Student Forum 2026

Rofaida AlQaisi

Rofaida AlQaisi is a Palestinian artist from Gaza and a Master’s student in Digital Art and Intermedia Practices at Trinity College Dublin. Her practice is rooted in memory and place, often focusing on everyday and historical spaces in Gaza that she reconstructs through digital drawing. Her work is calm and detail-oriented, shaped by slow processes such as mandala and dot art, allowing space for reflection and care.

Alongside her artistic practice, she works as a freelance designer. She is interested in how galleries function as shared spaces for conversation, and how artistic communities can hold memory and collective experience with sensitivity.

Working from the concepts of memories in objects, landscapes, and materials, Gillian works with the visual representation of absence. Having learned Gyotaku printmaking, Gillian is exploring new techniques in printmaking to achieve textural and elemental realism.

Her multidisciplinary practice in making, programming and creative production gives her a close understanding of artistic processes and supports her collaborations with artists and institutions. Through her practice, she designs experiences where every moment feels singular, complete and exists only there and then.

Deva Cervera

Deva Cervera (she/her) is a Spanish sculptor based in Dublin. Her work explores the emotional and psychological complexity of the human being through sculptures in plaster and clay, fragile and organic materials that reveal states of vulnerability, memory and inner reflection. Her process is intuitive and materialistic, giving form to delicate compositions that seem suspended between the physical and the emotional. She has developed an intimate and poetic visual language that connects the tangible with the invisible.

She has exhibited in How We See, DIVA Gallery (2022) and in Mud Between the Toes, Pallas Projects/Studios (2025). She currently works as an artist assistant in Connections Arts Centre and is beginning her studies in Art Therapy.

Padraig Dennan

Páddy Dennan (they/them) is an emerging visual artist, technician, facilitator and creative programmer based in Cork city. Their artistic focus revolves predominantly around our increasingly augmented reality, specifically through a queer lens. Predominant mediums in Páddy’s practice include plaster carving, drawing, wood work and interactive creative programming.

They graduated from Limerick School of Art and Design, in Sculpture and Combined Media, and currently a member and studio-holder at Sample Studios, Cork. They have exhibited nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at: Ormston House, Limerick; Sailors Home, Limerick; Clancy Quay Studios, Dublin; Outset, Galway; and PADA, Portugal.

Aoife Dunne

Aoife Dunne [she/her] is an artist from Abbeyleix, Co. Laois. A recent graduate of Sculpture & Combined Media from the Limerick School of Art and Design, her work is multidisciplinary, spanning sculpture, installation, publication, drawing, cartography, walking, photography and sound. She is interested in the relationships between the body, the self, and the lived environment.

Led by embodied and practice-based research, Aoife’s interest stem from her lived experience as an autistic woman in a disabled body. Aoife creates objects, installations, and narratives which interrogate conventions of identity and embodiment. She is particularly interested in models and frameworks of understanding disability, and the cognitive mapping process involved in transversing the built environment.

In 2025, Aoife was awarded the TUS RISE Undergraduate Scholarship from the Technological University of the Shannon for the completion of a research project exploring disabled women’s access to public space. Aoife has also worked with EVA, Ireland’s Contemporary Art Biennial, as part of their Visitor Engagement Team. In 2026, she was awarded a Percent for Art Commission for the TUS Athlone Mary Ward Centre for Science. Also in 2026, she was longlisted for the RDS Visual Art Awards, and shortlisted for the SpaceCraft Limerick Graduate Residency Award.

Sarah Edwards

Sarah Edwards is a Dublin-based creative technologist exploring how digital tools can transform public spaces. They use code to create playful, interactive experiences that inspire deeper connections to art and culture.

With a background in media theory and game design, Sarah reimagines how we engage with the spaces of tomorrow by expanding our understanding of technology today. Sarah has a Masters in Digital Arts and Intermedia Practices from Trinity College Dublin.

Sean Farrell

Sean Farrell (he/him) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Dublin. Implementing an expanded painting practice, he examines themes such as human psychology, the object, and memory. A central aspect to Sean’s practice is how colour can affect the perception of the viewer. Recently, Sean has been using photography to document aesthetic phenomena found in the urban environment.

Sean’s abstract paintings often take the form of wooden constructions. These “Constructs” are a departure from the flat painted surface and arose through an effort to answer one key question: How can colour materially reach towards the viewer? The Constructs are realised as several distinct series’, such as the Cut-out series which translates the flat forms of a painting into three dimensions.

In 2023, Sean completed a study exchange at HDK Valand, Gothenburg, Sweden. In June 2024, he graduated with a bachelors in Fine Art at IADT Dun Laoghaire and was long-listed for the RDS Visual Art Awards. Exhibition highlights include Encounters with Failure at South Tipperary Art Centre 2025, RHA Annual Exhibition 2025, Elastic Traces at Gislaved Konsthall, Sweden 2023. His work is included in the OPW State Art Collection and the DLR County Council Collection.

