Ciarán Walsh set up curator.ie in 2010 as a vehicle for innovative curatorial projects with a strong public engagement component and a collaborative ethos.

He is currently working as Curator of Film and Digital Media at Kerry Writers’ Museum on the management of film, analogue and digital heritage assets at a local level. The Heritage Council funds the project, which currently focusses on the digitisation and archiving of three important collections – Jimmy Deenihan / North Kerry Literary Trust, Leo Finucane and Tony Fitzmaurice. This includes a strategic partnership with Kerry Education and Training Board and a bold initiative in the area of archival and curatorial training.

Major research projects include Alfred Cort Haddon, A Very English Savage (Berghahn Books, 2023), a groundbreaking reassessment of the work of the Anglo-Irish ethnologist and an investigation of the relation between power and knowledge production in colonial and contemporary contexts.

A spin off from this project is work on the extraordinary photo-ethnographic work of Andrew Francis Dixon (1868-1936). He assembled a deceptively modest-looking album of photographs he took with in the Aran Islands in 1890. Walsh discovered the negatives in 2014 and these constitute the core of the story told in A Very English Savage. Adrian Dixon, A.F.’s grandnephew donated the album to UCC Special Collections after A Very English Savage went to  print. Before that, Walsh presumed that the album had been lost. It is one of the most important photographic collections to come into the public domain in recent years.

From 2012 to 2023, Walsh ‘curated’ the return and burial of human remains from TCD’s Anatomy Museum in partnership with Marie Coyne of Inishbofin Heritage Museum. TCD resisted determinedly before returning half of the collection in 2023. Dearcán Media featured the campaign as one of three stories in Iarsmaí (Remnants): exploring how museums and institutions in Ireland are ‘decolonising’ their historical collections.