AIC Scheme Bursary Award 2026 Recipients: Jijo Sebastian and Sophie Hutchinson

Create is pleased to announce Jijo Sebastian and Sophie Hutchinson as the recipients of the 2025 Artist in the Community Scheme Bursaries.

Jijo Sebastian is an India (Kerala)-born, Dublin-based collaborative filmmaker working between socially engaged amateur fictional cinema and transcultural authorship. He intends to use the bursary period to research and develop PATA: a Participatory, Arthouse, Transcultural and Amateur-facing methodology for collaborative filmmaking, to test how film enthusiasts excluded from the industry can become genuine co-authors; and to critically reflect, research, work with mentors, study AI/accessible tools, and produce a shareable framework for socially engaged cinema that is rigorous, repeatable and festival-facing.

Sophie Hutchinson is a dance artist and movement practitioner working across live performance, moving image and participatory contexts. Her practice is rooted in inclusive, score-based improvisation and somatic enquiry. Sophie has her own experience of differences in hearing and auditory processing, and has long found movement and the body to be a natural way of communicating and making sense of the world. She hopes to use the bursary to spend time listening, learning and continuing to develop relationships with Deaf, deaf and hard-of-hearing communities, exploring communication, access, embodied knowledge and different forms of listening. The bursary will support dedicated time for studio practice, reflection and relationship-building, allowing this work to develop through genuine exchange and collaboration.

The purpose of the bursary award, part of the Arts Council’s Artist in the Community Scheme, which is managed by Create, is to support and nurture professional arts practice, for an artist in any art-form who has a track record of working collaboratively with communities of place or interest in the making and interpreting of art. This is a developmental bursary aimed at practitioners who are facing particular barriers and/or challenges in developing their collaborative socially engaged arts practice.

The bursary of €20,000 will provide the artists with time and resources to engage with and reflect on their practice. More particularly, it allows them to consider key questions associated with their collaborative arts practice and collaborative methodologies. In addition, this bursary award offers bi monthly mentoring support from Create and up to two mentoring sessions with one of the experienced collaborative socially engaged practitioners from the Artist Mentor Panel.

The award emphasises the value and benefit to an artist’s development of an extended process of engagement with their practice, and seeks to provide artists with the time and resources to think, research, reflect and engage deeply with their practice. We look forward to supporting Jijo and Sophie as they advance their bursary during 2027.

Panel

The panel which determined this award was chaired by Áine Crowley, Programme Manager, Arts and Engagement, and consisted of Tobi Bello, socially engaged artist + community worker, Siobhán Clancy, Assistant Arts Officer – Community Arts, Cork City Arts Office, and Eve Olney, socially engaged artist, activist, educator, curator.

Tatiana dos Santos, AIC Development Support, Create, observed and took minutes, and Karen Whelan, Participatory Arts Support Manager, was an observer.