RDS Art Awards 2025 Winners

Craft

Céline Traynor

Established Maker Award

Céline Traynor is a contemporary Irish jeweller whose designs in silver, gold and alternative materials reflect a love of pure shape and form, appealing to a minimalist aesthetic.

A graduate of the University of Ulster, she began as an apprentice jeweller before building an international reputation through exhibitions, commissions, and film work, including Game of Thrones and City of Ember. Now based in Belfast, Céline continues to create distinctive geometric pieces, teach and facilitate community art project.

Hugo Byrne

Emerging Maker Award

Hugo Byrne crafts culinary knives that balance artistry and function. Using gathered materials and traditional techniques, he creates blades that are a joy to use and beautiful to behold.

High-carbon steel develops a unique patina over time, telling the story of its relationship with the user. Paired with salvaged handle materials, each knife reflects a deep connection to the landscape and invites reflection on creativity, nourishment, sustainability, and our place in the world.

Jennifer Hickey

Established Maker Award

Jennifer Hickey is an Irish porcelain sculptor based on the west coast of Ireland.

A graduate of NCAD Dublin, her work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally. Drawn to porcelain’s delicate, ethereal qualities, she creates intricate sculptures from thousands of wafer-thin, hand-pierced pieces, each high-fired and sewn onto tulle.

Influenced by the rhythms of nature and the changing seasons, her slow, meditative process reflects themes of beauty, fragility, and connection to the natural world.

Mark Newman

Emerging Maker Award

Mark Newman combines traditional goldsmithing with digital design and neuroscience, informed by his experience of aphantasia.

Using “practical algorithms” and non-visual design methods, he creates structured pieces that reinterpret symbols of authority, such as signet rings. Crafted in 18ct gold with pixelated gemstones, his work critiques systems of power while embracing their historic materials. Exploring themes of hierarchy and identity, Mark transforms jewellery from adornment into a tool for curiosity and critical engagement.

Vinh Truong

Emerging Maker Award

Vinh Troung is a Dublin-based designer and ceramicist specialising in wheelthrown tableware that merges industrial design with a passion for clay.

His practice explores the intersection of digital fabrication and handcraft, combining CAD modelling and 3D prototyping with traditional throwing techniques for precision and tactile depth. Working mainly in stoneware and porcelain, Vinh creates minimalist, functional pieces and designs bespoke tools to refine his process. Influenced by diverse design disciplines, he aims to expand his practice through collaborative projects.

Lorna Donlon

Established Maker Award

Lorna Donlon, a Dublin-born tapestry artist, studied at NCAD and Edinburgh College of Art and spent 20 years creating commissioned rugs and carpets.

Since 2010, she has focused on tapestry weaving, attending summer schools in Tuscany and joining groups like Contemporary Tapestry Artists and Timelines. A UCD graduate in Cell and Molecular Biology (2020), she integrates science with art as UCD Artist in Residence. Winner of the Golden Fleece Award (2021), she now curates research-based projects, including the touring exhibition Cut From The Same Cloth.

Visual Arts

Billie Adele O'Regan

RHA Graduate Studio Award

Billie Adele O'Regan is a contemporary artist whose practice celebrates femininity while defiantly challenging patriarchal constraints. A graduate of MTU Crawford College of Art & Design, Cork, with a First Class Honours BA (Hons) in Fine Art, she creates paintings that explore the grotesque, the monstrous feminine, and the transgressive potential of the female body.

Influenced by the occult, sci-fi and horror aesthetics, and strange beauty contraptions from past and present, Billie constructs uncanny, suspended realities where amorphous female forms resist containment and confront systems of control. Her work satirises the chaotic and absurd nature of beauty as ritual, merging macabre humour, theatricality and visceral materiality to transform painting into a performative and alchemical act of becoming.

Grounded in the belief that the body inhabits the spirit, her practice engages in an alchemy of paint, flesh, spirit and lived experience, where paint itself becomes collaborator, a living, shapeshifting vessel of emotion, transformation and resistance. This work engages with and empathises with the monstrous, recognising it as a symbol of transmutable power, tenderness and survival. Through these materially charged worlds, Billie reimagines the grotesque as liberation itself: fluid, embodied and defiantly alive.

Charlie Dineen

RDS Graphic Studio Dublin Emerging Visiting Artist Award

Charlie Dineen is a Dublin-based artist and filmmaker working primarily with multi-format analogue photography and film. A graduate of Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology (IADT) with a First Class Honours BA (Hons) in Photography and Visual Media, his work spans abstract and conceptual approaches, including street photography, documentary, and self-portraiture.

In his final year at IADT, Charlie introduced moving image into his practice, culminating in the film The City Beneath Me, the centrepiece of his graduate exhibition. Recently, he has begun experimenting with Super 8 and 16mm film—an exploration that has opened an exciting new phase in his creative journey. Grounded in the tactile processes of analogue photography, Charlie’s evolving film work continues to reflect his enduring fascination with light, materiality, and the alchemy of image-making.

Clara McSweeney

RDS Taylor Art Trust Award 

Clara McSweeney is a first-class honours graduate of the MA in Art and Research Collaboration at Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design & Technology (IADT). During her master’s she was also the ARC-LAB Curatorial Scholar (2023–2025). Her scholarship concluded with the curation of a group exhibition titled Liquid Urbanisms at The LAB Gallery in March 2025.

