A total of six grants were awarded in 2024:

• Miguel Amado

Miguel Amado is a curator and critic, and director of Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh, County Cork. Past directorships and curatorial positions include institutions such as Cork Printmakers; Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art and Tate St Ives, England; Abrons Arts Center, International Studio & Curatorial Program, and Rhizome at the New Museum, New York; and Centro de Artes Visuais, Coimbra, Portugal. In 2013, he curated the Portuguese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. His education includes the MA in Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art, London.

• Marnie Caddle 

Marnie Caddle receives the grant on behalf of Clann Chronain Volunteer Tour established by Clondalkin Round Tower Heritage Group, who provide free tours in Brú Chrónáin/the Round Tower Visitor Centre & Gardens and lead walking tours of Clondalkin village for local school groups, clubs/societies, individuals, as well as for tourists and visitors to Clondalkin.

The grant will allow the Clann Chronain Volunteer Guides to travel to Kells, Co. Meath to meet with the Volunteer Tour guides based there, to further aid the guides’ current knowledge and understanding of early Christian centres, and to share cross-community knowledge and experience between the two groups.  The group will also visit the OPW site at Mellifont Abbey to explore later medieval ecclesiastical centres. The increased knowledge and understanding gained by Clann Chrónáin will be used to enhance the experience of visitors to Brú Chrónáin / Round Tower Visitor Centre.

• Dr Hannah Gibson

Dr Hannah Gibson works as an educator at National Museums Northern Ireland. She attained her PhD in Anthropological Studies from Queen’s University Belfast in 2022 and has interests in ethnomusicology and applied anthropology in museum contexts.

Hannah’s research project explores the use of anthropological pedagogy in the education of primary school children through the use of buildings, homes, and artefacts at the Ulster American Folk Park, National Museums Northern Ireland (NMNI).  The grant will assist Hannah to travel and present her research at the European Association of Social Anthropologists conference in Barcelona, July 2024. 

• Dr Sorcha Ní Lideadha

Sorcha is the Collections Officer at the National Print Museum. In 2023, she completed a PhD on topographical printmaking in 17th-century France and Spain with the History of Art & Architecture Department at Trinity College Dublin. She has previously worked with collections at the V&A Museum as well as at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London.

The development grant will fund a diploma in Project Management to establish best practices for the steering of a major project that will see research data for over 10,000 objects in the National Print Museum’s collections transfer to a specialised collection management system for the first time, providing much improved capacity for up-to-date museum documentation procedures and MSPI standards, as well as access for researchers and the general public alike to information on collection objects.

• Sasha Smith 

Sasha Smith is Assistant Curator Institution UCD Classical Museum, University College Dublin.  Sasha’s role in UCD Classical Museum entails a wide range of responsibilities from giving tours of the collection to developing exhibitions. 

As part of wider renovations on UCD campus, the UCD Classical Museum is due to be refurbished within the next two years. This will involve co-designing a new museum space alongside the architects and professional designers, and Sasha is involved in this planning process.  The grant will facilitate Sasha’s attendance at ‘Accessible Interpretation in Practice’ training, a three-week online course organised by GEM (Group for Education in Museums), a recognised UK-based body that supports museum educators to equip her to implement essential accessibility changes during the period prior to the refurbishment as well as informing the planning and redesign of the museum to take into account inclusive and accessible interpretation.

• Beth Storey 

Beth Storey is a PhD student at the Technological University of the Shannon, researching the needs of managers at dark tourism sites, and works as a tour guide at The Irish Workhouse Centre in Portumna, Co Galway. Her undergraduate dissertation on the importance of tourism to workhouse museums has been published as a book chapter.

The grant will be used to travel to workhouse museums in the UK to assess the feasibility of the UK workhouse museums as case studies for PhD research into the management of dark tourism venues and to investigate the approach to the management of workhouse museums, how they approach the delivery of the workhouse story, and how they maximise resources to create a sustainable business that benefits the local community. An important aspect will be to identify differences between the UK and Irish approaches to telling the workhouse story.