How was 2006, culturally? In the second of a two-parts series, Kate Holmquisthears the artistic highlights of a variety of people

Bernadette Madden, batik artist

I only realised as I recalled them that there are two links between most of the things I remembered: that art lives on after death, and simplicity - art that makes us look more closely at everyday things, which we sometimes don't see because with so much stimulation in our environment we are inclined to skim over things. At the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Michael Craig Martin used very simple line images of everyday objects - even mobile phones. He started this work in the 1960s, is continuing and it still looks good today.

I went to Handel's Messiah on April 13th, which was performed on the site of its first performance over 200 years ago. Again, it made you think how art lives on and effects as strongly today as when it was created. At the RHA annual show I was inspired by Jim Savage's landscape drawing Valley - so simple, just lines on paper, no tricks. There's a lot of drawing happening now everywhere; art students who were taught to draw are taking it up. Another example of "less is more" was Pat Harmon at the Taylor Galleries, whose paintings of a single onion or gourd were just a few strokes of the brush really. Marc Reilly's exhibition of watercolours in the Paul Kane Gallery - his landscapes appear to be just crude lines on paper at first and then you look and look and realise he's got it exactly right, capturing exactly what was happening in the weather that day. Two painters died, John Kelly and Noel Sheridan, and both painted away knowing that they were ill. One of the big fears for an artist is to know you will go before you have shown what you can really do.

Christine Monk, director Zoetrope, cultural communications company

For me, the highlight was the Molloy Trilogy at CHQ in the Docklands during the Beckett Festival, with the finest actor around, Conor Lovett of the Gare St Lazare players. Whatever it is about the way I relate to Beckett, Conor Lovett captured that and brought me along for a five-hour journey, like travelling with someone you really trust and you just get lost in it and don't feel the time passing. Rufus Wainwright at the Electric Picnic was a complete contrast to the madness and noise all around. I wandered by chance into this tent where there was a man and a piano, gently singing away in a very personal, intimate performance.

I was completely captivated and I've been playing his CDs non-stop ever since. The opening of the Hugh Lane gallery [ Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane] was a fantastic event. They've created a new visual arts space in Dublin we can come to whenever we want, and we need that in Dublin. It was enhanced by Seán Scully being there and the Patrick Ireland retrospective and bands playing in unexpected places, everyone you knew from the arts world was there.

I wore a tiara to the Tassel Club at the Spiegeltent during the Dublin Fringe Festival. I loved the whole atmosphere of burlesque, fishnet tights, girls with hoolah-hoops, girls in sailor suits doing pretend striptease.

In London, the Friese Art Fair brought everyone interested in contemporary art together. It was celebrity city - like, "Jude Law's just left but there's Claudia Schiffer!" There was work by Tracy Emin, the Chapman Brothers and stands by the Project Arts Centre and the Kerlin Gallery which made you feel really proud. Lots of us love contemporary art, it's not a minority thing; it's mainstream.

Margaret Moore, portrait photographer

Gardening is a complete contrast to photography - slow, outdoors and you have to wait a whole year to see the results of your work. In our work at Photogenic (with husband Barry Moore) we're under pressure like anyone else so gardening has become our hobby and for the last seven years we have gone to the Chelsea Flower Show, which demonstrates how you can completely transform a space. This year's winner - Tom Stewart-Smith - created a truly spectacular work of art in line, form and structure that was so beautiful partly because the plants used were ordinary.

Venice during the carnivale was like walking through a work of art. Dubai is a place where every architect must want to be working today - the architecture is amazing and to a degree it's like the creation of a new Venice, a renaissance of sorts, with the rich spending their money on architecture that will be their legacy. We had a meal in the world's only seven-star hotel, Burj Al Arab, which has an amazing restaurant with a ceiling of lit square panels like the dance floor in Saturday Night Fever over your head instead of under your feet.

I would like to see the well-to-do Irish with property giving something back to Dublin, not just trophy buildings, but donating green spaces that can never be built on. Such a physical manifestation of beauty can have a positive effect on society.

I brought my daughter to Take That at the Point expecting nothing, but it was the best concert this year in terms of showmanship and production values. I love live popular music but so many performances at the Point this year were so lifeless they could have been done by remote. Ralph Fiennes gave a masterful performance of the Faith Healer at the Gate and I found myself engaged in the story in a way I don't normally find in the theatre.

Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, composer and director of the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance

Lines from Seamus Heaney's latest collection of poetry, District and Circle (Faber & Faber, €19.19), have been in my head all year. "If self is location so is love." The image he is creating is of poems like planes circling overhead and waiting to be brought in on along the runway's line. A poem has to circle in the sky above the aerodrome, waiting for the place to land and the artist brings down the poem successfully. This is a return to some of the "field notes" used in Heaney's previous collection, Field Work, back to time as it always was, to the same well-ploughed field, the same well-swept yard, but with the enhanced maturity of a poet who works, like his uncle with a hammer and the blacksmith, to tap the mould, getting the angle of the hammer just right, so that the perfect poem drops out. Would I like to write an opera of a Heaney poem? Tell me how to get in touch!

