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Royal Welsh College Principal Hilary Boulding Awarded a Damehood in 2017 Queen’s Birthday Honours

16 June 2017

Hilary Boulding, Principal of the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama has been awarded a Damehood for services to performing arts education.

During her ten-year tenure as Principal of Wales’s National Conservatoire, Hilary, who until recently was also Chair of Conservatoires UK, oversaw a £22.5 million capital development to provide the Conservatoire and Wales with a landmark building housing state-of-the-art rehearsal and performance spaces including the Dora Stoutzker Hall and the Richard Burton Theatre.

In the Guardian University Guide published last month, the Royal Welsh College was ranked number one in the subject tables for Drama for the third time. In Music, Hilary has championed professional collaborations and the development of individual career paths, making it the only conservatoire outside London to achieve 90% of graduates employed within six months.

Graduates across all its disciplines can be found at the forefront of the cultural and creative industries worldwide.

In recent years, in a bid to give every child in Wales the opportunity to engage with the arts, the Conservatoire has also reached out to tens of thousands of children and younger people through special performances, short courses and weekend schools

“I’m deeply honoured to receive this award”, said Hilary. “It has been an enormous privilege to serve as the Principal of Wales’s National Conservatoire since 2007 and to witness the institution take its place alongside Wales’s leading national cultural institutions and within its international peer group.”

“I pay tribute to my inspirational and dedicated colleagues who give so generously of themselves to ensure that every student has the opportunity to fulfill their individual potential, and to our wonderful students who will go on to transform and enrich our communities.”

“It has been particularly exciting to welcome new conservatoire students who have already had a taste of the College through its junior and outreach activity”,  she continues. “We aim to offer as many opportunities as possible for all young people to experience the arts, regardless of their financial means”

Lord Rowe Beddoe, President of the Royal Welsh College said: “Personally, I am absolutely delighted that Hilary’s enormous contribution to the continuing development of Wales’ national conservatoire has been deservedly recognised by this honour. On behalf of the College, its excellent staff and wonderful students, we all appreciate her significant and extraordinary leadership. We wish her well, of course with sadness, as she makes her historic move to Trinity College, Oxford.”

Hilary Boulding will leave the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama at the end of July to take up the role of President of Trinity College, Oxford – its first female President in its 462-year history. Hilary was previously Director of Music for Arts Council England (1999-2007) and before that was a Producer, Director and latterly a Commissioning Editor in arts broadcasting for the BBC. She recently completed her term as a non-executive director of Welsh National Opera. She is a graduate of St. Hilda’s College, Oxford.

The Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama, the National Conservatoire of Wales, and part of the University of South Wales Group, operates within its international peer group of conservatoires and specialist arts colleges. It trains young artists drawn from around 30 countries to provide a constant flow of emerging talent into the music and theatre industries and related professions.

The Royal Welsh College has a key role in identifying and developing new talent and provides high quality training tailored to the demands of contemporary arts and creative industries. Training and educating some of the most talented students from around the world, the College aims to give them not just the technical and craft skills they will need to operate at the top levels of the profession, but also to help them to discover and develop their individual artistic ‘voice’.

The College operates a Junior Conservatoire and Young Actors Studio for students of school age, with hundreds of students attending weekend training in Cardiff. In 2014, the College launched Young Actors Studio, Pembrokeshire. This year a third of the incoming student cohort to the undergraduate acting programme have come through the Young Actors Studio, competing for a place alongside over 1000 students from around the world.

In February 2017 the College announced the launch of a fully integrated international Opera School, delivered in association with Welsh National Opera. The Opera School will provide a unique training environment across all disciplines of opera performance and production – from singers and instrumentalists to conductors, directors, repetiteurs, stage managers and designers.