Our Speakers

2025

Speaker Biographies

 

Jonathan C. Creasy is a writer, filmmaker and educator based in Ireland. He is the recent recipient of both Film and Literature Bursaries from the Arts Council of Ireland, an artist residency in the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris, and a Creative Fellowship from Harvard University. He is co-founder and director of Miracle Pictures, an Irish independent production company; and founder and publisher at Writing Ireland. He teaches on the faculty in UCD’s Mary Lavin Centre for Creative Writing.

Sr. Mary de Lourdes Fahy is both a published historian and a Sister of Mercy, presently living in Saint Vincent’s Community in the heart of Galway City. De Lourdes spent most of her life in Gort, Co. Galway, having come originally from near Kiltartan. Her rich teaching life there led her to appreciate the invaluable literary life of the area, and conduct thorough local research into the genealogy of the Irish diaspora and their links to local families. She also co-founded the Kiltartan Gregory Museum. De Lourdes’ book Many Leaves, One Root not only details the history of Kiltartan, Lady Gregory and Yeats, but is also a detailed catalogue of surnames per townland over the years. Frequently consulted by academics and writers world-wide, Sr. de Lourdes is also a pioneer of the Burren Lowlands and a vital cultural ambassador.

Cathy Leeney is adjunct Researcher in Theatre and Drama Studies at UCD School of English, Drama and Film. She lectured and supervised research at UCD for over twenty years and has published widely on women in Irish theatre, gender in performance and performance analysis. Recent work includes Analysing Gender in Performance, co-edited with Paul Halferty (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) and The Plays of Maura Laverty, co-edited with Deirdre McFeely (Liverpool University Press, 2023). After training in Directing for Theatre at the British Theatre Association in London, Cathy directed and assistant directed professionally in Dublin and Belfast. She co-founded (with Finola Cronin) the MA in Theatre Practice at UCD, now run in collaboration with Dublin’s Gaiety School of Acting.

Chris Morash is the Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing in Trinity College, Dublin. He has written histories of Irish theatre (2002) and Irish media (2009), as well as a study of Yeats’s theatre (2021). His most recent book is Dublin: A Writer’s City (2023). He is currently editing The Cambridge History of the Irish Novel, and completing a book on Irish literary salons. He curated the Unseen Plays series of audio plays for the Abbey Theatre in 2020, in which he included Lady Gregory’s The Image. He is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, a Fellow of TCD, and a board member of the Irish Theatre Institute.

James Pethica teaches Irish Studies, Drama and Modernism at Williams College. He is at work on the authorized biography of Lady Gregory for Oxford University Press, and on a volume of her selected letters. His most recent publication, Lady Gregory’s Shorter Writings, 1882-1900, was issued in the Coole Edition in 2023. Lady Gregory’s Shorter Writings, 1901-1931 is currently in press and will be issued in 2026.

Melissa Sihra is Associate Professor in Drama and Theatre at Trinity College Dublin. Her books include Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation (Palgrave Macmillan), The Dreaming Body: Contemporary Irish Theatre (Colin Smythe Ltd.) and Marina Carr; Pastures of the Unknown (Palgrave Macmillan). She is co-Series Editor, with Elaine Aston, of the Cambridge University Press Elements Monograph series ‘Women Theatre Makers.’ She was President of the Irish Society for Theatre Research (2011-15). Melissa teaches and researches in the fields of Irish Theatre, Feminist Historiography, gender and women in theatre history and performance. Currently writing a book on Lady Gregory, she is a Dramaturg and has worked at the Abbey Theatre and in the USA on productions of Irish plays. She teaches Playwriting at Trinity College.

Ella Swift Redding is a writer, filmmaker, and Lady Augusta Gregory researcher. After completing her Master’s thesis on Gregory at Trinity College Dublin, ever the adventurer, Ella shifted gears to explore the worlds of film, music and theater herself as a writer, director, producer, and actress. Swift Redding now specializes in the intersection of renegades, biography, memoir, and lived experience. Her next project focuses on Gregory’s unique journey to becoming a prolific best-selling author, theatre director, and acclaimed playwright. Ella is a founding member of the Augusta Gregory Adventure Club (AGAC) along with Adrian Paterson & Anna Pilz, and Lead Creatrix of the forthcoming LadyGregory.com project with her media company, Burly Mermaid.

 

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Previous speakers at the Autumn Gatherings:

Imelda May is an Irish singer, songwriter, television presenter and multi-instrumentalist.  Imelda recently hosted the documentary  Lilly and Lolly Yeats: The Forgotten Sisters. “I came across them in 2017 when working on my 3Arena show wanting to project onstage the names of exceptional people, especially largely forgotten exceptional Irish women, who contributed hugely to our culture in Ireland.”

