The Bluecoat, England's oldest arts centre, has appointed Emer Grant as its first creative director, a new post created ahead of the institution's centenary in 2027.

Grant joins from Arts Collective in Northampton, where she has served as CEO and artistic curator since 2020. During her tenure she presented exhibitions of artists including Rose Finn-Kelcey and Mark Wallinger, and oversaw the £5.2 million redevelopment of the venue's new home at 24 Guildhall Road. She has also curated exhibitions at the Hessel Museum of Art and ISCP in New York, Stroom in The Hague, the Void Gallery in Northern Ireland, and Oolite Arts in South Florida.

In a statement, Grant said she was looking forward to making Liverpool her home and learning from the city's culture and creative communities, adding that she hoped to continue the Bluecoat's tradition of ambitious programming and help shape a vision for its next century.

The appointment signals a forward-looking strategy for the historic Liverpool institution, which has long balanced its role as a civic arts centre with international contemporary programming as it prepares for a milestone anniversary year. Creating a dedicated creative-director post is itself a statement of intent: it separates artistic leadership from day-to-day management, giving the centenary programme a single curatorial voice. Grant's trajectory, from Northampton's artist-led infrastructure to independent curatorial work across New York, The Hague, Northern Ireland and South Florida, suggests an approach grounded in small-to-mid-scale organisations and the communities that sustain them. That experience aligns with the Bluecoat's identity as a place where exhibitions, live performance, literature and community projects share one historic building, and the centenary year will test how ambitiously the institution can carry that mix into its second century.