Clara’s research informs both her curatorial and artistic practices, examining pressing social issues in Irish society, including the housing crisis, climate change, vacant properties, and injustices faced by women. Her current work focuses on the peculiarities of certain vacant spaces in Dublin, exploring dystopian futures shaped by environmental and social crises and the anthropomorphosis of inanimate objects.

Her process begins with research through observation, discussion, reading, and mapping, which informs layered historical, speculative, or fictional narratives. These narratives are realised through performance, sound, writing, speculative fiction, curation, and the activation of objects. Collaboration is central to her practice, and she frequently works with other artists and practitioners to develop projects into cohesive, critical explorations of contemporary social concerns.

Now Listen Closely, Fellow Humans, responds to the peculiarities of three distinct buildings located in Dublin City. She imagines the experience of vacancy from the perspective of these buildings. They have each confided to Clara their deepest fears, anxieties and confusions. Using these confessions she has scripted monologues and, with the help of voice actors, recorded them for a human audience. My Third floor speaks from the viewpoint of an ignored vacant space above a shop on Talbot Street. A New Urban Future is based on a building in the Docklands, set in a future where the climate crisis has intensified and flooding has occurred. Best to Last focuses on a state-of-the-art office block in Smithfield Square that has been left vacant for over a year.

You are now invited to eavesdrop on these confessions.

Lily Mannion

RDS Members' Art Fund Award

Lily Mannion is an Irish visual artist whose practice investigates the tensions between the natural world, systems of power, and human intervention. A graduate of ATU Galway with a First Class Honours BA (Hons.) in Contemporary Art. Her work examines spaces and phenomena that have been lost or altered through systems of exploitation, extraction and control.

Drawing on the legacies of industry, craft, trade, and labour, Lily explores networks of connectivity, seeking cohesion and order within the apparent chaos of the world. Her practice is driven by curiosity, often engaging with scientific and mathematical principles, while remaining attuned to the unknown, the potential, and the questions rather than definitive answers. Through her work, she interrogates the role of the individual within complex and uncertain systems, creating visual frameworks that help process, understand, and navigate the overwhelming forces that shape our environment and society.

Thaís Muiz

R. C. Lewis-Crosby Award & RDS Mason Hayes & Curran LLP Centre Culturel Residency Award

Thaís Muniz is a Brazilian-Irish visual artist and researcher whose multidisciplinary practice explores the intersections of inherited and acquired identities, memory, transit, and inward love. A graduate of Institute of Art, Design and Technology (IADT) with a Masters of Arts in Art + Research Collaboration (Grade: A), she works across sculpture, installation, performance, film, photography, and community-based workshops, engaging intimate communal learning processes and reimagining realities through refusal, dreaming, and personal magic.

Her work examines representations of “otherness” through notions of blackness and displacement in a postcolonial context, drawing on Black feminist theory, historical episodes, and embodied art-making. Central to her practice is the exploration of the ancestral significance of the head (Ori) in Afro-Atlantic societies, particularly through headwrapping as a system of non-verbal communication and cultural knowledge, which she activates in both tactile and performative ways. Through ongoing research projects such as New Atlantic Triangulations and Turbante-se, Thais creates participatory works that foster personal and collective healing, challenge canonical systems of representation, and open pathways for dialogue, reflection, and connection.

Vicky Ochala

RDS Taylor Art Trust Award 

Vicky Ochala is a contemporary artist whose practice merges the political and the personal through sculpture and film. A graduate of TU Dublin with a First Class Honours Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art, her work responds to her childhood home in a Polish housing block, where her grandparents still reside. She explores how socialist ideology shaped post-Communist brutalist architecture, while documenting the persistence of individuality within standardized spaces.

By incorporating materials and domestic elements sourced from her grandparents’ apartment, Vicky transforms familiar household objects through casting, screen printing, and structural deconstruction. These sculptural interventions evoke memory, scarcity, and the passage of time, reimagining the domestic as a site of quiet resistance and adaptation.

Her video “Chodź, opowiem ci coś / Come, let me tell you something” juxtaposes archival Communist propaganda with personal interviews and recordings, exposing the tension between state-imposed narratives and lived experience. Through these material and cinematic explorations, Vicky examines the fragility of political, architectural, and familial systems while honouring resilience, personalisation, and the intimate acts of survival embedded within working-class homes.

 

Music

Jane Sullivan

RDS Collins Memorial Performance Award & RDS Music Bursary 

Irish Oboist Jane Sullivan is a multiple solo prize winner and orchestral musician, she has just completed her Bachelor studies at the Royal College of Music London under the tutelage of Juliana Koch, John Roberts, and Olivier Stankiewicz, and at the Paris Conservatory (CNSMDP) with Jacques Tys where she studied on Erasmus+. Jane enjoys a varied performance career as a soloist and orchestral player. In February 2024 she gave her debut recital at Wigmore Hall (London) in collaboration with Irish Heritage. In June 2025 Jane was award the McCullough Cup and RTÉ Lyric fm award at Feis Ceoil.

Senan Sheridan

RDS Jago Award

Senan Sheridan is a 17-year-old pianist from Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is the current Northern Ireland Young Musician of the Year and recently won the John A. Pigott Memorial Cup, Anthony A. Glavin Trophy and Morris Grant Bursary at Ireland’s foremost music festival, Feis Ceoil. In 2024 Senan was the winner of the Glasgow International Youth Piano Competition. In the same year he won the Patricia Read Memorial Cup at Feis Ceoil and was shortlisted for the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition. Senan studies under Professor Anthony Byrne at the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin.