Margaret Sheehy was born in Australia but has spent almost thirty years in the UK. She is a cultural animateur with a background in theatre as a director, writer and producer. The particular focus of her work is in the nature of community engagement and participatory practice, and in the development of arts and cultural policy.

Working in Sydney in the 1970’s she established an innovative young peoples’ theatre group before becoming Sydney’s first community drama director. Moving to the UK in 1976 she set up her own theatre company and worked on the London fringe as a director and producer. Progressively her work extended across the UK into small and large-scale community and participatory projects and festivals.

For more than two decades she has championed participatory arts practice, lobbying the arts funding establishment for recognition of the work and training other practitioners. In the mid 90s she led on a major bid to the Arts Lottery, which resulted in a five-year project to collate and establish the Community Plays Archive and Database, now lodged with the Theatre Museum.

She has a strong commitment to training and individual development. In the 1980s she headed the Directors Guild Symposium on Director Training that led to a Gulbenkian Foundation review and a radical change in the provision for director training. She was also instrumental in that decade’s campaigns for more equality of opportunity for women in theatre. She continues to mentor and to support younger practitioners, and to teach and train others.

More recently her work has focused on cultural policy and on the intersection of participatory arts and social change. She gained a doctorate in Community and Celebration and currently works as a consultant and project manager across the arts, local government, the education sector, the heritage sector and social change programmes. In recent years she has headed a year-long millennium festival programme in the East End, launched the first two London Creative Partnership zones and convened the Lower Lea Valley cultural consultation for the London 2012 Olympics.