37 Magazine
Architects of a Creative Community in Hollywood
Academy Award and Golden Globe-nominated filmmaker Kirsten Sheridan has long championed an actor-led approach to screen training. Now, she has partnered with Bow Street Academy founders Shimmy Marcus and Gerry Grennell as the renowned Irish screen acting school expands to Los Angeles at The Lot at Formosa, one of Hollywood’s most historic studio lots.
Generations of filmmakers and actors have worked within Formosa’s walls, shaping its rich history and the language of cinema. From silent-era landmarks like The Gold Rush and The Thief of Bagdad to classics such as Some Like It Hot, Scarface, and West Side Story, its stages have long reflected Hollywood’s evolution. In recent years, the lot has remained firmly part of its present, hosting productions including HBO’s Big Little Lies and Euphoria.
For Kirsten, the campus embodies a legacy of creative self-determination. Built in 1912, the eleven-acre property in West Hollywood was acquired in 1918 by Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks as Pickford-Fairbanks Studios, becoming the first studio lot owned and operated by a woman. The pair would later join Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith to establish United Artists in a revolutionary act of artistic independence. The groundbreaking company was an artist-driven alternative to the traditional studio system. The creative sanctuary gave actors and filmmakers greater control over how their work reached audiences, and the Formosa campus became part of its studio base, linking it to one of Hollywood’s earliest and most influential experiments in artist ownership. More than a century later, Kirsten sees echoes of that same spirit in what Bow Street is trying to build.
Actor-Led Ethos
“There is something fitting about a school built on the work of actors finding its home on a lot that was built by actors. Bow Street Academy aligns itself with that original spirit of autonomy, of artists taking charge of their craft again.”
Bow Street’s actor-led ethos emphasizes agency in storytelling, filmmaking, and career development. Artists learn not only how to perform, but how to take ownership of their craft. From their first day, students train for the realities of screen performance working on camera in production-style environments to develop an understanding of how to work with the lens rather than simply perform for it. The emphasis is on interpretation, creative ownership, and lasting on-screen fluency. Housing the school within an active Hollywood studio lot places students in the midst of the industry itself, reinforcing Bow Street’s belief that actors learn best by engaging directly with the world they aspire to enter.
For Kirsten, partnering with Bow Street LA is a natural progression. It brings her background in independent filmmaking and talent cultivation to a project launched at a moment when the industry is actively seeking more artist-driven models. Their focus is to cultivate that distinct, actor-first environment across the Atlantic, giving actors a living ecosystem to create in together. “To bring the exact training that Shimmy and Gerry perfected in Ireland to a legendary space like The Lot at Formosa feels like the perfect bridge between Dublin’s creative community and Hollywood’s screen history.”
Formed by Film
At just twenty-six, Sheridan directed her debut feature, Disco Pigs, an adaptation of Enda Walsh’s cult stage play that cast a then-unknown Cillian Murphy in his first screen role. Premiering at the Berlin Film Festival, the gritty, unconventional feature drew widespread international attention and established her focus on intense, character-driven narratives centered on identity and human behavior.
Born into an Irish filmmaking family, Kirsten spent much of her childhood backstage and in lighting booths at the Irish Arts Center in New York, surrounded by rehearsals and productions. Her father, filmmaker Jim Sheridan, would go on to become one of the defining directors of modern Irish cinema, but long before his films earned international acclaim, storytelling had already become part of the fabric of her everyday life.
Her first direct encounter with filmmaking came at twelve, when she appeared in her father’s feature My Left Foot, playing the younger sister of Daniel Day-Lewis. The landmark Irish film went on to win multiple Academy Awards, and the experience sparked her lasting interest in storytelling. Her global breakthrough came shortly after with the 2002 studio feature In America. Co-written with her father and her sister, Naomi Sheridan, the film drew on her family’s experience immigrating to New York. The deeply personal project resonated worldwide, earning three Academy Award nominations, including Best Original Screenplay for the Sheridans.
Directing August Rush, a major studio film for Warner Bros. starring Robin Williams, Keri Russell, and Freddie Highmore, marked a shift toward larger-scale filmmaking within a more structured studio environment. Working with established actors alongside a young lead required a different kind of collaboration around performance and process, expanding her experience of how actors are supported within production systems. The film became amajor box-office success and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song, as well as a Grammy nomination.
Building the Cinematic Future
The Bow Street initiative feels like a natural evolution for Kirsten, whose career has been defined as much by cultivating new talent as by creating her own work. In 2010, she co-founded The Factory in Dublin alongside fellow filmmakers John Carney and Lance Daly. At the time, the concept was radical: part collective, part laboratory, and part artistic community. The Factory offered emerging filmmakers and actors an environment where experimentation mattered more than hierarchy, and where opportunities were created rather than granted. The initiative ultimately helped launch a generation of Irish talent that would go on to achieve international success.
“While I was a co-founder of the original Factory collective back in 2010, it was Shimmy who took the reins, co-founded Bow Street Academy with Gerry, and built it into a world-renowned institution over the last ten years while I was living and working in the US. I feel very privileged they asked me to partner with them to bring this definitive Irish training to an iconic Hollywood lot.”
The expansion to LA builds on the community that Shimmy Marcus and Gerry Grennell spent more than a decade cultivating in Dublin. Together with Kirsten, the trio brings a blend of filmmaking, performance coaching, and artist development designed to train actors as active creative collaborators capable of shaping their own careers.
While establishing the school in the heart of the entertainment industry marks a significant milestone, the broader ambition is to cultivate both technical skill and artistic autonomy, a philosophy that aligns with the collaborative mentorship Kirsten Sheridan has practiced throughout her career. Formosa is a fitting home for that mission, where a century-old legacy of artist independence carries forward into a new generation of performers.
Bow Street LA offers short-and long-form programs ranging from foundational courses to advanced scene study. Finding raw, untapped talent is core to the ethos.
For more information, visit BowStreetAcademy.com/LA
