Seán Hillen (b. 1961, Newry) is an Irish artist based in Dublin whose work spans photography and traditional paper photomontage, often using humour and surreal juxtapositions to address difficult political and cultural themes. He studied at Belfast College of Art before moving to London, where he completed further studies in Media/Fine Art at the London College of Printing and at the Slade School of Fine Art. He lived and worked in London from 1980 to 1992.

Hillen grew up in a working‑class Catholic estate in Newry during the Troubles, surrounded by the conflicting forces of the predominantly Protestant RUC and UDR, the British Army, and the Provisional IRA emerging from within his own community. Arrested at 15 for throwing stones at soldiers, he experienced the conflict’s dangers directly. His later move to London gave him a new, surreal distance from his hometown—an experience he would later describe through the punning duality of “LondoNewry.”

Returning to Northern Ireland in the 1980s, Hillen photographed Republican funerals, riots, Orange marches, religious processions, and other charged public events in Newry, Belfast, and Derry. He soon began incorporating his own documentary photographs into photomontages, combining them with imagery from religious pamphlets, London postcards, and commercial packaging. This approach shaped early series such as Newry Gagarin and LondoNewry. As critic Mic Moroney observed, Hillen’s photomontage—like that of John Heartfield—allowed him to subvert images of power while expressing the contradictory, overlapping realities of Northern Ireland, using absurdism as a form of psychic protection amid pervasive violence and paranoia.

After relocating to Ireland in the early 1990s, Hillen developed IRELANTIS, a visionary and gently post‑apocalyptic series of photomontages based largely on the hyperreal postcards of John Hinde. Launched with an opening speech by Seamus Heaney and published in 1999 with an introduction by Fintan O’Toole, the series has since become part of Ireland’s visual culture. A selection was exhibited at the National Photographic Archive during PhotoIreland Festival 2012.

In 2011, the National Library of Ireland Photographic Archive acquired 530 negatives and scans of Hillen’s Troubles‑era photographs, now held permanently as The Seán Hillen Collection. His work appears in major public and private collections, including the Imperial War Museum, London, and the National Gallery of Ireland. He has received several awards, and images of his work have appeared on more than 40 book and magazine covers, including the cover of Fionna Barber’s Art in Ireland since 1910 (2013).

A full‑length documentary on his life, Tomorrow is Saturday, first broadcast in Ireland in 2021, won the Irish Doc Fest Audience Choice Award and the Royal Television Society’s Factual Programme of the Year. It was released on Netflix Europe in December 2022.