Academic Managers

Dr. Niamh Ann Kelly

Head Discipline - Art and Visual Culture

Tel: +35312205892

Dr. Niamh Ann Kelly is Head of Art and Visual Culture at the TU Dublin School of Art and Design. She is an art writer, researcher, and art historian and a Director of the Irish Heritage Trust. For more than 20 years, she has lectured in Visual Culture across art and design BA and MA programmes and supervises PhD research. She has developed many industry links with the cultural sector at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

Her research interests centre on interrogating postcolonial conditionings of material and visual heritage. This includes issues of ethical spectatorship and the potential of visual, material, and spatial culture for enabling historical understanding across museum collections, art practices and heritage landscapes.

She has published monographs including Imaging the Great Irish Famine: Representing Dispossession in Visual Culture (2020, Bloomsbury Academic); many chapters in academic books on commemorative visual cultures and; has contributed to contemporary art and heritage publications, including Art Monthly, The Irish Review, Museum Ireland, and Source Photographic Review, and to radio arts programmes on BBC 4, RTE 1 and Lyric FM. She has written research essays for art catalogues and museum publications and delivered public workshops, lectures, talks and acted as chair for arts and heritage events.

Before joining TU Dublin, Niamh Ann lectured at the National College of Art and Design Dublin (NCAD) and Institute of Art, Design and Technology (IADT) and worked in the education department at the National Museum of Ireland. A graduate of NCAD (with Joint Honours BA Degree in Painting and the History of Art, 1997, and MA Degree in the History of Art, 1999), she has a PhD, cum laude, from the University of Amsterdam (2010) where she studied at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis.

Research Interests
Contemporary art
Histories and theories of art
Commemorative visual cultures, including monuments, museums and heritage practices
Cultural heritage, collections and archival strategies
Museum studies and exhibition histories

Current PhD supervision
Sean Kissane: Patrick Hennessy’s Queer Art 1937 – 1980: Navigating the Closet.
Harriet Wheelock: The Royal College of Physicians of Ireland’s Collections:
From museum for the profession to museum of the profession.
John Beattie: Reconstructing Mondrian - Piet Mondrian’s Paris Studio (1921-1936), Reconstructed (1994), Re-interpreted (2023).
Deirdre Ring Maher: Towards a methodology for documenting Ireland's visual,
graphic heritage of vernacular shopfront lettering: A case study of Kilkenny Signwriting.
Colm Murray: Histories of Grangegorman Site and Society, 1770 – 2012.

Past PhD Supervision
Dr Benjamin Jye O’Sullivan: El Centro de Arte y Comunicación: A Methodology for Mapping Global Artistic Networks and Decentering Artistic Engagements with Cybernetics
Dr Tom Spalding: Intersections: Quotidian Design and Modernism(s) in Cork City, 1922-1969
Dr Siobhan Doyle: Heroic Death and Martyrdom as Narrative Devices in Centenary Exhibitions Commemorating the 1916 Rising

Academia Page: https://tudublin.academia.edu/NiamhAnnKelly

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2367-7765

Email: niamhann.kelly@TUDublin.ie

Phone: +35312205892