Alastair MacLennan was born in Scotland and has lived and worked in Belfast, N. Ireland, since 1975. His achievements as an artist have had a significant influence on performance art, nationally and internationally.

Performing in diverse contexts, his works convey political, social and cultural conditions. His Actuations (performance/installations) seek to fuse interrelations.

His works have (also) been presented as part of Black Market International (in Europe, America, Canada, Asia, Mexico, etc.),  by Trace Gallery, Cardiff, by the National Review of Live Art, Glasgow, by Le Lieu, Quebec, by Bone International Performance Art Festival, Bern and through NIPAF in Japan. He represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 1997. 

He has works in private collections in America, Canada, Italy, Poland, Germany, Scotland, England, Ireland, Wales and in the public collection of the British Arts Council, England.

Amanda is an internationally recognised and critically acclaimed artist working across the medias of live art, performance, photography and video. She is one of the most dynamic and exciting contemporary visual artist’s practicing in the arena of performance. Her 2015 exhibition in the Dublin's Royal Hibernian Academy, I’ll sing you a song from around the Town, was described by Artforum as 'performance art at its best'.

Her extraordinary work is challenging, provocative and always visually stimulating. In 2010 the Irish Times said, 'Coogan, whose work usually entails ritual, endurance and cultural iconography, is the leading practitioner of performance in the country'. Her expertise lies in her ability to condense an idea to its very essence and communicate it through her body. Using gesture and context she makes allegorical and poetic works that challenge expected contexts.
Her works encompass a multitude of media; Objects, Text, Moving and Still Image but all circulate around her live performances. She is at the forefront of some of the most exciting and prolific durational performances to date. The long durational aspect of her presentations invites elements of chaos with the unknown and unpredicted erupting dynamically through her live artworks, She is first and foremost an embodied practionner. Her work often begins with her own body and challenges the expectations of the contexts, such as head banging to Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’, and signing the lyrics to Gill Scott-Heron’s ‘The Revolution will not be Televised’. Her work moves freely between solo presented live performances, group performances and living installation. 

Connolly is a multi-media artist who has created artworks, which often relate to their context and reflect on current socio-political issues. He employs a range of artistic processes, including Performance Art, Installation, Drawing & Printing, Film Making, Collaboration, etc. Since the early 1990’s he has created solo, collaborative and group performances, interactive public performances, durational works etc. He has performed & exhibited in diverse contexts throughout Europe, in North America and Asia. He developed the performance genre ‘Install-action’ in the early 1990’s and has created a series of interactive Market Stall Performances, in which he tries to sell a series of surreal, satirical, political and humorous objects, or engage the public in humorous or optical processes.  

Between 1995-2022, Connolly was an Associate Lecturer in Fine Art, in the Belfast School of Art at the Ulster University, Belfast. 

He has initiated and curated events and visual art projects nationally and internationally and remains committed to artist run initiatives and organizations throughout Ireland including: Bbeyond, The Sculptors Society of Ireland, Visual Artists Ireland, Circa, Flaxart etc. He was a co-founder of Bbeyond and established the annual Belfast International Festival of Performance Art from 2013 - 2022.

Emma Brennan is an interdisciplinary artist working predominantly in performative practices including multi-media installation, moving image and collaborative processes. Based in Belfast and originally from Dublin, her practice finds public outcomes in exhibitions and festivals locally, nationally and internationally. Brennan is a current board member of Bbeyond, Belfast and Live Art Ireland, Tipperary. She is also the founder of QRIT Belfast, a queer crit group. 

Recent works include her solo exhibition It Is & I Am (2024) at Belfast Exposed Gallery, on a cultural exchange with MOCA, Yinchuan, China (2024). Brennan was the sole recipient of the Cathedral Quarter Arts Visual Arts Bursary for 2024/25.

Cork-based artists Irene Murphy and Mick O'Shea combine sculptural installations with sound and drawing performances for which they use improvisation, play and chance procedures. In 2003, they formed Domestic Godless with Stephen Brandes to pursue absurdist adventures in a culinary landscape. In 2010, they created Strange Attractor with sound artists Danny McCarthy, Anthony Kelly and David Stalling. Projects with both collectives have seen them touring Ireland and performing across Europe as well as in Tasmania, Japan and the USA. While in Paris they are recording sounds for future projects and finalising a Ulysses 100 commission for MoLI in Dublin.

