Yvonne Coughlan

Writer/Director/Producer Yvonne Coughlan, MA Theater and Drama studies, UCC, from Kinsale, founded RSVP (Red Sandstone Varied Productions) in 2006, and has co-created arts participatory projects in short film and theater, site specific theater projects, inter-disciplinary performances, festival arts installations and community arts events in Ireland and internationally.

Yvonne has written, directed and produced live performances, musical theater, music videos, short film, art film, promotional tourism video, advertising video, documentary film and radio podcasts, in Ireland, England, Scotland, Greece, Norway, Poland, Germany, USA and Australia, and worked with creatives worldwide. Though her heart lies with the artistic direction of the actor on screen, stage, or in performance workshops, she is also a producer and casting director for both film and stage with credit highlights such as Writer of internationally multi-award winning unproduced dramatic micro-script, Regret; Casting Director and Line Producer for award winning short film 3 Friends, an adaptation of the work of Colm Toibín by director Michael Culpepper; and Writer/Director/Producer for internationally multi-award Best Film winning experimental short silent film, An Étude in Art, which she won two Best Director awards for; and most recently she won a best director award for Embrace the World the music video of the multi-vocal rock ballad composed by autistic adult, singer/songwriter Kevin Walsh. The music video was also awarded Best Drama.

Further positions held by Yvonne are producer for promotional film company VisitorFlix International Ltd; Chairperson of the board of directors for Dance Cork Firkin Crane; National Campaign for the Arts (NCFA) coordinator for Cork-South-West; and Creative Producer with InFlightflix, the inflight video guide specialists for airlines. Yvonne's not-for-profit company, RSVP, extols the virtues of creative expression through its community work, and produces everything from seasonal family experiences to film creation and theatre workshops, offering a wide variety of creative performance opportunities to people of all ages.

Prominent Cork heritage locations have provided memorable settings for Yvonne's writing and directing in theater, such as Blackrock Castle Observatory, Fota House and Gardens, The Old Cork Waterworks, and Cork City Gaol, where the first production of Yvonne's writing The Haunted History Tour began in 2007. Since her UCC Masters thesis project involving the politically and logistically challenging theater production of Information for Foreigners by Argentine playwright Griselda Gambaro, with 40 actors playing 146 roles, and 20 crew working on 13 stages for 4 concurrent audience groups over 5 nights in 2003, Yvonne has enjoyed the adventure of directing a cast of 20 women for The Vagina Monologues in 2009; creating the Connections: Make a Film in 4 Days arts participation project in Ireland in 2011, and Greece in 2017; co-creating the film and theater interdisciplinary performance No matter where you go there you are with Jennifer Williams and Cathie Clinton exploring emmigration in 2012, which premiered in the 2012 Melbourne Fringe Festival; and in 2013 Yvonne responded to an Irish national tourism initiative with The Gathering-RSVP; this involved a multi-disciplinary performance in film, theater, poetry, visual art, dance and song entitled Irish HeArts in collaboration with writer/ director/ choreographer Martin A. David, poet Adam Wyatt, choir leader Caz Jeffries, artist Elaine Garde, director Stephen Broekhuizen, playwright Mark Harvey Levine, artisans Levi & Atilla Magyar and Director of Photography Maurice Supple.

Her proudest creation in recent times is the groundbreaking Inclusive Dance Cork, a new professional accredited training for dancers; all bodies are welcome, and this course is inclusive of all impairments or disabilities. Yvonne is a founder member of the team who envisioned and created this new dance education programme, now led by artistic director Rhona Coughlan. In 2022 Yvonne travelled to Wiesbaden, Germany where she was teaching drama to teens, as part of their English curriculum in school. She is currently screening on Sky 186, as presenter/ director/ producer of the television mini-series ‘Great Reasons to Visit Ireland,’ produced by VisitoFlix Media Productions. Since 2014 she has organised and produced Halloween festivities for her hometown Kinsale, in 2022 she included the inaugural Lantern Parade, which her gorgeous grandson got to enjoy alongside Nana and over 500 other participants. Up next for 2023 is the foundation of Kinsale Youth Theatre, and the production of her short film script Regret, although her full length play, Hold on Tight, and dance theater script, Extreme Angels are also longing to meet their audiences in the not too distant future of 2024. www.rsvpireland.net