178 artists have received the Next Generation Artists’ Award since 2016

The once-off awards supported emerging artists to advance work and skills

Part of the Decade of Centenaries commemoration programme

Today the Arts Council and the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media are hosting the Next Generation Artists’ Symposium. In the ninth and final year of the Next Generation Artists’ Award, the Arts Council is marking the completion
of this initiative with the Next Generation Artists’ Symposium, which takes place today in Dublin Castle. A publication celebrating the achievements of this programme is due in February 2024. The purpose of both the symposium and the publication is
to reflect on the role and impact of 178 artists who have received this prestigious award since its inception in 2016. 

First introduced as part of the
Ireland 2016 programme to mark the centenary of Ireland’s landmark year of 1916, the purpose of the Next Generation Artists’ Award was to support a group of promising artists across all disciplines at an early and pivotal stage in their career.
This once-off and exceptional award was designed to support emerging artists unique development needs as they advance their work and skills.

Minister Catherine Martin TD said:

“Established in 2015, the Next Generation Artists’ Award has played a pivotal role in fostering emerging artistic talent and shaping the cultural landscape. The success of this unique award is a testament to what can be accomplished through the power
of recognition, support and nurturing of the creativity and innovation of our young artists, leaving an indelible mark on the artistic landscape for years to come. Today’s symposium is an exciting and most worthwhile gathering of the artists, to network
and discuss and share their experiences of the award with each other and the Arts Council, my Department and other interested parties. This dialogue will help to best inform and shape the approach to future initiatives of this nature. The Next Generation
Artists’ Award, ART:2023, the symposium and publication will each contribute to the important legacy of the Creative Imagination Strand of the Decade of Centenaries Programme 2012-2023 under which the Department has partnered with the Arts Council.”

Maureen Kennelly,
Director of the Arts Council, said:

“From its inception in 2015, the Next Generation Artists’ Award has enabled support for some of the most exciting artists to emerge in that time. In honour of this pivotal award, this symposium will celebrate the extraordinary work of these artists. The
legacy of the Next Generation Artists’ Award will continue to inspire future generations of artists to similar levels of excellence and ambition.”

In 2023, each Next Generation Artists’ Award recipient received €25,000. The awarded artists are also invited to take part in a week-long residency programme at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig, Co. Monaghan. The categories of awardees include
the following artforms: Literature; Theatre; Dance; Visual Arts; Music; Traditional Arts; Arts Participation; Film; Architecture; Circus; Opera; and Young People, Children and Education (YPCE).

The symposium is being hosted by Shaun Dunne, a Dublin-based film and theatre artist, as part of the ART:2023 partnership between the Department and the
Arts Council. Shaun will be joined by an array of brilliant panelists including Marina Carr, multi-award-winning playwright; David Coonan, composer and multidisciplinary artist; Professor Sarah Glennie,
Director of the National College of Art and Design; and Choy-Ping Clarke-Ng 吳彩萍, Hong Kong-Irish writer, director, performer and designer of set, costume and video; to name but a few. 

Performances on the day will include a film screening by Dean Kavanagh and Anja
Mahler; a poetry reading by Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe; and a dance and music performance by Edwina Guckian. There will be a Fallow Media live podcast interview hosted by author, podcast & radio producer, Ian
Maleney, and visual artist, Doireann O’Malley. All the above-mentioned artists are previous awardees of the Next Generation Artists’ Award.

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The Arts Council is delighted to announce the recipients of the 2022 Next Generation award.

The Next Generation bursaries are awarded to promising emerging artists across all disciplines at an early but pivotal stage of their career. The award allows artists to buy time to develop their work and to be able to show their potential to advance and strengthen a distinctive and assured creative practice. The successful recipients have demonstrated in a compelling way how the award and the financial investment at this particular time will have a transformative effect in bringing them to the next stage of their artistic development.

Arts Council Director, Maureen Kennelly said, “I am really excited by the range and diversity of these young artists who have received these awards. These bursaries offer artists valuable time to cultivate their artistic voice, develop their practice and pursue their vision. I look forward to seeing the work of the Next Generation.”

