Claire Shovelton

Claire is a London-based creative producer, consultant and mentor in the performing arts with over 35 years professional experience in theatre, opera, dance and classical music including the Barbican, the Young Vic, Riverside Studios, operafactory, the Royal Ballet and Opera, Sadlers Wells, Early Opera Company, Britten-Pears Arts and the commercial West End.

As a freelance creative producer she collaborates with artistic director Stuart King (since 2002) for the award-winning ensemble CHROMA, and for the last 20 years she has been involved in various roles at Tête à Tête. With both of these she is very involved in the area of new work, collaborating with the creators of pieces for performance, and mentoring.

Claire also has a focus on inclusive practice and supporting people to thrive in her performing arts work. This includes Creative Producing Quiet Songs (Finn Beames & Company) and BEAM (Nadine Benjamin) both addressing equity, collaborative processes and access provision in live performance practice, and Rough for Opera, the series that develops opera practitioners and new works, currently with a focus on disabled composers and librettists.

Claire is consultant and event producer with Citizens of the World, the UK’s leading refugee choir. She serves as a chair of choral theatre company Filament and as a trustee for Fly On The Wall (the original pop-up film studio system for classical music).

As a photographer Claire specialises in production photos of studio-scale live performance. Commissions for visuals for performance include David Gorton’s audio-visual piece Burgh Castle (The Forge, Camden and Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival), and CHROMA’s Awakening programme combining Renaissance and contemporary music. Her video installation Towards Light - exploring accompanying non-human species through the lens of moths - a collaboration with Dr Katherine Pogson, was exhibited at the Lumen Gallery Bethnal Green, Proposition Studios Camden, and was stimulus for CHROMA’s music, art and lepidoptery project in Fair Isle.