Jack Galligan

Jack Galligan (he/him) is an artist in his final year of study in Sculpture and Expanded Practice at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD), Dublin. Through sculpture, performance and video, he examines performativity, intimate experiences and the ironic realities of life both online and offline.

His work draws from the aesthetics and cultures of the internet, using mobile technologies, ready-made objects and performative intervention to interrogate how young people relate to each other and communicate in a contemporary context. He is currently interested in the relationship between spectator and performer, and challenging this relationship in public space, exhibition space and on the internet.

Recent exhibitions include SOD SCRAPER (2025) at NCAD Gallery, Commoning Knowledge: NCAD FIELD(2025) as part of NCAD works 2025, and the Academy for Fine Arts Leipzig Rundgang (2025).

Alba Molina

Alba Molina (she/her) is a creative producer and artist based in Dublin. Her multidisciplinary practice engages sonology, spatiality and urbanism, working through themes of commoning, togetherness and collective learning.

Her work is concerned with the relationship between sound, acoustics and space, and with listening as a political and relational act. She explores how sonic experience shapes our understanding of the built environment and how collective listening can function as a form of care, repair and resistance. Through soundwalks, radio, field recording and immersive interventions, she examines the intersections between the self, the city and shared social worlds. Her research-led practice spans photography, video and sound, alongside curatorial and production methodologies that foreground collaboration and experimentation.

She volunteers with ddr. and is part of the Dublin Modular team curating exhibitions, performances and site-responsive events across Dublin. In 2025, she led the curatorial direction of Alternating Current under the theme Urban Scores, informed by the writings of Elena Biserna on walking and listening. Invited through the Erasmus+ programme to Budapest for radioradioradio, she curated and led a collective soundwalk designed to attune participants to the city through deep listening.

Her recent residencies includes participation in the Seydisfrjodur Community Radio seminar with ICRN x LungA School, and a short residency at Kunst Raum Mitte – Autumn School, researching the cultural fabric of Berlin’s Mitte district through urbanism and artistic practices. Alba is currently part of the M.Phil Digital Arts and Intermedia Practices.

Emma Murphy

Emma Murphy (they/them) is a Dublin-based artist and musician whose interdisciplinary practice explores club culture, identity, community spaces, and digital world-building. Their work engages emerging digital technologies to build layered, narrative-driven pieces, while working across illustration, 2D and 3D animation, as well as combining photography, live-action video, and sound. They are a graduate of the National Film School at IADT with a BA (Hons) in Animation and are currently undertaking an M.Phil in Digital Arts and Intermedia Practice at Trinity College Dublin.

Emma is also a co-founder of HONEYPOT, a club night and community for queer women, which platforms female, trans, and non-binary artists through regular club events, workshops, screenings, and lineup curation.

Berenice Guerrero Pattugalan

Her study in aesthetics gives her further insight into the theory and value of artistic experiences. She continues to develop her artistic practice in digital media and video, alongside her writing

James Wellwood

James Wellwood (he/him) is a visual artist based between Kilkenny and Galway. His practice functions as a document of everyday experiences and his immediate surroundings, with a particular focus on rural spaces.

Working across painting, drawing, and sculptural processes, the work begins with walking and observation. It is often informed by the concept of ‘soft fascination,’ enabling James him to gather source material while attuning his attention to his environment. Spaces that carry emotional or formative significance become the basis for exploring themes of memory, isolation, and spatial perception, examining how place is experienced both physically and psychologically.

In 2024, he graduated with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art (Painting) from Limerick School of Art and Design and was long-listed for the 2024 RDS Visual Art Awards. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at The Hunt Museum and Ormston House, Limerick; Outset Gallery, Galway; GOMA, Waterford; and iP12 House, Chania, Crete.

In 2025, he undertook a three-month residency with Breaking the Patterns in Chania, Crete. He was awarded a Kilkenny Arts Office Arts Act Grant, followed by the Artlinks Bursary Award in 2026. He is currently an Orbital member at Engage Art Studios, Galway.

Dylan Yearsley

Dylan Yearsley (he/they) is a writer, curator and cultural producer based in Dublin. Currently in their final year of Visual Culture at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD), Dylan’s research interests include post-colonial memory, digital queer futurism, and gallery spatial practice.

He is currently involved in a number of projects as a researcher and producer, including an analysis of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) as a post-colonial institution and how its programme responds to the building’s past. He is also involved in a publication on decolonising natural histories in conjunction with the National Museum of Ireland – Natural History’s Dead Zoo Lab.

Dylan is currently engaged in an ongoing research project on Epistemic Belonging in conjunction with NCAD and the Higher Education Authority, analysing the impact assessment can have on one’s feelings of place in third level art and design institutions.

In the last year, they have acted as a curator for the group exhibition “Better Than Ambrosia” in collaboration with Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology (IADT) 3rd Year Fine Art students in March 2025. As part of Dublin Digital Radio’s pride broadcast “Queering the Airwaves”, he presented his research on queer digital futurism and transhumanism through his show “Queer Cyborgs”.