Artists from Louth to Mayo, and Cork to Wexford working across Arts Participation; Dance; Literature; Music; Theatre; Traditional Arts; Visual arts And Young People Children and Education have been awarded 20 bursaries to support their practice and their ambition as rising stars of the contemporary arts in Ireland. Each artist received an award of €25,000 and they are invited to participate in a collective week-long residency in the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig in the spring of 2023.

The 20 Recipients are listed below:

Áine O’Hara is a Dublin based multidisciplinary
artist, theatre maker and designer. Áines work is interested in blurring the
lines between community building and art. Áine has presented work nationally
and internationally and their work has been supported by Dublin Fringe
Festival, A4 sounds studios, Arts and Disability Ireland and the Arts Council
of Ireland. You can see more about their work at aineohara.com

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Ali Clarke is a choreographer working with dance and circus. Ali’s work is characterised by her strong transdisciplinary approach and her passion for exploring the interface between public and performer. This award will allow Ali to explore immersive formats for performance. Currently, Ali is working on a dance and circus performance commissioned by The Courthouse Arts Centre for October 2022 and preparing for an immersive dance solo to premiere in The Mermaid Arts Centre in 2023.

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Alice Kinsella was born in Dublin in 1993, and raised in Co. Mayo, where she now lives. Her poetry pamphlet Sexy Fruit (Broken Sleep Books) was a Poetry Book Society Spring 2019 Selection. She edited Empty House: poetry and prose on the climate crisis (Doire Press, 2021) Kinsella’s creative non-fiction debut Milk will be published by Picador in spring 2023.

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Aoife Ní Bhriain was born in Dublin to a family of musicians, has established herself as one of the most versatile musicians of her generation. An award winning violinist and fiddle player she has collaborated with artists from a huge range of genres such as trad, jazz, classical and contemporary music. Aoife has a particular interest in combining her upbringing in traditional folk and classical music and presenting it in new ways to her audience.

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Chanelle Walshe is an artist living and working in Dublin. They graduated from The National College of Art and Design, Dublin in 2010 and the Turps Banana Art School Correspondence Course in 2019. Recent exhibitions include The Hennessy Craig Award Exhibition, RHA, Dublin 2021, WE CAN DANCE, West Cork, 2021 and ARTWORKS at Visual Carlow, 2019. Their work has been collected by The Arts Council of Ireland and Trinity College Dublin. Their next solo show is at Limerick City Gallery, spring 2023.

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Choy-Ping Clarke-Ng 吳彩萍 is a Hong Kong-Irish theatre maker and Linbury Prize-winning designer of set, costume and video. Their interests in theatre making include exploring racialised and queer identities, the sociology of Ireland and all things surreal. They have designed for venues including the Abbey Theatre, Bristol Old Vic and Singapore Repertory Theatre.

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Ciara Roche is a painter based in County Wexford. Recent exhibitions include MATAIRLANDIA – World Trade Centre – Jakarta and Selasar Sunaryo – Bandung in Indonesia 2022, Generation 2022 – Butler Gallery 2022, Hennessy Craig Exhibition – Royal Hibernian Academy 2022. of late… (solo) at mother’s tankstation Gallery 2021 and Ochre (two person) at Wexford Arts Centre 2021. She was shortlisted for the biannual Hennessy Craig Award and won the KM Evans painting prize in 2022. In 2020 she won the Éigse Graduate Prize with Carlow Arts Festival for her work in ARTWORKS, Visual.

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Cóilín O’Connell (b.1990) is a visual artist from Dublin. His interdisciplinary practice has seen him adopt the methods of archivists, hoarders, archaeologists, pamphleteers and bootleggers to explore knowledge production and narrative building. He uses image making, field work, research and writing as the basis for making works in video, installation, print and publication.

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Darragh Kelly is a composer and musician. He is interested in the ineluctable dialectics of the virtual vs the actual, subject vs object, the bathetic, the ecstatic, new music’s ageing, and tonality’s afterlife. Recent work makes use of AI, seeking to re-embody the output of neural networks and treat these systems as external organs of the body—a body in excess.

