Hugh W. Brown is a Belfast-based actor, writer, composer, and performance-maker with over 30 years’ experience working across film, theatre, outdoor arts, circus, clown, and music. His practice is rooted in the creation of bold, playful, and emotionally resonant work for young audiences and their families, combining physical storytelling, live music, humour, and visual imagination.

Hugh has been a long-standing collaborator with Cahoots NI, appearing in numerous productions across the company’s 20-year history. Recent credits include The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (2024), The Ghost House (2022), and The Grimm Hotel (2021). He was co-writer and performer on The University of Wonder and Imagination, which toured virtually for nine months across Ireland, the UK, and the USA during the Covid pandemic (2020–21). Hugh has also toured extensively with Cahoots’ critically acclaimed productions Shh! We Have a Plan and Egg, the latter winning Best Show for Young People at the Off West End Awards (OFFIES). These productions have toured widely throughout Ireland, the UK, the USA, and China.

Alongside his ensemble work, Hugh has performed internationally as a solo artist across Europe, Asia, and Australia, often under his alter ego Jitterbug Jackson. This character-driven strand of his practice sits within outdoor arts and public performance, blending music, clown, and spectacle to create work that is playful, anarchic, and accessible. In this context, Hugh served as Creative Performance Director for Belfast’s St Patrick’s Day Parade with Beat Carnival in 2022 and 2023. He went on to develop performance concepts, soundtracks, and original songs for St Patrick’s Festival Dublin in 2024 and 2025.

As a writer, composer, lyricist, and maker of film and audio work, Hugh has produced a wide range of successful projects for organisations including Cahoots, Grasshopper, and St Patrick’s Festival Dublin. Recent commissions include writing, composing, and directing work for Dublin City Council, Creative Places Darndale, Creative Places Bagenalstown, and Carlow Arts. In collaboration with Grasshopper and Curious Broadcast, Hugh co-created, presented, and composed the soundtrack for RTÉ’s podcast The Science of Sense, which was commissioned for a third series in 2024.

While living in Cambodia, Hugh wrote, produced, co-directed, and starred in the feature film Inside the Belly of a Dragon, which received Special Selection at both the Cambodian Film Festival and the Belfast Film Festival in 2017.

Across three decades of practice, and through his work with leading arts organisations including Belfast Community Circus, City Fusion, Creative Places Darndale, and Creative Places Bagenalstown, Hugh has developed his own model of creative exploration, Theatrical Thinking. This approach works with people of all ages and backgrounds, using the disciplines of circus, music, song, and theatre as tools to build confidence, creativity, collaboration, and individual expression.