Visiting Artists

John Anthony Baldessari (1931-2020) was an American conceptual artist and a member of the Burren College of Art’s Advisory Council. He was also a recipient of the BCA-University of Galway Honorary Doctorate. Baldessari has been termed “one of the most influential artists to emerge since the mid 1960’s.” He has contributed to the definition of postmodern art. His ingenious application of certain art-making strategies includes appropriation, deconstruction, decontextualization, sequentiality and text/image juxtaposition, was prescient, as was his cogent and witty intergration of semiology, linguistic systems and mass media. His work has been featured in more than 200 solo exhibitions in the US and Europe.

Aideen Barry (born 1979) is an Irish visual artist. Barry was born in Cork and is known for her performance, film, sculpture, drawing, and installation work. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally in a number of Museums, Publicly funded centres of Contemporary Art, Private Galleries, and Art Fairs across the world.

Malcy Duff (b.1978) is a cartoonist from Edinburgh, Scotland. He has produced over 60 comix, including ‘The Pineapple,’ ‘Jimmy Stewart,’ ‘The Heroic Mosh Of Mary’s Son,’ and ‘A 52 Second Silence For Topsy.’ His work has been published in a variety of magazines and anthologies, and has exhibited internationally. He also performs and records in the duo Usurper, which he co-founded with Ali Robertson in 2003.

Gediminas Gasparavičius specializes in late modern and contemporary art. He is assistant professor of art history at the Myers School of Art, University of Akron (Ohio, United States). His research focuses on collective and participatory art in Eastern Europe in late socialism and early postsocialism. His doctoral dissertation examined the work of the Slovenian multidisciplinary collective Neue Slowenische Kunst (or NSK), which in 1992 established NSK State in Time. NSK State is a conceptual entity that issues passports, opens “embassies,” and subversively mimics other functions of the state. In Fall 2014 he curated the exhibition IRWIN: NSK State in Time at Emily Davis Gallery at Myers School of Art, University of Akron.

Léann Herlihy [they/them] is an artist, researcher and educator based in Dublin. Their practice is informed by trans*, queer ecological, feminist and abolitionist theoretical frameworks which deploy alternative modalities of expression through an array of mediums including live performance, video, billboards, sculpture, text, workshops and radical pedagogies.

Dragana Jurisic was born in Slavonski Brod, Croatia (then Yugoslavia). She is currently based in Dublin, Ireland. Dragana won a number of awards and exhibited widely both in Ireland and abroad. In 2008, Dragana completed Masters in Fine Art at the University of Wales, Newport, receiving a distinction for her work. In 2009, she was selected as an Axis MAstar, “An annual selection of the most promising artist from the UK’s leading MA courses” and shortlisted for the Emerging Visual Artist Award (Ireland). She also had her first solo exhibition Seeing Things in Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, Wales.

The son of a Scottish policeman, Alastair MacLennan was born in 1943 in the Perthshire village of Blair Atholl. As a consequence of his father being regularly relocated, the family moved often within the Perth and Kinross area. Holidays were spent with grand parents on the Isle of Skye where a great great uncle had once practised as an artist. Since 1975, he is based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He was a founder member of Belfast’s Art and Research Exchange. He is member of the performance art collective Black Market International (BMI).

Mahamid (1976) is a conceptual multidisciplinary Palestinian artist based in Haifa and Dublin since 2020. She was born in “Moawia”, a Palestinian village.

The Irish painter and sculptor Alice Maher was born in County Tipperary. After taking a BA in European Studies at the University of Limerick, she studied drawing and painting at the Crawford College of Art in Cork.

Trevor Martin is an artist, educator, and arts administrator living and working in Chicago. His performance and sculptural works have been presented in museums, galleries, and alternative spaces in Chicago, New York, Cleveland, Tucson, and Florence, Italy as well as places in between. In addition, Trevor has curated numerous projects with a focus on both live performance and performance for video. He received his BFA (1992) from Transylvania University and MFA (1998) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).

Siobhán McDonald’s practice draws attention to contemporary topics dealing with air, breath and atmospheric phenomena, weaving scientific knowledge into her art in a poetic and thoughtful manner. Siobhán McDonald was born in New York. She lives and works in Dublin.

Kriss Munsya is a Belgian, Congolese born visual artist living in Vancouver BC. From a very young age, Kriss has been exploring art through drawings, photography and video. But his journey started with his long feature film “Us And Them” in 2015, shot on his hitch hike trip from New-York to Rio de Janeiro. Being on the road as a black male, shifted his vision of the world and transformed his approach of art. ​

Kira O’Reilly is a UK based artist. Her practice is both wilfully interdisciplinary and entirely undisciplined, and stems from a visual art background. In her work she employs performance, biotechnical practices and writing to consider speculative reconfigurations around the body.

Dr Alistair Payne is the Head of the School of Fine Art at The Glasgow School of Art. Previously he was an Undergraduate Programme Leader at the GSA, and the MA Fine Art Course Leader and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art (Painting) at The University of Wolverhampton. He has also worked at Manchester Metropolitan University in the Painting Department (2002-2005) and as a Visiting Lecturer at different UK institutions. In 2006 he was awarded a PhD from Chelsea College of Art, he also has a Fine Art Degree from The University of Hertfordshire and an MFA from The University of Newcastle upon Tyne.

Mark Shetabi is an artist whose work examines a disjointed and subjective overview of history through concurrent bodies of work in painting, sculpture and installation. Born in New York, as a child he lived in Tehran, Iran for five years, returning to the United States on the eve of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The experience of straddling two cultures often in conflict is an enduring subtext of his work.

Amelia Stein, lives and works in Dublin, Ireland, where she was born in 1958, establishing herself over 30 years as a singularly exacting photographer whose work is characterized by meticulous attention to detail in tandem with the attributes of fine black and white photographic printing. As a performing arts photographer, Stein has worked in Theatre and Opera in Ireland 1979-2000. Her signature black and white photography featured widely in the Music Industry. Elected a member of the RHA in 2004, Aosdána in 2006.

Chelsea Thompto (she/her) is a transdisciplinary artist and educator working at the intersections of art, trans studies, and technology. Her research based studio practice spans a variety of media which often include code, video, sound, writing, and sculpture and her work has been shown nationally and internationally. Born and raised in Iowa, she has spent most of her life between the Midwest and California and is now an Assistant Professor of Creative Technologies at Virginia Tech and serves as the Executive Editor of Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus. She received an MFA in 4D Art and an MA in Gender and Women’s Studies from the University of Wisconsin Madison.

Dominic Thorpe is an Irish visual artist who works primarily through the body in performance, drawing, video and photography. His work often involves contextual and relational based processes. Through his practice he engages with subject matter that has significant social importance, often related to issues of trauma and injustice. He has shown and performed work widely internationally and in Ireland, including at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Bergen Museum of Art Norway, the Bangkok Cultural Centre Thailand and the Galway Arts Centre Ireland.