The second work that blew me away was Peter Sellars's production of John Adams's Nixon in China at the English National Opera (June). It has it all - president Nixon, Mao Tse Tung, political manoeuvrings on a world-scale. The centrepiece of the set is a Boeing airplane and throughout the opening you know that Nixon will step out - the whole depth and width and size of this operatic production had me in awe.

Kieran Owens, chairman of Project Arts Centre

RTÉ's Living Music Festival (February) featured composer Steve Reich and it was a spectacular coup to get him. Even he was seriously impressed with how it went. This is a very important festival at the top level of international contemporary composition and next year, John Adams is the featured composer. In July, the Eva Quartet from Sofia Bulgaria (Farmleigh Salon Series) sang a capella accompanied by these indescribable Bulgarian folk instruments. The breathtaking musical quality and the venue of the ballroom at Farmleigh combined to make a memorable concert. At Electric Picnic, Antony (of the Johnsons) with My Robot Friend (their album is Dial O) was an extraordinary performance of modern musical madness. The new venue, Tripod in Harcourt street, owned by John Reynolds, captures all that is best about Electric Picnic, total attention to the audience, their comfort and needs and pleasure - Electric Picnic has a huge potential future. A very important event in traditional music was the opening of traditional music archive in Merrion Square. Zoe Conway is a spectacularly exciting traditional fiddler and her album, The Horse's Tail (Tara Music), is brilliant. The closing of Peter Stringfellow's nightclub greatly enhanced our cultural life in Dublin and it has given me some hope that the Irish can resist the slippery slide into contemporary carnal culture.

Donal Shiels, cultural adviser to the Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism

Peter Sellars, one of the world's leading theatre, opera and TV directors, spoke at the Theatre Forum Conference in Limerick. His approach is fresh, humane, accessible and - this is really important - fun. Bono's launch of the Beckett Festival at Dublin Castle was a surprise and it was great that someone like Bono would go so public in his own inimitable style. It's almost a show in itself: Bono Does Beckett.

I loved the luminous landscape of fire created by the French company, Compagnie Carabosse in the Dublin Docklands during the Fringe Festival. The on-street presence in the Docklands of the Fringe helped define the Docklands as a new city within a city.

Street theatre has always appealed to me in an age when people have less time, so why not bring theatre to them? Shaun Davey is a seriously great composer and his show in the National Concert Hall proved this, with his blending of Irish traditional music and international influences.

Donna Vittoria Colonna di Stigliano, film-maker

The Mostra (film festival) in Venice (September) was crazy - I went for the parties to be honest, seeing films as well means getting no sleep and I was drunk with tiredness but I made lots of contacts. The best film? The beautiful and surreal Nouovomondo (Golden Door) by Emanuele Crialese, which will represent Italy at the Oscars. Winner of the Silver Lion, Nuovomondo - which literally means "the new world" - is the story of the emigration of the Sicilian Mancusa family to New York at the beginning of the 20th century. I worked on a documentary in India - just being there is a cultural experience. I loved the timelessness of it, yet there is radical change too. The sacred cows wandering around new multi-million dollar buildings and the Ganges river, with people washing, drinking and cooking in water that has body parts floating in it. I was impressed by the way the Indian people celebrate death. I saw bodies being burnt, the limbs swelling and turning pink as pork - like cartoon limbs. My best book was The Good Death by Nick Brooks a black comedy about life in a mortuary that explores the bizarre way Western culture deals with death. A lot of Irish theatre is terrible but whenever the Corn Exchange does something I'm delighted to have seen it (Michael West's Everyday, Dublin Theatre Festival, October). The Björk video - Triumph of the Heart, about a woman married to her ideal lover - a cat, was comical and delightful.

Loretta Yurick, director, Dance Theatre of Ireland

Two things, which were actually on the edge of madness - flirting between contradictions and extremes, descent and ascent, ecstasy and illusion - got my full attention. Alain Platel's Vspers by C de la B at the International Dance Festival this year, was the kind of gripping associative work that I like, mysterious, positive - in the end uplifting - to see 10 incredible dancers (including former Cirque du Soleil performers) and their array of caricatures and humanity, plus 10 musicians and a soprano perform.

Here Lies, Operating Theatre Company's Olwen Fouéré and Roger Doyle's work set in a glass box tracing Antonin Artaud's journey in Dublin and descent into madness. . . was he or wasn't he? The Jason Mraz concert in Ireland because the kid can really sing. Very lucky we were to see La Cité de Radieuse (Frederic Flamand) while attending the Monaco International Dance Forum of Dance & Technology: the indescribable contrasts, freedom or hostage, utopia or jungle - set amid an architectural wonder of mesh and blinds.