Staff Profiles

Jan Ryan - Director
janryan@ukarts.com

Jan Ryan has been working in the arts for over thirty years, having been initially inspired to go into the business by seeing 7/84's production of John Arden's play, The Ballygombeen Bequest at the Edinburgh Festival in the seventies.

Prior to this, she spent a year as a trainee fashion buyer in Harrods, organised second mortgages for the Commercial Bank of Wales and taught English and Drama in further education.

Her first arts job was with The Tramshed in Woolwich, as publicity officer. From there she moved to Interaction where she ran Dogg's Troupe. At the same time, she did a postgraduate diploma in Arts Administration at City University -one of the very few arts administration courses in existence at that time.

She then moved to the Half Moon Theatre as Programmer and Administrator for the Old Half Moon in Aliey Street and Publicity and Marketing Officer for both venues. This was followed by a spell running the Half Moon Young People's Theatre.

She spent a couple of years with the Women's Theatre Group (later to become Sphinx) where she learnt how to run a touring theatre company. She left Women's Theatre Group to move to Worcester, where she headed up Worcester Arts Workshop for a year, handled the publicity and marketing for the English String Orchestra, as well as taking on freelance directing, writing, teaching and administration contracts.

After a short spell as temporary Touring Officer at West Midlands Arts, she was invited to set up the touring department at Birmingham Rep, which she did for several years, instigating an exchange with Birmingham Rep in Alabama and taking the company's work to venues of all scales throughout the UK as well as to France and Germany.

In 1992, she set up UK Arts International.

In addition to her work with UKAI, Jan has also been international consultant for the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, South Africa, Theatre Royal Stratford East and the Danish Performing Arts Market. She has run workshops through the British Council and Visiting Arts for artists and producers in Zimbabwe and South Africa, has contributed to a publication on BME theatre and given papers at arts conferences around the world.