Artists in Bradford will create new projects from moving theatre and immersive dance to community zines and landscape painting exhibitions thanks to Bradford Culture Company, the charity who delivered Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture.
The company has announced the artists and projects who will benefit from the 2026 round of its Artist Awards programme, which will invest in local creative talent, enabling artists to develop their practice whilst creating more opportunities for people in the region to experience and participate in arts and culture.
The projects and artists for the 2026 Artist Awards are:
- Vespertine Garden by artists Amy and Emma-Jo Bairstow (pictured, right) is a project engaging young people with biodiversity loss and environmental stewardship. This will result in an immersive installation of UV-lit sculptural plants and creatures, which will transform South Square Centre into a glowing, twilight landscape.
- Writer, director and artist Kamal Kaan’s (left) TO LEAVE THIS SOIL ALTERED is a devised live installation performance combining contemporary dance, music and poetic storytelling. The work explores love, resilience and belonging – imagining growth as both a biological and human act.
- Theatre artist, dancer, choreographer Joachim Keke will premiere The Memory House, an immersive Afro-diasporic dance-theatre experience exploring memory, migration, identity and belonging through movement, sound and participation.
- Zine artist Munaza Kulsoom will create Gardens of Frizinghall, an exhibition and series of zines created with South Asian residents, capturing the ingenuity and beauty of gardens in the area through photography, interviews and workshops.
- Poet, lyricist and theatre maker Kauser Mukhtar will use the award to explore the creation of a new piece of multilingual community theatre using puppetry based on a satirical poem by famous Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, working with a creative team and local communities.
- Writer and performer Kirsty Taylor’s site-specific theatre show Birth Mum is a hyper-naturalistic, gripping, funny and heartfelt drama that explores the lives of women who have had their children removed. It will be created in collaboration with women’s services professionals and those with lived experience of child removal.
- Independent dance artist Ella Tighe’s Fierce Little Things is a research & development led-project into a new dance-theatre show that will be co-created with a local cast of 16-21 years old competitive Disco Freestyle exploring girlhood and ambition in young women.
- Landscape painter Anji Timlin will make a new body of her largest and most ambitious paintings to date inspired by two rewilding, post-industrial rivers of Bradford, with two separate exhibitions in Keighley and Ilkley under the banner of CONDUIT.
Jenny Harris, director of programme at Bradford Culture Company said “Through our UK City of Culture programme we were proud to support over 1,000 creative practitioners based in Bradford District, some of which was through our 2025 Artist Awards programme. We’re so pleased to be able to continue this area of our work and further support our creative community.
The breadth of applications this year was fantastic, and it was a joy to see the enthusiasm and energy that shone through. The selected artists and projects really capture the spirit of Bradford, our storytelling, passion for nature, and want for our community and place to be embedded into the work we create. We can’t wait to see the outcomes.”
