Meet our 2022 Judges!
We're delighted to welcome our 2022 Dublin Fringe Festival awards judges to this year's proceedings!
Every year, Dublin Fringe Festival selects a panel of experts from Irish cultural life to become Fringe Award Judges. They are tasked with choosing nominees and recipients for the prestigious awards. Dublin Fringe Awards recognise, reward and celebrate the talent on display at our festival each year.
Ali Hardiman is an actor and writer from Dublin. She will next appear as Bethany-May in upcoming BBC3 series WRECK. Other recent acting credits include CHRISTMAS AT CASTLE HART (Hallmark), WALLED CITY PASSION (RTÉ/BBC) and BLASTS FROM THE PAST S2 (RTÉ).
As a writer, Ali currently has three TV projects in development with three of Ireland’s leading production companies, Treasure Entertainment, ShinAwiL, Blinder Films as well as RTÉ. Her play ELECTRIC is also currently in development for a feature film adaptation with Treasure Entertainment and Screen Ireland.
Amanda Adé is a digital creator, podcast host and activist from Kildare. She is also the Creative Director of a community organisation, named Black and Irish. After completing her studies in Analytical Chemistry, Amanda’s passion for creating change led her transition into the world of activism and social justice issues. In her free time, she enjoys writing and performing spoken word poetry.
Amy Conroy is an actor, playwright, and theatre maker. Her first radio play, Hold This, was recorded and broadcast on RTÉ Radio One in September 2010. Her first stage play, I ♥ Alice ♥ I, won the Fishamble Award for New Writing in the 2010 Dublin Fringe Festival and has enjoyed sold out runs in the Dublin Theatre Festival, the Peacock stage of the Abbey Theatre Dublin, and has toured extensively worldwide. It is published by Oberon.
Her second show, Eternal Rising of the Sun, won the Best Female Performer Award when it premiered at Dublin Fringe Festival 2011. The show enjoyed successful runs in the Dublin Theatre Festival 2012, Fringe World in Perth, Australia, and a staged reading in Sydney Theatre Company. In September 2013, Amy and her company HotForTheatre presented Break, which combined spoken word, music and text in Dublin Fringe Festival. Luck Just Kissed You Hello premiered at the Galway International Arts Festival in 2015, concluded a sell out run for the Dublin Theatre Festival later the same year, it was nominated for Best New Play in the Irish Times Theatre Awards 2016 toured nationally and was recently restaged in The Peacock. Her most recent play, The Boy Who Talked to Dogs, a commission by Australian theatre company Slingsby, premiered at the Adelaide Theatre Festival 2021 and is currently on tour in Australia.
Amy has performed in countless production over the years, including Citysong, directed by Caitriona McLaughlin (Abbey Theatre and Soho Theatre, London), for which she was nominated as Best Supporting Actress in the Irish Times Theatre Awards 2019, Holding – ITV, and Every Brilliant Thing, directed by Andrea Ainsworth (Peacock/ National Tour).
She directed Me Sara (Priming the Canon) for the Abbey Theatre, which played in the Peacock and toured nationally, Looking Deadly (Dublin Fringe Festival – national tour), Here and Now by Veronica Dyas, and Sham (Gúna Núa) in the Belltable.
Cathal Cleary is a theatre director from Roscommon who has worked extensively across Ireland and the UK. He has directed for companies such as Druid, the Young Vic and The Abbey. Since 2017 he directed ten productions, including six new plays which have won multiple awards including two Stewart Parker Awards, an Irish Times Irish Theatre Award, Dublin Fringe Award, Vault Festival Award and Papatango New Writing Prize. In 2014 he took residency at the Donmar Warehouse as Trainee Artistic Director. He was selected as the JMK Director's Award Winner in 2011 for which he directed Enda Walsh's Disco Pigs at the Young Vic.
Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan is a Dublin-based writer, performer, and cultural consultant from India. Her work has been published by Dedalus Press, UCD Press, Lifeboat Press, Poetry Ireland, Honest Ulsterman, and Banshee, amongst others. Chandrika has been selected for the Irish Writers Centre’s XBorders programme twice, and in 2021 was a Poetry Ireland’s Introductions poet and a Science Gallery Dublin’s Rapid Residency Artist. Chandrika was editor of Poetry Ireland’s Trumpet issue 9, is book reviewer for Children’s Books Ireland’s Inis magazine, and is on the Board of the Irish Writers Centre. She also has worked in arts management for over a decade, which included three years with Fishamble: The New Play Company.