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David McGovern is a socially-engaged artist and educator from Louth. He works with moving image, audio and text to create space for self-enquiry, reflection and speculation. He is passionate about exploring what is common in our experiences, even if that commonality is ambiguous and niche. His current work, HARDCARE, explores fringe, deviant experiences of healthcare and self-care through queer, crip and cyberfeminist lenses.

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Éadaoin Ní Mhaicín is an award-winning multi-instrumentalist from Mayo. She has appeared on world-learning stages, such as Broadway, Croke Park, RDS, Marlay Park, the National Concert Hall, the Barbican Theatre in London, and at Áras an Uachtaráin to perform at the invitation of President Michael D Higgins. Éadaoin plays with the National Folk Orchestra of Ireland and has appeared on numerous national and international radio/television stations, including RTÉ, BBC, Virgin Media One and TG4.

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Ellen Duffy is a Visual Artist from and living in Dublin. Ellen is in the early stages of her career and has shown her work in a number of exhibitions across the country. Graduating from T.U.D in 2019 she was selected for the RDS Visual Art Awards and was the recipient of the RHA Graduate Studio Award. She is The Draíocht’s current artist in residence 22/23 and is preparing for her first solo show in the Draiocht in the Spring of 2023.

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Francesca Bratton is a writer living in Maynooth. Her work has appeared in PN Review, Blackbox Manifold, Wild Court and elsewhere. Her experimental book Stronger than Death (John Murray, forthcoming) combines memoir and biography, tracing the lives of the poet Hart Crane and his mother, Grace.

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John Patrick McHugh is from Galway. His work has appeared in Granta, The Tangerine, Banshee, Winter Papers, and The Stinging Fly. His debut collection of short stories, Pure Gold, is published by 4th Estate.

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Léann Herlihy is an artist, researcher and educator based in Dublin. The methodological fulcrum of their practice pivots around academic studies in queer theory and feminist epistemologies which they utilise in tandem with live action, performance, video, sculpture and text

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Martha Breen is a performer, facilitator and theatremaker from Wicklow. She is graduate of the Lir Academy 2018. She has been Artistic Director of Mr. Sands Youth Theatre, Bray, since 2020. Her artistic aim is to make work that emulsifies text with movement as a tool for devising, but most importantly, for consensual, collaborative creativity. As a performer and deviser, she has worked with the Gate Theatre, Rough Magic, Peacock Theatre, Backstage Theatre, MALAPROP, Gúna Nua, National Theatre, and Fishamble Theatre Co. She is a founding member of Broad Strokes, and directed the Mermaid Arts Centre’s Fighting Words 2021 and 2022.

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Mary-Lou McCarthy is a writer and actor working across theatre, film/TV and radio, with a particular focus on work for young audiences. In 2020, she was commissioned by The Civic’s “Ready, Steady, Show!” programme to develop “The Dead Letter Office”. The play explores themes of migration and belonging for ages 9+ and will premiere in October 2022. Mary-Lou is a fluent Irish speaker and a graduate of Drama and Theatre Studies from UCC. Her work is supported by Branar’s Meitheal initiative. She is based in Co. Mayo

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Noel O’Regan is an award-winning writer from Tralee, Co. Kerry. His writing has appeared in publications such as The Stinging Fly, Southword and Ambit. His debut novel, Though the Bodies Fall, will be published by Granta Books in late 2023.

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Sheila Armstrong is a writer from the northwest of Ireland. She spent ten years in publishing and now works as a freelance editor. Her first collection of short stories, How To Gut A Fish, was published in 2022 and her debut novel, Falling Animals, will follow in 2023.

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Vanessa Jones was born in Tennessee and is based in Dublin, she has worked at the Frick Collection in New York and at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in Dublin. She received her BA in Fine Arts in 2003 from the George Washington University in Washington DC and was the recipient of the Presidential Art Scholarship from 1999-2003. Vanessa recently completed her MFA at NCAD in Dublin in 2021, where she was the recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Award towards her studies.

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