Open Clasp is the North East’s only professional all-female theatre company. It works in collaboration with local women to create pieces informed by their lived experience. It aims to build women’s aspirations and give them a stronger voice within communities and among policy makers, which it does by collaborating with community groups to run issue-based drama workshops with women and girl’s groups.
The company’s approach is needs rather than issue-led: the direction the workshops take are decided by the group working collectively.
Gill has been involved in women’s activism – raising awareness, organising feminist conferences, and setting up the first refuges, rape crisis centres, and incest survivor groups. In 1990 she co-founded the Violence Against Women Research Group (now the Centre for Gender and Violence Research) that pioneered activist-based research and has become one of the world’s largest VAW research centres. She has led awareness-raising projects internationally, produced 120 publications (7 books, 5 practical guides, training manuals and programmes, activist materials & professional papers), and delivered training/awareness-raising for more than 25 years.
Gill has extended her impact internationally. She has researched ‘honour’-based violence in Iraqi Kurdistan, and this research has led to direct awareness-raising work with Kurdish women. She has also worked on transnational projects for raising awareness of VAW with Indian women, and worked on other awareness-raising projects around the world.
Nominees
Catherine McArevey
Fiona Elvines
Sonja Freebody
The Haven Way
Restored