Caitríona McLaughlin, Artistic Director, Abbey Theatre.  Caitríona was born in Donegal and studied science at the University of Ulster before moving into theatre. She was Associate Director at the Abbey Theatre from 2017-2020, where her productions included: The Great Hunger by Patrick Kavanagh (with Conall Morrison); Citysong by Dylan Coburn Gray (ITTA nomination Best New Play); On Raftery’s Hill by Marina Carr, (for which she won Best Director at the 2019 ITTA); and Two Pints by Roddy Doyle, which toured widely in Ireland and the USA. She also worked with theatre and opera companies on both sides of the border, including Wexford Opera, Hot for Theatre, INO, The Local Group, and Landmark, and she was the director on O’Casey in the Estate, a TV documentary shown on RTE. Prior to moving into directing, with Patrick McCabe’s Frank Pig Says Hello at the Finborough Theatre in London in 2003, Caitríona worked as a drama facilitator in Northern Ireland, working with young people and in conflict resolution. In London, she directed numerous productions, focusing primarily on new writing, and collaborated with the Royal Court in sourcing and developing a new theatre space. She was awarded a Clore Fellowship in 2007 and subsequently spent six summers with LAByrinth Theatre Company in New York developing new plays for Artistic Directors John Ortiz and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, at their Summer Intensive. During this time, Caitríona also directed a number of plays in New York including Killers and other Family (part of the OBIE award-winning Hilltown Plays) and plays at Atlantic Theatre, Rattlestick, and Bard Summerscape.

Jane Murray Brown is the great-granddaughter of Augusta Lady Gregory and the younger daughter of Catherine (“Nu”).  A resident of Crowborough in beautiful Ashdown Forest, Sussex (A. A. Milne and ‘Winnie the Pooh’ country), Jane and her family have highlighted the many connections between Coole Park, Thoor Ballylee, Mount Vernon, et al with nearby locations, e.g. Penns in the Rocks, where Yeats spent time after Lady Gregory’s death.  In sharing their personal recollections of their childhood, memorabilia and stories of Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats, Jane and her family have greatly enriched the Autumn Gatherings.

Anna O’Donnell has spent her career in the fields of history, the arts and community development. She began her own business as a Culinary Historian, demonstrating, lecturing and consulting for various organisations including “The Culinary Historians of Boston” and assisted academics at Harvard University. Anna also has a performance background; she toured in America with a historic theatre group, doing original plays based on period writings from the 18th and 19th century.  She has appeared on Good Morning America, the Today Show, and Evening Magazine, as well as doing several radio segments. Anna has been in plays that both toured Ireland and appeared in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Anna had a radio show called “The Culinary Muse”. She’s written various articles for newspaper and magazines, and has authored a poetry compendium and two books that are unpublished at this time.   Anna is passionate about community, social inclusion, sustainability, and the arts and culture. Anna was a member of the Burren Lowlands, and designed and delivered “The Flight of the Dishes”, a yearlong programme for Galway’s EU Region of Gastronomy in 2018. She was also instrumental in “Heart of Gort Festival” a ‘big ideas small town’ initiative for Galway 2020. Anna is currently the Chair of the Board of Directors of the Yeats Thoor Ballylee Society.

Cecily O’Neill works internationally with teachers, students, actors and playwrights and is author of a number of books on drama education, including Drama Worlds (1996) which was published in Complex Chinese in 2021. She has contributed to a number of Autumn Gatherings, most recently in 2019, with a talk on Lady Gregory in America. Founder and artistic director of 2TimeTheatre, a performance and publishing venture based in Winchester, her recent productions include Pies and Prejudice (2021) Lewd Women and Female Felons (2020), and Meeting Miss Austen (2019).

Adrian Paterson is Lecturer in English at the University of Galway, publishing widely on literature, music, art and technology from the eighteenth century to the present. President of Modernist Studies Ireland, and curator of the multimedia exhibition Yeats & the West, with Christine Reynier he is co-editor of two recent E-rea special issues on modernism, and with Charles I. Armstrong and Tom Walker co-editor of the newly-published The Edinburgh Companion to W.B. Yeats and the Arts (2024).

Katla Ársælsdóttir is a scholar and practitioner from Rejkyavik and holds a BA in Comparative Literature and a postgraduate diploma in Applied Gender Studies from the University of Iceland. She is interested in Irish and Icelandic women playwrights and feminist historiographies in theatre. Her research focuses on women’s experiences within theatre, recently submitting her Master’s thesis in Theatre and Performance studies from Trinity College Dublin where she focuses on the portrayals of women’s sexuality in selected plays by Marina Carr and Brian Friel.

