Staff
CEO
Deej Fabyc
I am a performance video and installation artist/curator based in Ireland since 2020, when I came to Tipperary starting Live Art Ireland in a large plantation house that was vacant for 12 years. I have been creating work globally for over 40 years. holding BFA from Southern Cross University, Australia, and MFA from the College of Fine Arts, UNSW Sydney. I have received grants from several organizations, including the Australia Council, the Arts Council of England, the Arts Council Ireland, recently, a Creative Ireland Project Award for Portach Promenade, a participatory grief walk and film. My work focuses on the psychological aspects of trauma in both personal and political contexts. My performance work involves mapping narratives related to neurodiversity, loss, mental health, and chronic illness. I have worked collaboratively and in a participatory manner since the 1980s. Additionally, I have taught performance and fine art in HE,the prison system, and community settings for 30 years
Access Admin Support
Joanna Ryan-Purcell
Joanna Ryan-Purcell is an artist, writer, performer and events manager. Her work is interdisciplinary. She wrote her own adaptation of the Children of Lir, an Irish myth, through prose poetry. She is currently performing this around Ireland to small audiences. She is also the founder and artistic director of the Blue Door Sessions, a creative platform for independent artists of all disciplines. Joanna is from and based in Cloughjordan, Co. Tipperary.
Associate Curator
Diana Bamimeke
Diana Bamimeke is an independent curator, art writer and transdisciplinary artist based in Dublin, Ireland. Their socially engaged practice spans text, exhibition-making, performance, pedagogy and other artistic interventions. Guided by critical and political frameworks—including Black feminist & queer thought, anti-colonialism, and anti-imperialism—Bamimeke strives to understand themselves and their world. Bamimeke’s work questions relations of power, negotiations of belonging, how people become political subjects and processes of abjectification. Their writing has been published by VISUAL Carlow, Visual Artists Ireland News Sheet, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Paper Visual Art and frieze; with a new solo performance/art action upcoming at Outburst Festival in November 2025.
Associate Curator
Rob La Frenais
Rob La Frenais is an experienced independent curator, writer and lecturer who has recently returned to art practice. He has been working as a curator since 1987, working internationally and creatively with artists entirely on original commissions. He believes in being directly engaged with the artist’s working process as far as possible, while actively widening the context within which the artist can work. He lives and works in France, where he has been a resident since 2018. He was born in the UK of French Anglo-Indian origin.In recent years he was visiting curator at the University of Texas at El Paso, USA where he curated amajor project by Tomas Saraceno, in 2015, visiting professor at Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore, visiting curator at FACT Liverpool, and National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art and curator of the 2016 residency programme at the Maison Des Arts Georges Pompidou, Cajarc, France. He writes for the UK journal Art Monthly, the French magazine makery.info and Artlink Australia. He undertook a HIAP/FRAME curatorial residency in 2018 and in 2019 was a Fellow at the Saari Residence, in Finland. After rethinking his artistic trajectory at these two residencies he is now taking part in artistic collaborations as well as curating and writing.
Previous Intern
Fanny Laurent
Fanny Laurent is a graphic designer from Paris. After school, she first did a media, print and graphic BTS in Toulon and then in 2021 she pursued with the National Art and Design degree with focus on graphics and visual identity at Olivier de Serres. In 2023 she did an internship as a communication officer at Le Consulat Voltaire Paris , an artist residence, with an artistic programme, and a cabaret and exhibition hall. Afterwards she went on with a civic service at the art and food center “Parti poétique/zone sensible” again as a communication officer and as a graphic designer assisting Olivier Darner, an artistic creator director, until November 2024. She also likes to explore different mediums like stained glass, intaglio engraving, linocut, plant coloring and film photography. To immerse herself in a residential art center and to improve her English she became an intern at Live Art Ireland in February 2025.
On her free time she works on magic healing cards for an oracle card deck.
Previous Access Support Consultant
Layla Tobin
Layla Tobin is a photographer from Thurles, Co. Tipperary. After finishing school, she went on to get her degree in business with Event Management and Public Relations at ATU, Galway. She was gifted a film camera in 2020 which coincided with a move to Lisbon, Portugal where she found her love for analog photography. Tobin has been residing in her hometown again for just over two years, where she is a staff member at The Source Arts Centre. She began working in Live Art Ireland in September, 2024. She has also been studying photography at LCFE, Limerick for two years. Tobin’s photographic work has featured in Petit Mort magazine and on the cover of The Holy Hour by Working Girls Press. She released a book ‘Her Sacred Touch’ in collaboration with artist Jennifer Ryan Kelly I. February 2025 Photo Holger Haase