We moved to Limerick a year ago last May having lived in New Zealand and Australia and then travelled around Asia for seven months, which was amazing. We came over because we wanted to try living in Ireland for a while. Colin got work in Tuamgrainey where he works in Horticulture.

Initially I wasn't quite sure what was here. The longer I have stayed here the more I have realised how there is loads going on here, culturally speaking. When I arrived I started looking around Limerick to try and find work within the arts and Daghdha Dance Company happened to have a position come up in August and I jumped at it. Limerick is really, really busy in the cultural sense and arts-wise I think it is very progressive - there are a lot of interesting people within the arts here, which is great, rather than it being centralised in Dublin.

I have always been in the arts. I did applied arts in Derbyshire and then I worked with a designer for a year before I went and did my Masters in Industrial Product Design in Birmingham for a year, where I specialised in museum and exhibition design. It looked at how people interact in museum spaces and how they moved around those spaces. So it examined how the actual exhibitions are designed, their user-friendliness and ergonomics - all along those sort of lines.

I just enjoy museums and exhibitions and the arts - and thankfully there are a lot of parallels with dance which would come in handy later. My next job was working for a company called MICE International which managed all kinds of exhibitions from Jaguar cars and more, but my area was museums, designing and building them. I project managed those. The big one was in Greenwich in London in the National Maritime Museum, that was fantastic. They have a lot more funding in the UK for certain projects - although that is changing now with the Olympics - but it was over 800,000 pounds per project. Despite that, it was really good fun to work on.

It was difficult to work in the arts in New Zealand and Australia as there are very few opportunities. I did work within Darwin Museum and Art Gallery which was fantastic, if a little hot! The joy of working in Australian museums was that you can have exhibitions and performances outside, so that was very interesting. It would be great if we could bring that into Limerick, if the weather would hold up.

Thankfully my experience transferred into my role with Daghdha. Particularly the whole project management side of it and developing communications with people and running events. There are lots of parallels and I just enjoy being involved in creativity, and helping artists achieve careers as well. Multi-tasking is the name of the game, my job takes in everything from finance to marketing and publicity and writing funding proposals, to hopefully getting more funding, those sort of areas as well as the day to day running of Daghdha. But it is important to find ways for artists to be able have a career within their field and profession.

At the moment we have six core members of staff who are full time. Then we have the Daghdha Mentoring Programme resident artists, which we have eleven of, with two extra special integrated artists from the Garvey Centre who are integrated in the whole of Daghdha and that is something we are hoping to increase in the future. On top of that we can have anything up to 20 freelance staff depending on what projects we are working on and what we need at the time. We try and have a very flat hierarchical approach where everybody works together as a team rather than there being one person as "the boss", we work together, it is a more holistic approach.

My future is definitely in Limerick. There are some really interesting things about to happen, I know that there are plans to redevelop St. John's Square and that is obviously very enticing because Daghdha is right at the heart of that, so it very exciting. I love being here, I live out towards Killaloe but I love Limerick as a city, I think there is a lot going on and I can fly from Shannon to Birmingham so I can always visit my family very easily.

Interview by Alan Owens.