The School Management Team of the TUDublin School of Art and Design.
Head of School
John Walsh is Head of School and Lecturer in Product and Furniture Design at TU Dublin School Art and Design. He is founder of TU Dublin CreateLAB, an applied design research lab which supports industry and entrepreneurs in the development of new products and creation of Intellectual Property through Innovation Vouchers, Innovation Partnerships, Collaborative Research Agreements etc. John has been responsible for attracting almost €500k in external and research funding and is the Principal Investigator on Craft 4.0 a €316k Erasmus+ project which will investigate how new technologies such as 3D printing can enhance the Craft Sector.
John has 18 years of design industry experience working primarily in the area of Product and Furniture design. He has designed multiple products which have have generated in excess of €40m in sales and his office furniture has been chosen by clients such as Google, Microsoft, British Telecom, O2, the BBC, Lloyds, British Airways for major installations. John's products have won several international design awards, including the FX Design Award 2008, Triflow Future Talents Award 2009, Lotus Prize 2014 and Institute of Designers in Ireland Awards in 2007, 2009, 2011 and 2014.
John is a Past President (2012) and Fellow of the Institute of Designers in Ireland and is a regular Juror at the iF (International Forum) Product Design Awards in Hamburg.
John’s areas of expertise and research interests include general product/ industrial design, design for manufacture, human factors/ user centred design, prototyping, workplace design, commercial furniture design. He has a degree in Materials Technology, a Masters in Design and a Postgraduate Diploma in Sustainable Design Innovation.
Email: john.walsh@TUDublin.ie
Phone: +35312205871
Head of Design, Assistant Head of the School
Barry Sheehan is Head of Design and Assistant Head at the TU Dublin School of Art and Design.
He is a dissertation supervisor on the Masters in Professional Design Programme and is a guest lecturer and critic at many of design courses throughout Ireland.
He has judged many design competitions and awards including the James Dyson awards, the Bombay Sapphire Glass design awards, Institute of Designers in Ireland Graduate Design Awards, the Institute of Creative Advertising and Design awards as well as the Art Directors Club of Europe awards. In 2012 and 2013 he was a judge in the creative section of the Undergraduate Awards of Ireland.
Prior to joining TU Dublin, Barry has been the principal of award winning design practices in Dublin. An architect by profession, Barry has been involved in the design of numerous projects from architecture and interior design through to graphics, multimedia and product design. Prior to setting up in private practice, Barry worked in the United Kingdom on master planning projects, most notably the Cardiff Bay Inner Harbour regeneration. The work of Sharc Design and Sheehan Architects has appeared in several magazines and newspapers as well as on Television. has lectured on his work including to the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), and Design Shannon amongst others. He is a regular commentator on design matters in the national media He maintains close links to Industry, particularly with Dyson..
Barry is actively involved in numerous design organisations. He is a former President of the Institute of Designers in Ireland and Vice Chairman of Design Ireland. He has been keenly involved in Dublin’s bid for World Design Capital and is a Pivot Dublin partner. He is Past President of the Rockwell College Past Pupils Union and former President of Little League Baseball Ireland.
Email: barry.sheehan@TUDublin.ie
Phone: +35312205870
Head of Art and Visual Culture
Niamh Ann Kelly is Head of Art and Visual Culture at the TU Dublin School of Art and Design. She is an art writer, researcher, and art historian and a Director of the Irish Heritage Trust. For more than 20 years, she has lectured in Visual Culture across art and design BA and MA programmes and supervises PhD research. She has developed many industry links with the cultural sector at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
Her research interests centre on interrogating postcolonial conditionings of material and visual heritage. This includes issues of ethical spectatorship and the potential of visual, material, and spatial culture for enabling historical understanding across museum collections, art practices and heritage landscapes.
She has published monographs including Imaging the Great Irish Famine: Representing Dispossession in Visual Culture (2020, Bloomsbury Academic); many chapters in academic books on commemorative visual cultures and; has contributed to contemporary art and heritage publications, including Art Monthly, The Irish Review, Museum Ireland, and Source Photographic Review, and to radio arts programmes on BBC 4, RTE 1 and Lyric FM. She has written research essays for art catalogues and museum publications and delivered public workshops, lectures, talks and acted as chair for arts and heritage events.
Before joining TU Dublin, Niamh Ann lectured at the National College of Art and Design Dublin (NCAD) and Institute of Art, Design and Technology (IADT) and worked in the education department at the National Museum of Ireland. A graduate of NCAD (with Joint Honours BA Degree in Painting and the History of Art, 1997, and MA Degree in the History of Art, 1999), she has a PhD, cum laude, from the University of Amsterdam (2010) where she studied at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis.
Research Interests
Contemporary art
Histories and theories of art
Commemorative visual cultures, including monuments, museums and heritage practices
Cultural heritage, collections and archival strategies
Museum studies and exhibition histories
Current PhD supervision
Sean Kissane: Patrick Hennessy’s Queer Art 1937 – 1980: Navigating the Closet.
Harriet Wheelock: The Royal College of Physicians of Ireland’s Collections:
From museum for the profession to museum of the profession.
John Beattie: Reconstructing Mondrian - Piet Mondrian’s Paris Studio (1921-1936), Reconstructed (1994), Re-interpreted (2023).
Deirdre Ring Maher: Towards a methodology for documenting Ireland's visual,
graphic heritage of vernacular shopfront lettering: A case study of Kilkenny Signwriting.
Colm Murray: Histories of Grangegorman Site and Society, 1770 – 2012.
Past PhD Supervision
Dr Benjamin Jye O’Sullivan: El Centro de Arte y Comunicación: A Methodology for Mapping Global Artistic Networks and Decentering Artistic Engagements with Cybernetics
Dr Tom Spalding: Intersections: Quotidian Design and Modernism(s) in Cork City, 1922-1969
Dr Siobhan Doyle: Heroic Death and Martyrdom as Narrative Devices in Centenary Exhibitions Commemorating the 1916 Rising
Academia Page: https://tudublin.academia.edu/NiamhAnnKelly
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2367-7765
Email: niamhann.kelly@TUDublin.ie
Phone: +35312205892