Public Service Broadcasting featuring NASUWT Riverside Band & Felling Male Voice Choir: Durham Brass Festival 2024

A moving concert in Durham Cathedral by Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) featuring NASUWT Riverside Band & Felling Male Voice Choir opened this year’s Durham BRASS Festival. PSB, inspired by archive film footage, performed the album Every Valley in its entirety for the first time live on stage. Chronicling the demise of coal, it proved an emotional commemoration of the miners’ strike. Paul Smith (Maximo Park) performed as soloist with Welsh singer Lisa Jên Brown. The brass band’s set included Ave Maria, Pomp and Circumstance and Gresford, the ‘miners’ hymn’ composed by Hebburn-born Robert Saint. The concert was introduced by Ross Forbes of Durham Miners’ Association.

Hopetown Darlington

The new visitor attraction opened on July 16 and attracted more than 51,000 visitors in just two months, all in good time to celebrate the great day nearly 200 years ago - September 27, 1825 – when Locomotion No. 1 became the first steam locomotive to haul a passenger train on a public railway, the Stockton & Darlington Railway. Hopetown Darlington recalls that moment and all that followed while aiming to inspire future innovators. With £35m of funding, a seven and a half acre site has become a network of free attractions housed in buildings accommodating more than 30,000 historic objects.

Alexandra Carr and Colin Rennie

Sunderland-based artists Alexandra Carr and Colin Rennie collaborate as Torus Torus Studios, exploring their shared interest in the synergies between art and science. This year their kinetic sculpture Only Breath, a commission by The Science Museum in London, was installed as the centrepiece of Energy Revolution: The Adani Green Energy Gallery, looking at energy supply. The majestic artwork, incorporating reclaimed mirrors, recyclable stainless steel and timber from trees felled by storm Arwen, hangs above visitors and appears to breathe. Only Breath reminds visitors of the delicate balance we must maintain in our pursuit of a greener, more sustainable future.

Every Child a Filmmaker: The Young Women's Film Academy, INTO Film & Westgate Hill Primary School

The Young Women’s Film Academy was founded by volunteers in 2018 to get young people involved in storytelling through film and digital media. It runs a Saturday and holiday clubs for 12 to 19-year-olds and a 16-plus group called Future Lasses in Film for those wanting to create their own projects. In July, as part of INTO Film’s Every Child a Filmmaker programme, the Academy and a Future Lasses in Film participant worked for a week with 12 children from Westgate Hill Primary School, Arthur’s Hill, to create a stop motion animation to be shown in Newcastle’s Everyman Cinema as part of the INTO Film festival.

Young Musicians Project

Sunderland aspires to be recognised worldwide as a Music City and its credentials are bolstered by the Young Musicians Project run by We Make Culture. It was founded by Laura Brewis to help young people develop the skills needed to perform, record and release music. Three groups meet weekly at Field Music Studio in Sunderland and there are regular get-togethers at Pop Recs. The young people get access to an instrument library and recording studios. The growing number of Young Musicians Project beneficiaries attracting wider attention – including Isabel Maria, shortlisted for Newcomer of the Year – suggests the word about Sunderland Music City will spread fast.

Hannah Walker

Hannah is a comedy performer and theatre maker who performs regularly with theatre company The Six Twenty. Often finding material in her own life experiences, she had a hit with Gamble, co-created with Rosa Postlethwaite, at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. Informed by her experiences of gambling, from village hall bingo to discovering her partner was a compulsive gambler, it was billed, tongue in cheek, as “a glittering, glamorous peek into the spectacular world of online gambling”. Audiences responded to the glitzy delivery and the serious issues raised, such as the stigma of addiction and the betting industry’s slick marketing.

