Ursula Burke (b. Ireland)
Ursula Burke is an Irish artist who grew up in the Republic of Ireland and later lived in post-conflict Northern Ireland and uses this experience of living as a part of two cultures as a starting point to develop a dynamic practice that reflects on aesthetics and ethics of different cultures. Her work incorporates porcelain sculpture, soft sculpture, embroidery, and drawing, to investigate identity politics of historical and colonial eras ranging from tradition to modernity. Burke explores precarity in the social realm, power relations in the political arena, and post-conflict histories relative to Northern Ireland. Her work creates a conceptual bridge between antiquity and the contemporary, mining art historical tropes of representation and display. Mediated through craft-based processes re-configured in a fine art context, her approach destabilises conventions around traditional techniques of making by using unexpected juxtapositions of materials, processes, and images with a desire that bends towards the surreal.

Rita Duffy (b. Northern Ireland)
Born in Belfast, Rita Duffy attended the Art and Design Centre and the University of Ulster. Her art is often autobiographical, and reflects on Irish identity, history and politics. Duffy was awarded the Gold Medal, Royal Ulster Academy of Arts in 2006. Her work is held in public collections including the Arts Council of Northern Ireland; Ulster Museum, Belfast; Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; The Drawing Museum, New York; and the Office of Public Works, Dublin.

Encompassing themes and images of Irish identity, history, and politics, Rita Duffy’s work is often both personal and autobiographical. In her work, she often pays homage to the language of magic realism. Duffy received her BA at the Art and Design Centre and her MA in Fine Art at the University of Ulster. She is an Honorary Member of the Royal Society of Ulster Architects (RSUA), and she was awarded the Gold Medal, Royal Ulster Academy of Arts in 2006. Her work can be found in many collections including; Arts Council of Northern Ireland; Ulster Museum, Belfast; Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; The Drawing Museum, New York; and the Office of Public Works, Dublin. A member of Aosdána, Duffy has previously been Artist-in-Residence at Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Institute (Trinity College Dublin) and held a Leverhulme Fellowship with the Transitional Justice Institute (Ulster University) to look at the role that visual art has in post-conflict societies.

Alán Carrasco (b. Spain)
Alán Carrasco is a visual artist and holds an international PhD in History and Theory of the Arts from the University of Barcelona. In his thesis, he analyzes the concepts of iconoclasm, symbolic organization of the public space and collective memory as reflected in socio-political events ranging from 1949 to 1991 in East Germany. His artistic production is conceptually intertwined with this theoretical research. In recent years, he has created a body of work focused on the mechanisms by which official stories are constructed, with a particular focus on some of their strategies of narration, such as selective inducement of memory and forgetting, and even more specifically on the function of iconoclasm within this particular technology of power. He is especially interested in the margins of historical accounts, and in analyzing the reasons why some aspects and participants were systematically eliminated from these accounts. In more recent projects, he has also worked with aspects of what he calls possibilities of history, that is, events the authenticity of which we cannot be sure about, but which are nevertheless plausible. Represented by ADN Galeria, Barcelona (ES).

Annie Fletcher, Director, IMMA
Previously she was Chief Curator at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and a tutor at de Appel, Amsterdam, the Dutch Art Institute (DAI) and the Design Academy Eindhoven. She was co-founder and co-director of the rolling curatorial platform If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution with Frederique Bergholtz and Tanja Elstgeest (2005-10). In 2012, she was Curator of Ireland’s Contemporary Art biennale EVA International and is regularly called upon to sit on International juries, including the 2019 Preis der Nationalgalerie, Berlin; the 2016 Irish Pavilion at Venice; the 2015 Köler Prize, Estonia; the 2014 Turner Prize, UK; the 2013 Leopold Bloom Art Award, Hungary; and the 2011 BC21 Art Award, Austria.

Mary Cremin, Head of Programming, IMMA
Previously Director of Void Gallery, Derry since 2017, where she has supported artists to produce and present ground-breaking new works, including commissioning the artist Helen Cammock’s Turner Prize winning film The Long Note. Cremin was the Commissioner and Curator of the Irish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale with artist Eva Rothchild in 2019. Working with organisations such as the Afghan Visual Arts & History Collective and Beirut Art Residency, her programme focuses on revealing new narratives and histories that address and challenge the disparities that exist within Western culture, acting as a curatorial corrective. Her areas of research are embedded in ecology, ethics and is informed by politically and socially engaged practice.

Johanne Mullan, Curator of Collections, IMMA
Recent curatorial projects include Patricia Hurl: Irish Gothic (2022); Protest and Conflict: The Narrow Gate of the Here and Now (2021-‘22); From the Edge to the Centre: IMMA Archive: 1990s (2020); Gaze, IMMA Collection: Freud Project (2018-2019); and Willie Doherty, Remains, Art Sonje Center, Seoul, Korea (2017). She was Chair of IMMA’s Self Determination Programme as part of the Decade of Centenaries and lead curator of commissioned works for the exhibition Self-Determination, A Global Perspective (2023-24). Her research interests include the potential of exploring collections and archives for overlooked or untold stories in contemporary art. She produced a number of artist curated exhibitions such as The Ethics of Scrutiny: Curated by Daphne Wright (2018) and Trove, Dorothy Cross Selects from the National Collections (2015).
Member of the Board of Directors, Member of the Irish Art Research Collections Network, Northern Irish Art Network, Chair of the CNCI Cataloguing and Digitisation Committee and member of Inspiring Ireland CNCI digitisation initiative.