The Maxine Greene Gathering - Ireland

Sarah Beirne is Draíocht's Children & Youth Arts Officer since 2009. With a large population of young people in Dublin 15, Draíocht has a particular commitment to high quality arts provision for 0-18 year olds, across a variety of programmes since its inception in 2001, and the programme is informed by the Lundy Model of child participation. Recent large scale youth arts projects include 'The PlayGround Orchestra', which delivered a 29 piece live professional orchestra into 30 local primary schools, reaching 17,000 pupils. This was followed by a 'Live Theatre Tour', and a 'Live Dance Tour', bringing multi-genre newly commissioned programmes directly to young people in their school environment. Ongoing projects in Draíocht include the weekly Dublin 15 Youth Theatre classes, established in October 2011 for 14-18 year olds; and 'Create Dance' classes, established in 2013, a dance project for children with a variety of intellectual disabilities, aged 5-18 years; and an annual early years festival for children under 4 years called 'The Toddler Take Over', now in its 10th year. Draíocht launched 'Your Walls' in 2023, an art sharing project for local schools, using work from Draíocht's visual art collection, complemented with philosophy training for teachers and then a series of classroom-based workshops for children. Two brand new works have been commissioned in 2025 by artists Deirdre O'Reilly and Tom Climent, and these will be hung later this year. 2025 will also see the completion of the newly commissioned 'Dreamers Space' by artist Corina Askin, which includes a child-led visual and storytelling trail around the building. Previous to working in Draíocht, Sarah worked with children and young people in a social care setting with Extern Ireland.

Holly Fairbank is the co-founder and Executive Director of The Maxine Greene Institute for Aesthetic Education and Social Imagination. She teaches courses in Arts & Aesthetic Education at Hunter College (CUNY). She was a teaching artist and an Assistant Director at Lincoln Center Institute (LCI) from 1997-2010.

Executive Director, Fulbright Commission in Ireland

Katy Fitzpatrick is the Creative Ireland Creative Communities Engagement Officer for Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council. She has worked for 20 years in arts education, in particular in gallery education. Her main areas of interest are interdisciplinary, collaborative, and participatory art practices, with a breadth of experience in gallery outreach and community-based programming.

Amanda Nicole Gulla is a poet and an educator. She is Professor Emeritus of English Education at Lehman College, City University of New York where she taught for twenty years, guided by Maxine Greene’s philosophy of Aesthetic Education and the Social Imagination. She is the author of Inquiry Based Learning through the Arts for Teachers and Teacher Educators (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020) in addition to many other publications about aesthetic education, inquiry-based learning, and Ekphrastic poetry. She lives in the Catskill Mountains of New York State.

Dr. Carmel Hinchion is an Associate Professor in Education (Emeritus) in the University of Limerick. She taught on the Initial Teacher Education programmes at undergraduate and postgraduate level in the School of Education. Before working in UL Carmel was a secondary school teacher of English, History and Personal and Social Studies. She has been involved in curriculum change in English Pedagogy over many years.  Her doctoral study (2023) explores the experiences, identities, and pedagogical perspectives of student English Teachers. Carmel's areas of interest include English pedagogy, especially poetry pedagogy, imagination in teaching and learning, the arts in education and creative writing.

Colm Keegan is an award winning writer and poet from Dublin. He judges the Waterford Poetry Prize and was guest editor of Poetry Ireland Review in 2022. His debut collection “Don't Go There” was released to critical acclaim and his latest collection “Randomer” is available from Salmon poetry. In 2023 he developed Ireland Is, a spoken word roadshow with Poetry Ireland and Sofft Productions, which toured the island of Ireland.

His first full-length play “For Saoirse” was staged in Axis Theatre and shortlisted for the Fishamble New Writing award and his short play “Something Worth Saying,” commissioned for the Abbey Theatre and starring Owen O’ Roe, was called ‘exquisite and devastating’ by reviewer Emer O’ Kelly.

He has set up numerous creative writing projects for schools & organisations across the country including Writing Home, an initiative he developed in partnership with Kilkenny County Council, to support homeless service users through the pandemic, which won a LAMA award for best education initiative.

He was a co-founder of Lingo, Ireland’s first Spoken Word festival and has been awarded several residencies including the Maynooth University, Carlow College and the LexIcon, Ireland’s largest public library.

He also coordinates Deadly Poets Society, an exchange project between poets and academics in Ireland and Australia.

Dr Rachel Lenihan is an Assistant Professor in Teaching, Learning and Assessment in the School of Education at the University of Limerick. She teaches on Initial Teacher Education programmes at both undergraduate and post-graduate levels. Before joining UL in 2022, Rachel was a post primary teacher of English and History. She was seconded to the professional support services for teachers as an English Advisor with Junior Cycle for Teachers from 2016-2018. She continues to engage in work regarding curriculum reform in post-primary English. Rachel’s doctoral study, completed in 2019, examines teachers’ understandings of adolescent literacy in the post-primary setting. She continues to research in areas that include literacy, education policy, English pedagogy, Global Citizenship Education, assessment and reflective practice. 