Born in Lagos, Nigeria, Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi is a writer, performer and arts facilitator. She is a commissioned poet on the Poetry as Commemoration project run by the Irish Poetry Reading Archive in UCD under the Decade of Centenaries 2012-2023 programme. Her poetry film was screened in the ongoing Words at Wilton Park programme and was among the official selection of the 2022 Bloomsday Film Festival. She was selected for the Screen Ireland 2021 X-Pollinator Programme to support the planning and development of her short film. Her short story (published in The Art of the Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories anthology, edited by Sinéad Gleeson) was long-listed for the 2020 An Post Short Story of the Year Award. She is co-editor of Writing Home: The ‘New Irish’ Poets anthology (Dedalus Press, 2019). She is working on her debut poetry pamphlet. Find her on Instagram/Twitter @AmadiEnyi.
Emily Aoibheann is an artist, aerialist, director and mentor. Her varied background leads to creative, collaborative and original integration of multiple art forms, realised with a broad artistic and technical team. She uses aerial dance and circus arts as tools to explore ideas of all kinds: philosophical, social, ecological, historical, magical. Emily Aoibheann's recent work concerns bodies without context and 'dances of dissolution'; transience and trace making; the heart and spine; embeddedness, dwelling and death; experimental writing and music. She is founder of the Experimental Circus Award, currently in its first year, which promotes intellectually engaged and unconventional circus practice in Ireland.
Dublin Fringe Festival has been a key platform for Emily Aoibheann's work, including Sorry Gold (2019), Judge's Choice winner Object Piggy (2015) and as part of PaperDolls Performance Company with BUNK (2013), the Spirit of the Fringe winning Constellations (2012) and Paperdolls (2011).
Eve D'Alton has been working in Technical Theatre for 18 years across Ireland and the UK. After training at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, Eve found herself specialising in lighting working mostly as a Chief Electrician and Lighting Programmer. Before leaving the UK, Eve worked as Deputy Technical Manager of Soho Theatre on such shows as Silently (Fishamble-Olivier Award winner) and Fleabag (DryWrite - Olivier Nominated).
Since returning home, Eve has been Head of Lighting at The Lir Academy, Trinity College Dublin. She has also had the pleasure of working as a freelance Technical and Production Manager for companies such as Dublin Fringe Festival, Liz Roche Company and ThisIsPopBaby.
Jack Colley, a.k.a Baliboc, is a DJ and club promoter with nearly a decade of experience in the Irish underground music community. He is most notable for co-founding Club Comfort, alongside Roo Honeychild and Cian Murphy (DJ Selky). Club Comfort has blazed a trail in the Irish club scene, providing a liberated space to experience the cutting edge of dance and experimental music since 2017. Club Comfort was awarded the Radical Spirit Award for Comfort Carnival at the 2019 Dublin Fringe Festival.
Jack has since began working with NOISE Music, a collective of musicians providing free workshops and mentoring in DJing, music production and songwriting for young people in the south county Dublin area. He has also recently undertaken a BA in Visual Culture at the National College of Art & Design.
As Arts Programme Lead at Business to Arts / Fundit.ie, Michelle Reid develops and delivers the Arts Affiliate Programme which supports over 140 cultural organisations and artists to build capacity and to foster creative partnerships with businesses. Over the past five years, she's also managed Fundit.ie, the all-Ireland crowdfunding platform for creative projects. As well as driving the platform's strategy, she's moderated and supported 100s of project creators throughout their crowdfunding campaigns. Before coming to the arts, she managed international events in Europe and the Middle East.