Black Creatives and Arts Network

The Black Creatives and Arts Network, or BCAN, was established in 2022 by the upcoming generation of Taste of Africa North East (founded 21 years ago by immigrants and children of immigrants). It’s an important venture by young creatives dedicated to building confidence and gaining recognition for their talents. More than 60 people are part of BCAN and collectively they highlight the work of black creatives in Tees Valley through events, provide business support and create opportunities for networking and collaboration. They organise Taste of Africa events including the Black History Youth Awards and Miss Black History North East.

Isabel Maria

Sunderland-born singer-songwriter Isabel Maria has experience well beyond her 18 years. Steered towards music by a keyboard given to her by her grandfather, she has been writing songs since she was 11. She really rose to prominence with the release of her admired debut EP, The Melodramatic Milers Club. She also won a Young Northern Writers’ Award for her songwriting. This year she followed up by winning the Alan Hull Award, named in memory of the Lindisfarne frontman, and embarking on a busy performance schedule, gigging solo and with her band across the North East and further afield.

Steam to Green: Discovery Museum & Various partners

Discovery Museum, which tells the story of Tyneside aided by important science and industry collections, devised Steam to Green: A North East Energy Revolution (on until September 2026) to showcase moves to ensure a sustainable future. Alongside pioneering research by Newcastle University, it features inspiring stories from its collections and those of businesses connected to green energy, thereby speaking of hope in the face of the climate crisis. One aim is to inspire young people to pursue careers in the green energy sector. Nineteen businesses contributed stories and objects, including a cutaway electric car and subsea cables, and five gave financial support.

Christina Berriman Dawson

Christina, widely known as an actor, emerged as an accomplished writer with A Class Feeling, a play born of music - or, to be precise, Makina, a techno sub-genre popular in the more energetic corners of the North East dance scene. This is Makina! was a project launched in 2023 at the Customs House, South Shields, in which Christina and others worked with young Makina fans to shape a piece of ‘gig theatre’. Its popularity ensured a follow-up and Christina’s hard-hitting yet deftly crafted play premiered this year, telling of wannabe MC Justin who is riddled with insecurities and grieving for his mother.

Fat Chance

Rachel Stockdale, who wrote and performs Fat Chance, introduces herself on the website as “a fat, benefit class actor & theatre-maker from Middlesbrough.” She’s no less sparing of herself on stage where she has a parmo (a calorie-laden Teesside delicacy) flung at her, squeezes into a too-tight wedding dress and relates with gusto the challenges she has faced. Three things that’ll be held against an aspiring actor, she notes, is that that person be northern, fat and female. Rachel’s play has been a salutary hit. Her willingness to be vulnerable in front of strangers, and clever and funny with it, deserves a standing ovation.

Middlesbrough Art Week 2024

September’s seventh Middlesbrough Art Week, given the title In The Now And the Far, animated the town’s galleries and public spaces with an ambitious programme of exhibitions, performances and events. The North East Open Call, mounted in a former B&M store in the Dundas Arcade, featured the work of eight exceptional artists in a range of media including sculpture, ceramics and photography. The New Graduate Award showcased artists poised on the threshold of promising careers. There were contributions from international artists such as Francis Alÿs, Kyriaki Goni and Karrabing Film Collective and new commissions by Natasha Thembiso Ruwona and Alia Gargum.

Julie Milne

Julie Milne has worked for Tyne & Wear Museums & Art Galleries, now known as North East Museums, for more than 20 years. She became the Laing’s first female curator and since 2012 has been chief curator of art galleries. She is responsible for the creative direction and strategic vision of each gallery, guiding and inspiring her close-knit team, and this she has done brilliantly through often difficult times, negotiating financial constraints and Covid. Originally from Wallsend, she is North East through and through and a champion of the region’s art and its power to enthral and educate – and always mindful of the need to instil in young people an appreciation of their cultural heritage. The Laing Art Gallery had no art of its own when it first opened in 1904. Now it has an internationally significant collection which is patently in good hands.

Congratulations to Julie, the recipient of this year’s award for an outstanding contribution to the region’s cultural life.