Introducing Hannah, Third Angel Fellow, courtesy of the BBC Performing Arts Fund

This morning we are extremely happy and excited to announce that we've been awarded one of 19 BBC PAF Theatre Fellowships. The £10,000 award will enable us to work with emerging theatre maker Hannah Butterfield in 2014 to develop a new piece of her own work with our support, and draw her into Third Angel's process as she joins us as dramaturg on our 2014/15 piece Paradise.

Alongside her creative development, we'll boost her producing and management skills so that she can take her work out into the world with, we hope, a toolkit of resources, experience and a little black book full of contacts.

Hannah works across an impressive range of disciplines, from singing to choreography to writing and performing, and is already in demand as a creative collaborator. Actually, I'll let you tell you in her own words:

My name is Hannah Butterfield. I am a theatre maker and facilitator based in Leeds. Sometimes I am Hannah Butterfield, choreographer. And workshop leader. Sometimes I’ll be a vocal coach, and sometimes a writer. Occasionally I am a musician. Quite frequently I am one third of The Souvenirs Theatre company. I am always an explorer.

I currently have a piece of 'unmade' work I would like to develop. The piece is currently a text I wrote in response to a task set by Alex Kelly when I was an MA student. I spent a day sitting in Leeds train station ‘at work in the world’ observing, imagining and remembering. I thought a lot about travel, about saying hello and saying goodbye and for hours considered the effect of modern ticket barriers on romance. I went on to write a performance score that I have been desperate to use! I would love for this work to become an ensemble theatre piece.

Hannah also runs a children's choir in Bradford and teaches at the Arden School of Theatre.

We're particularly happy to have this opportunity because Third Angel has been mentoring early and mid career artists for many years, and we know that opportunities for theatre makers are even fewer and further between that those for performers, directors and producers. There is no established career path for someone who makes their own work. We all need the next generation to get a foothold, or the whole ecology starts to disintegrate. We're looking forward to being able to see what working with an artist over six months, as opposed to six days, does for both mentee and mentor; learn lessons from our experience and then see if it's possible to offer a similar opportunity again.

Some of our very generous partners are going to help us to make the Fellowship as helpful to Hannah as we can: DepArts, Theatre in the Mill, Slung Low, Point Blank and Sheffield Theatres are all lending time, space and expertise, for which we're extremely grateful.

Our mentoring relationships are never one way, and we know we'll gain a lot from working with Hannah, on her piece and on Third Angel's. We hope it's the start of a beautiful friendship and future collaboration.

There's more information on the BBC Performing Arts Fund here, and a full list of fellowships here.