Dr Kevin Mc Dermott is a writer and independent researcher. His research interests include dialogic and conversational pedagogy, and the pedagogy of creative writing for writers from marginalised communities. His research interests include dialogic and conversational pedagogy, and the pedagogy of creative writing. He is the author of six novels for young adults. His writing for radio includes plays, feature-length documentaries, essays and short stories. His poems and stories have been published in journals in Ireland, the UK, and the United States, and broadcast on RTE. He is an Arts Council Literature Bursary awardee, and a Fulbright-Creative Ireland Professional Fellowship Scholar.

Emer McGowan has 37 years professional experience in the Arts and Culture sector. Having first held the role of Draíocht’s Outreach/Education Officer, she was appointed Director in 2003. Draíocht, a multidisciplinary arts centre, located in Dublin 15, serves an immediate population of 130,000, and has a particular commitment to high quality arts provision for children and young people. Emer has a broad portfolio range with policy/strategy development, stakeholder management, multi disciplinary programming and collaboration with artists to develop high quality engagement projects across all disciplines, at the core. Her commitment to children/young people runs thoughout her career, having held a variety of roles such as administrator of the Dublin Youth Theatre and Dance Council of Ireland; Dublin Development Officer with the National Association for Youth Drama; General Manager of TEAM Educational Theatre Company; Arts Officer for City of Dublin Youth Service Board and Director of Baboró, International Arts Festival for Children.

Stephen M. Noonan is an educational administrator with The New York City Public Schools (NYCPS) and currently serving as a Leadership Coach in the Manhattan High School district. Prior to this, he was the founding principal of The Maxine Greene High School for Imaginative Inquiry (MGHS), at The Martin Luther King, Jr. Educational Campus in Manhattan. The school was created in 2004 through a partnership between Maxine Greene, NYCPS and Lincoln Center Education. In September 2024, MGHS was merged with another school at The MLK Campus. In March 2017, he was honored as “Irish Principal of the Year” by the Emerald Society of NYCPS.

Helen O’Donoghue is an educator, researcher, curator and artist based in Dublin. She was the inaugural Senior Curator and Head of Engagement & Learning Programmes, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, IMMA. In 2019/2020, Helen was a Fulbright Scholar at MoMA in NYC. Helen is a highly experienced curator and astute manager who developed a multi-faceted programme for IMMA's audiences, across all ages in formal and informal education, with communities of interest and general public from its inception in 1991 to 2022. Initially trained in Fine Art at the NCAD and working on experimental socially engaged arts projects for a decade before joining IMMA, Helen adopted a pioneering approach to breaking new ground in creating people-centred access programmes to the museum.
She has experience of working with partners from local community organisations to national and international collaborations exploring how art and artists can work with diverse communities. She has fostered relationships with national arts, education and community development organisations as well as many international collaborations e/g Socrates and Grundtvig E.U. Learning Partnerships and the TATE and MoMA.
She has presented her work at conferences, published in peer review publications and acted as external examiner to several courses at TUD (formerly DIT). She is currently a board member of the Butler Gallery, and formerly the Family Resource Centre, St Michael’s Estate, Inchicore, Dublin, a member of the Bealtaine (Age & Opportunity) advisory group and an expert for the editorial panel for EPALE, the Electronic Platform for Adult Learning in Europe (epale.ec.europa.eu).

Jane O’Hanlon was Head of Education with Poetry Ireland/Éigse Éireann for twenty-five years, developing and coordinating its suite of national education and outreach programmes. She holds MA’s in Women’s Studies and Children’s Literature and her doctoral research was on the unique character and affordances of arts learning within the formal education system. Her research interests include arts and aesthetic education and children’s literature, and she has presented widely on both. She is a member of the STEM Implementation Group and the convenor and chair of the STEAM Advisory Group to the Department of Education. She is president of IBBY Ireland, the Irish Section of the International Board on Books for Young People, and a member of the Executive Committee of IBBY International (www.ibby.org). She was a Fulbright Ireland Scholar for 2023/2024.

Susan Thomasson, dancer/educator/choreographer, has performed a wide range of modern dance styles, touring nationally and internationally in the dramatic work of dance pioneer Anna Sokolow and the abstract, gymnastic work of Pilobolus. She was among a founding group of teaching artists who developed the aesthetic education pedagogy and philosophy of Lincoln Center Institute, serving as a performer, teaching artist and consultant for LCI (now Education) in the development of its national affiliates. She is a lead teaching artist for the 92Y New York, NY City Center, the Joyce Theatre, and the New York and New Jersey arts councils, Susan is a curriculum writer and professional development leader for the NYC Department of Education. She conducts residencies nationally and is a faculty member in the dance graduate program of Hunter College. Susan’s choreography has been presented in numerous dance festivals in New York and across the country at colleges and universities. Susan is the recipient of choreographic fellowships from the New Jersey State Arts Council and has been honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the New York State Council Arts Council, as well as a New Jersey Governor’s Arts Award.

Deputy Executive Director & Awards Program Officer, Fulbright Commission in Ireland