About

Page updated 6|05| 2026

Ciarán Walsh set up curator.ie in 2010 and works from his home in Ballyheigue, County Kerry.

A graduate of NCAD (1984), he completed a PhD (Anthropology) in 2020 and resumed work as a freelance curator and writer.

He currently working on a number of  curatorial projects on a freelance basis, including an international review of the photographic work oh John Joh in association with Adrian Dixon and Natasha Serne of the Royal Dublin Society and a consortium of other individuals and organisations.

Recent curatorial projects include Curator of Film and Digital Media at Kerry Writers’ Museum, a post funded by the Heritage Council (2024-206), archivist/curator in Donegal County Council Archives Service (2022) and The Bolex Boys exhibition at Kerry Writers’ Museum (2023).

Between 2012 and 2023 he worked with Marie Coyne, Director of Inishbofin Heritage Museum, on the return and burial of the ‘stolen skulls of Inishbofin’, the remains of thirteen ancestors stolen in 1890 and held in the Anatomy Museum in TCD since 1892. The campaign is one of three stars featured in Dearcán Media’s feature Iarsmaí (Remnants).

Berghahn Books (New York, Oxford) published Alfred Cort Haddon, A Very English Savage in October 2023. Walsh co-curated the Haddon and the Aran Islands exhibition in the Royal Anthropological Institute to set the scene for the book launch and to exhibit – for the first time ever – photographs featured in the book alongside photographs that put these in context. The exhibition ran from November 2023 until February 2024.

 

positive scan of black and white pinhole photograph (12 second exposure) showing a curator Ciarán Walsh standing against the wall of Kerry Writers' Museum with St John.s Theatre and Culture Centre - a repurposed church - in the background. The photo was taken through the aperture of a camera obscura using photographic paper wrapped around the inside of a cylindrical coffee tin hence the extreme curve or fisheye effect. Taken during a two-day workshop led by Cork-based artist Harry Moore as part of an analogue mini-fest Ciarán Walsh curated during Heritage Week 2025.