Sally O’Dowd is an award winning visual artist who makes performance, drawing, film and experimental drawing sessions that explore identity and women’s roles in contemporary Irish society. Her socially engaged, site-responsive practice uses drawing as process and live documentation.

Recent projects include Border Biennale 2025, Beuys 50 Years Later (Ulster Museum), Array Collective’s Lay of the Land, and documenting the Good Friday Agreement 25th Anniversary and Breastival Festival of Breastfeeding.

She leads experimental drawing workshops for institutions including the Ulster Museum, Conversations Festival for National Trust Mountstewart, and NI Mental Health Arts Festival.

Her artwork can be found in the Historic Royal Palaces, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and the Northern Ireland Civil Service collections.

A former creative co-director of Townhall Cavan Arts Space, and founding member of Vault Artist Studios, Belfast, Sally is actively involved in curating exhibitions and public programmes.

Sandra Johnston’s artworks often involve exploring the aftermath of trauma through acts of commemoration that exist as forms of live testimony and empathetic receptiveness. Her performances are experiential in nature, based on improvisational processes that explore physical states of responsiveness, formed in relation to the actualities of specific situations and the moment of making. Actions are assembled using mainly found objects, each offering the Johnston different kinds of tactile stimulation, informing through memory and haptic perception – as opposed to conceptual devising. The performances are intended as propositions, whereby the audience observes the emergence of latent relationships between materials and gestures, offered as ‘provisional behaviors’ and existing unapologetically as irrational, incomplete and mutable encounters.

Johnston has held several teaching and research posts including the AHRC Research Fellowship at the University Of Ulster, Belfast (2002), the ‘Ré Soupault’ Guest Professorship at the Bauhaus University, Weimar (2007), and is currently Course Leader of the BxNU MFA at Northumbria University, England. In 2013, Johnston published a PhD research project entitled, Beyond Reasonable Doubt: An Investigation into Concepts of Doubt, Risk and Testimony Explored Through Consideration of Performance Art Processes in Relation to Systems of Legal Justice. Frequently, her work emerges through intensive collaborative relationships, and this interest in collective creativity extends to a long-term involvement in the development of performance art networks.

Thomas Wells is an artist and curator based between the UK and Ireland. Thomas' work centres on socially engaged practice often involving LGBTQIA+ history and experience. Documentary, events and performance are often employed to explore themes of domestic ritual and hospitality. 

Recent projects include ‘A Queer Dander’ (2025) a film project on the history of Belfast Pride, and ‘It’s Turned Out Nice Again’ (2024) an installation and performance series on the theme of biography and nostalgia. Thomas is a member of Array Collective, founder of SAM’S EDEN and committee member for Belfast International Festival of Performance Art.

Bbeyond is committed to promoting the practice of performance art and artists in Northern Ireland and further afield. Our aim is to raise people’s consciousness of live/performance art as being integral to the world in and around us, inspiring reflection and enriching lived experience.

STAR FINCH writes in the genre of the experimental-weirdo-porno. They do research on vomit and dildos as literary technologies. They are currently working on a book of concrete poems called AsshOle. Their recent books include Fuck Me Judith (After 8 Books, 2025), Crache dans ma bouche puis crache dans mon autre bouche (Les petites matins, 2024), and contributions to Kathy Acker: Get Rid of Meaning (Walther Konig, 2023) and Kathy Acker 1971-1975 (Editions Ismael, 2019). They also perform solo and collectively, mainly about themes of sexual practices, poetry, theory, and explicit sex.

MATHIS PERRON is a French artist born in 1995 and graduated from the Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2019. He lives and works between Paris and Charente Maritime, where he cultivates a garden of aromatic and medicinal plants. Drawing on this relationship with living things, he develops radical and sensitive research on the consequences of integrating plant logic into culture through drawing, sculpture, video, performance and writing. Interested in collective projects and the transmission of knowledge, Mathis Perron is involved in various associative and educational initiatives for which he frequently gives workshops. His works have been shown in various galleries, artist-run spaces, museums and art centres in France and abroad, such as Lafayette Anticipation, Palais de Tokyo, Le Louvre, Kohta Galerie, Glassbox and The Community Centre.

