Galway Arts Festival

Founded in 1978, Galway Arts Festival is Ireland’s leading multi-disciplinary arts festival, incorporating theatre, spectacle, dance, visual arts, music, literature and comedy created by artists from Australia, Austria, China, France, Holland, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, New Zealand, Romania, Russia, the UK and the USA. Since its inception, the Festival has become a platform for Irish and International art of the highest quality and is now established as one of Europe’s key cultural events. The Festival has been an important catalyst for artistic development in Galway. It has prompted an awareness of and created a sustained demand for the performing and visual arts. It has helped to realise an improvement in the city’s arts venue infrastructure, acted as a stimulus for artistic innovation and provided a pivotal springboard for many artistic careers. It has also been a seedbed for a large number of dynamic, innovative arts organisations in Galway.