3 Rivers Storytelling Festival

• Suzanne Hogan is a native Australian now settled in Athlone.She trained at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts and has worked in theatres internationally. She investigates via performance how people understand their culture and society through stories, play and dance.She has enjoyed a year long residency in Athlone’s Dean Crowe Theatre as well as several Director- in-Schools programmes as part of Westmeath County Councils Arts initiative. She has done several community projects for the Percent for Arts Scheme working with international choreographers Jeannine Maguire-Lowry and Rionach Ni Neill.

• Liz Weir has worked with all age groups for over thirty years promoting the traditional art for which Ireland is world famous. A children’s librarian by training, she now travels the world telling stories to adults and children, organising workshops on storytelling, and speaking at courses for parents, teachers and librarians. She was the first winner of the International Storybridge Award for “exemplary work in promoting storytelling between Ireland and other countries”. She is the director of the Ulster Storytelling Festival and has been a featured teller at major festivals in Ireland, England, Scotland and in the U.S.

• Danielle Allison comes from an educational background. She has worked with children in schools, libraries and festivals all over Ireland. Danielle tells a wide range of stories, which often involve audience participation. She is a founder member of The Dublin Yarnspinners .Now settled in Athlone, she is committed to bringing the t

raditional Artform of storytelling to the Midlands and is Director of the Three Rivers Storytelling Festival.

• Simone Schummelfeder grew up in the small German town of Beverungen Weserbergland. Her father inspired in her a love of stories early on. At university she learned the power of storytelling as a teaching tool. In 2006 she spent the summer studying with renowned Irish teller Liz Weir. She and her

sister are the authors of a book for children titled Ruprecht Storchschnabel -die Abenteuer des zu vorletzt Geborenen der Elfen (Rupert Stork-beak – The Adventures of the Last of the Last-born of the elves).

• Liz Warren, a fourth-generation Arizonan, is the direcotor of the South Mountain Community College Storytelling Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. She has performed nationally and in Ireland and England. Representing SMCC, she is the producer of the annual Mesa Storytelling Festival in Mesa, Arizona. Her new textbook, The Oral Tradition Today: An Introduction to the Art of Storytelling was published in 2008. Every summer she comes to Ireland to teach “The Irish Storytelling Tradition” as part of Mesa Community College’s Study Abroad Ireland Program.

• Aideen McBride often used storytelling in her at Primary School in Ballymun, Dublin,Now a full time storyteller She has told her stories at the National Museum in Dublin, Cultra Folk Museum in Belfast and at many, many

summer festivals. Her stories, sad and funny by turns, include yarns and folktales handed down to her by her father in Carlow. She loves to include her audience in the stories, many of which have a participatory element. Audiences of all ages will enjoy the spell Aideen weaves with her imaginative and warm delivery of these stories from the Irish tradition.