PAUL LEPETIT is a French artist born in 1995 and graduated from the Beaux-Arts in Normandy (Caen) in 2019. He lives and works in Paris. At the heart of his work lies a certain look. It is an amused gaze that contemplates the world in which he grew up. At first glance, we see simple shapes and rough gestures that all stem from a fascination with these hesitant figures. This repertoire is linked to society and his walks, creating an impression of the strangely identifiable. Like a right-handed person using their left hand, he revels in the fragility and naivety this creates. Paul gently allows himself to become ignorant, discovering the simple pleasure of intuition each day. A flower, a character, or even a noise becomes the backdrop to a new theatre, placing the visitor at the centre of the action. Different narratives are therefore possible for the same story, since the viewer is initiated into a space where each piece offers the freedom of its own interpretation. The stories that make up the pieces produced testify to a fascination with all aspects of our society. Figures become bodies wandering in poetic and grotesque fields of experimentation, acting out an absurd story.

ROZY SAPELKINE gleans stories from around them and, by recomposing them, reintegrates elements from popular traditions and diasporic narratives into new narratives. Like a traveling theater, they imagine work that takes shape in immersive installations - environments made of textiles, wood, drawings and videos. These spaces are counter-worlds that question dominant narratives.
Like a show that carries the audience away, Rozy plays with the archetypes of spectacle to engage in a dialogue with the collective imagination. By including in their work everyday symbols that emerge from the ground and from memory: fruits, vegetables and familiar figures - the letchi, the sweet potato, the scarecrow - become the heroes of a moving fiction. 

Artist-researcher SARAH ROSA most often works in collectives. Her practice is thus built through encounters and the sharing of our stories, experiences, skills and desires. Her research focuses on collective practices in art, on what brings us together and on co-creation. As co-founder of the Gufo collective, she experiments and develops her research around the banquet in a variety of forms, temporalities and invitations. With Gufo, they place the necessary act of eating at the centre of living, creating and celebrating. The aim is to question their conditions as artists, workers in the field of art and, more broadly, as workers.

Born in 1995, UGO BALLARA lives and works between Paris and Bagnolet. He creates texts and forms that often speak of architecture, confined spaces, infiltration, personal anxieties and collective actions. His practice focuses on parasitic places, objects and activities, the feeling of being both inside and outside, holes, tunnels and those who use them. At the intersection of writing, video, installation, sculpture and curating, his works are points of view, peephole devices that intrude, spread rumours and articulate strategies of resistance within places of power.

A graduate of the Sorbonne in History and Art History, then of the Beaux-Arts de Cergy (ENSAPC), he has been a member of Glassbox since 2019, an organisation supporting young creators through research, production and dissemination programmes. He has also been part of Kim Petras Painting since 2021, a collective of varying sizes bringing together artists around the issues of fan art, whose works are dedicated to German pop star Kim Petras. His work has been shown in exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo, Frac Île-de-France, Bétonsalon, Treize, Le Sample and Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers. He also composes music for artists and writes texts for exhibitions.

Zofia Kuligowska (she/her) is a performance artist and doctoral researcher at the Academy of Art in Szczecin. Her practice centers on performance and language as interconnected mediums for exploring neurodivergence, empathy, and collective care. She has presented work internationally and lived and created in Romania, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland, and Norway.

In 2024, she realized Cycling is My Love Language, a processual performance and research journey from Poland to Dublin, meeting neurodivergent artists across borders. These connections became the foundation of THE ANCHOR, a collective of neurodivergent artists working digitally as part of INCLUDE+ (University of Leeds), which develops ethical, trust-based models of collaboration.

Together with Wojtek Bernatowicz and Michal Szota, Kuligowska co-creates the trio Rudger Power, producing immersive text-based and auditory performances that blend sound, storytelling, and live presence. Her work celebrates the multidimensionality of neurodivergence and seeks to build connections across boundaries.