Amberlea Neely is a Northern Irish based creative practitioner and consultant working with projects and organisations that connect to place.

Amberlea founded Starling Start (2019), a practice with a focus on arts, place and collaboration. Before this she was Acting Director at PLACE, which operated at the cutting edge of creative, intelligent and inclusive public engagement in the built environment in Northern Ireland. Amberlea was Chair of NI’s largest visual art festival, Belfast Photo Festival which uses the public realm as the gallery, and she was a founding director of Platform Arts which was one of Belfast’s first meanwhile projects housed in the vacant upper floors of a city centre building. Amberlea has been a part of placemaking initiatives with a range of partners, from local residents to senior government officials and community representatives, designers and academics.

Recent projects include:

A co-commission (with Studio idir) by the Department of Justice to liaise with Belfast residents, developing ideas for the future of a peace wall in North Belfast;
9ft in Common, which is an investigation into ownership, access and disruption of an infrastructure of alleyways in Belfast (in collaboration with Studio idir);
Creative engagement for an Arts and Heritage Strategy as part of Translink’s new Belfast Transport Hub (with Haller Clarke);
An appointment by Belfast City Council as artist-in-residence (along with Dr Conor McCafferty) as part of the Creative Communities programme.
Amberlea has an MSc in Cultural Management, a PGCert in Executive Leadership and a BA (Hons) in Fine Art.

www.starlingstart.com

www.9ftincommon.com