The Port Talbot Steelworks covers a large area of land which dominates the south ...

, Wales with over 1,000 local residents taking part.

It Gets Better Project

In 2013 McGrath was interviewed alongside a number of other theatre practitioners in Wales for the

It Gets Better Project It Gets Better is an Internet-based 501(c)3 nonprofit with a mission to uplift, empower, and connect lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) youth around the globe. It was founded in the United States by gay activist, author, m ...

. The project was set up in response to the suicides of teenagers who were bullied because they were gay or because their peers suspected that they were gay. In the video he states, "I knew that I didn't quite fit in with the right way to be a boy...If you can find ways to be strong and to ask for help when you need help, then people are out there to help you. ... Don't worry also if you don't fit into the new 'profit pattern' of what it is to be gay, there are places and spaces to be a bit different, even from that." 20 seconds in, 03:10 minutes in and 3:56 minutes in. Retrieved 2 February 2017.

Awards

* 2005 Cultural Leadership Award from the National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (NESTA) * 2015 Honorary Doctorate from the

Open University The Open University (OU) is a British public research university and the largest university in the United Kingdom by number of students. The majority of the OU's undergraduate students are based in the United Kingdom and principally study off- ...

Books

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ProQuest.
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References

External links

Manchester International Festival
* {{DEFAULTSORT:McGrath, John 1962 births Artistic directors British chief executives Disability rights activists from the United Kingdom LGBT theatre directors Living people New York University alumni