Antonio Bibbò is a lecturer in English and Translation at the University of Trento (Italy). He has lectured at the universities of Genoa, L’Aquila, and Manchester. He was Honorary Research Fellow at Manchester and Visiting Research Fellow at the Moore Institute (National University of Ireland Galway). As a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow (2014-2017), Dr. Bibbò conducted a research project on the reception of Irish literature in Italy (1900-1950). As part of this research, he produced an online database of Irish literature translated into Italian (www.ltit.it), and curated the “Irish in Italy” exhibition (Rome 2016 and 2017; Cork 2019; Galway 2022), now online: https://minerva.manchester.ac.uk/irish-in-italy/. He has recently published a monograph titled Irish Literature in Italy in the Era of the World Wars (Palgrave). As a translator he has edited and translated works by Woolf, Defoe, Pound, Wilde and of Irish Folklore.

Angela Bourke previously a speaker at the Autumn Gathering and the Yeats Summer School, Sligo, is a leader in Irish Studies internationally, especially in the culture of the late 19th century, lament tradition, and storytelling. Best known of her books are The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story (1999), which won several awards, and her biography of the writer Maeve Brennan. She has published many academic articles, reviews and short stories in Irish and English and was joint editor of the Field Day Anthology, vols 4 & 5: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions (2002). A Member of the Royal Irish Academy Angela is full professor emerita at the UCD School of Irish, Celtic Studies and Irish Folklore, where she taught for many years.

Nora Grimes is a scholar, an artist, and an activist. She is a first year PhD candidate in Drama Studies at Trinity College Dublin, where she earned her MPhil in Theatre and Performance this past year. Her doctoral research focuses on Lady Augusta Gregory, the influential women playwrights at Ireland’s Abbey Theatre and their American counterparts of the Provincetown Players in the United States. Her major research interests are theatre history, feminism and gender in theatre, and performance as research, and she is dedicated to her practice through performance, directing, and technical theatre. She teaches Gender and Performance at Trinity College. Nora is planning to continue her work uncovering silenced histories in theatre while exploring the roles of myth and violence in historical and contemporary feminist theatre performance.

Ben Kennedy is the great grandson of Lady Gregory and the grandson of Robert Gregory. He finished his schooling at St. Columba’s College, Rathfarnham, Dublin in December 1959 and emigrated to the north east of Scotland in January 1960. Ben attended Aberdeen University School of Agriculture from 1962 – 1965 and since then has worked in the pig breeding and rearing industry in Denmark, England and Scotland. In 2012, he became a “retired swineherd”. Other than his family, Ben’s interest lies in Agricultural History, particularly the lot of the labourer up to W.W.1. Some say he was born with a wooded spoon in his mouth!

Viviane Monteiro, a Brazilian actor, writer, and director, is deeply intertwined with women’s rights activism. With a rich stage career under directors like Antunes Filho, Bete Coelho, and Adriana Pires, Viviane has portrayed characters from authors like Jean Luc Lagarce to Clarice Lispector, often assuming a producer’s role. Her work can be found on Sony Channel, HBO, and GloboPlay series. Currently, Viviane is immersed in scripting a fiction film and studying documentary writing and camera. Recently completing a master’s in Theatre and Performance from Trinity College Dublin under Melissa Sihra’s guidance, her research revolved around exploring facets of womanhood in some of Lady Gregory’s work.

Catherine Sheridan is a drama lecturer, facilitator, director, playwright, actor, producer, project manager, arts consultant, and mentor. For over two decades, Catherine has created, designed and implemented a wide range of Arts in Education programmes for both primary and secondary schools, as well as private facilitation work. Catherine is the National Trainer for Creative Clusters, Tutor & Facilitator of TAP+ and Blast, Creative Associate with Creative Schools works in various capacities for a number of national organisations and government agencies. Catherine is Artistic Director & founder of Roscommon County Youth Theatre. Catherine is also a former Lecturer in Drama Education at Mary Immaculate College, Ireland.

Catriona Yeats, daughter of Gráinne and Michael Yeats and grandchild of W. B. Yeats, has had a long and distinguished career as an orchestral harpist, soloist, chamber music performer and harp teacher. She has worked with the Boston and  Cincinnati Symphony Orchestras, was Principal Harp with the latter and returned to Europe some years ago to become Solo Harpist with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra. She has played under many of the world’s great conductors and  has been Harp Professor in Danish and Swedish Academies of Music. Catriona has always been a great ambassador for her memorable artistic family, travelling from her home in Copenhagen to grace many commemorative events.