Pea Dineen is a playwright, theatre maker and performer from Dublin. Her debut play White enjoyed a sold out run at the Dublin Fringe Festival 2018, where she was later awarded a place on the Dublin Fringe artist residency programme. Since, Pea has worked as a dramaturg and playwriting mentor throughout Ireland. She is the programme leader and mentor on the Transforming Stages development programme with Outburst Queer Arts Festival, an initiative aimed at nurturing early career trans and non-binary theatre makers. Currently, Pea is working on a loosely autobiographical narrative cabaret show centred around her experiences as an Irish trans woman, in collaboration with director Ronan Phelan and supported by the Arts Council of Ireland. Elsewhere, Pea is co-founder, co-host and general showgirl at Dublin's most happening queer cabaret night EGG.
PJ Kirby is a queer multidisciplinary creative from Cork City. As a professional dancer PJ has worked with the likes of Calvin Harris, Anne-Marie, David Guetta, Stormzy, Rag’n’Bone Man and Camelphat. He's also choreographed for both established and upcoming artists such as Wolf Alice, Level 3 and Blinkie. As a presenter he co-hosts I’m Grand Mam, a podcast which has dominated the comedy charts in Ireland since its inception. The I'm Grand Mam duo have also co-wrote sold out live shows which toured across the UK and Ireland. Queer issues are very close to PJ's heart and this year he managed to raise over €21,000 for LGBT Ireland to help combat hate crime in Ireland. As a writer PJ won a Gold Anthem Award at the Webbys for the 2021 Rapunzel commercial he wrote for Amazon Prime. He is currently based in Dublin where he is working on his next project.
Rachel Ní Bhraonáin is an artist making multidisciplinary shows and short films from her hometown of Waterford. With storytelling at its core, her work combines dance, writing, sound and sometimes aerial, to create visually exciting and emotionally honest work. Her interdisciplinary approach comes from her varied background as a performer on stage, on screen and on the sides of buildings. She is the 2022 recipient of the SEVN Bursary and is developing a new show for 2023.
Shane Daniel Byrne is a writer, actor, MC and award winning stand-up comedian. He sold out his first solo show Shane Daniel Byrne LIVE in Dublin’s Liberty Hall Theatre. 2022 has seen him headlining some of the big comedy clubs in Dublin as well as special guest spots on Tony Cantwell’s National Tour and even supporting one his comedy heros David O’ Doherty.
He has performed at clubs all over as well as major festivals including The Cat Laughs (2019,2021,2022), Vodafone Comedy Festival (2019), Paddy Power Comedy Festival (2022), Body & Soul, Otherside, Electric Picnic and Love Sensation.
For RTÉ, he hosted Love Bites in 2022 and Queer History School in 2021. In 2020 he appeared on Reeling In The Fears in a sketch he wrote with Joanne McNally. For Virgin Media, he was a guest on The Six O’ Clock Show and Ireland AM.
As an MC he hosted the Dublin Pride Stage at Mother Pride Block Party, co-hosted the Irish Times Theatre Awards 2022 with actress, Lockdown Lols for GCN Magazine and The Pride Takeover on DubX Radio. He has also hosted events for Yelp.ie, Nine Crows, Dublin Youth Theatre, Bulmers Light and West Coast Cooler.
Stephen Quinn is an award-winning theatre and performance maker, whose work explores the meanings of Irish queerness through a kaleidoscope of music theatre; drag; burlesque, physical theatre, and alternative cabaret. Recent credits include "Shame // Less" (Galway Film Fleadh, 2022; GAZE International LGBTQ+ Film Festival, 2021); Anu Productions "Faultline" (Dublin Theatre Festival/Gate Theatre, 2019); "Overfired" (winner of the Outburst Queer Fringe Award at Dublin Fringe, 2018), MacArthur Fellow Taylor Mac's "A 24 Decade History of Popular Music: The First Act" (London International Festival of Theatre 2018, Barbican Theatre) and Zoe Ni Riordan’s "Recovery" at Project Arts Centre (2016/17; winner of the Romilly Masters Performance Award from the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris, 2017). In 2023, Stephen will appear in a major new work from acclaimed queer performance artist Taylor Mac entitled "Bark of Millions," which will receive its initial premiere in NYC before embarking on an international tour. Stephen is also the co-creative director/host of the acclaimed, Dublin-based queer performance event SPICEBAG, where he perform as his alter ego: Stefan Fae. See www.stephenquinn.org for more details.