Amy Hailwood is a director, theatre-maker and Applied Theatre facilitator based in Manchester. She creates dynamic, moving and richly textured, contemporary theatre for social change.
A quality of hybridity is fundamental to Amy’s perspective and practice, which crosses conventional boundaries of professional and community theatre to enrich both. This ability to see things from multiple points of view at once, stems from the key life experience of being raised in various places outside of the UK.
She is highly versatile and has directed a range of work, including youth and community casts of fifteen to twenty people, new writing, devised, physical and immersive theatre, as well as assisting on several main house shows. Directing credits include: Joy Unspeakable (5 venue tour, 2024), Re: Discover Festival (Streetwise Opera & Bridgewater Hall, 2024), Today These Streets Are Ours (Royal Exchange Den, 2023), Remote (Octagon Theatre Bolton & Lowry, 2022), XYV (Hope Mill Theatre, 2021), The Present (Octagon Theatre Bolton, 2019), After Birth (Co:LAB, Royal Exchange Manchester, 2018), Memories of Partition, (Royal Exchange Manchester, 2017), Faraway, So Close (Old Fire Station, Oxford, 2014). Assistant Directing credits: Parliament Square (Royal Exchange Theatre and Bush, 2017, dir. Jude Christian), A Christmas Carol (Octagon Theatre Bolton, 2017, dir. Ben Occhipinti).
Amy has extensive experience of facilitating theatre workshops with children, young people and older adults, as well as various marginalised groups. She has worked with the Octagon Theatre Bolton, Streetwise Opera, Collective Encounters and many others in this capacity. She is also Artistic Director of theatre-for-social-change company Ordinary Glory, a mentor for Arts Emergency and a member of SDUK.
Running through the varied subject, form and scale of Amy’s work, is a desire to relate to audiences and participants as citizens not consumers, and an invitation to enter into risky conversations within a safe, playful space. She likes to think of this as the theatre of hospitality and encounter, and everyone is invited to the party!
“At its best, theatre is a fun, experimental party, full of wildly different guests whose creative encounters spark electricity that flows out and transforms the world.”
