2026 National Arts in Education Portal Day – Panel Announced

Our 11th annual National Arts in Education Portal Day will take place on Saturday, 7 November at East Quad, TU Dublin, in partnership with TU Dublin School of Art and Design.

Bookings open on 7 October.

This year’s event exploring the theme The Future is Creative: Why arts and creativity in education matter more than ever, features a panel discussion, plus multiple creative workshops and presentations.

The Arts in Education Portal are excited to announce the following panelists.

Arts in Education Portal Day Panel Chair:

Phil Kingston

Phil Kingston is the Community and Education Manager at the Abbey Theatre, where he leads the development and delivery of participation, applied-drama and education programmes for schools, communities and young people. His work includes producing plays and workshops for primary and secondary schools as well as long term projects with community groups like BeLonG To, the SAOL Project and IPAS Centres.

He also works with the RCPI training doctors, and with St James’s supporting carers. He serves on the Advisory Panel for the Arts in Education Portal, the editorial committee of Youth Theatre Ireland and the Learning and Engagement group of the CNCI. Before moving into arts education, Phil worked as an actor, playwright, television scriptwriter and dramaturge.

Arts in Education Portal Day Panelists

Jo Mangan

Jo Mangan is Director and CEO of The Performance Corporation, makers of theatre, opera, festivals and immersive work in Extended Reality. Work includes the Fedora Digital Prize for the VR Opera Out of the Ordinary (Irish National Opera) and the live mixed reality project We Who Live Under Heaven at Kilkenny Arts Festival and Nemo Biennale, Paris. She founded The SPACE Programme, Ireland’s longest running international artists residency, focused on arts and immersive technology. A keynote speaker on AI and creativity, she has presented at SXSW in Austin, and sits on the boards of The Gate Theatre and the International Network for Contemporary Performing Arts.

Nathan Geszczak

Nathan is a seventeen year old with a strong passion for the arts, particularly performance art and music, but art as a whole nonetheless. He has been involved in his local theatre, performing and creating art, for years and is very passionate about issues that affect young people. He has been on panels for the Ombudsman for Children and used to be a member of Comhairle na nÓg, and is a big advocate for correct AI usage and bringing awareness to its risks.

Kate O’Shea

Kate O’Shea is a socially engaged artist working across printmaking, archiving, installation, performance, and publishing, with an emphasis on collaboration and building networks of solidarity. In 2026, she presented Mycelium at VISUAL Carlow, an immersive installation bringing together textiles, sculpture, sound and artist-made books, marking a significant point in her long-term project Mycelium: An Archive of Archives and Archivists. In 2025, she undertook a residency exchange between Irish Museum of Modern Art and Fremantle Arts Centre, on Whadjuk Noongar Boodjar Country in Walyalup, Western Australia, developing JUMP CUTS with artist-architect Aideen O’Donovan. She is co-founder of transdisciplinary collective Broken Fields, Durty Books publishing house and mobile printmaking device FieldPress.

Suzanne Little

Suzanne Little is professor in the School of Computing at Dublin City University and an SFI Principal Investigator at the Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics working in the area of media analytics, information access and retrieval across a variety of application domains. She completed her PhD at the University of Queensland, Australia in 2006 examining and developing tools for analysing and managing scientific multimedia data. She has worked on a number of EU projects in the areas of multimedia, technology enhanced education, security, autonomous vehicles and big data. Prof. Little is co-director of the SFI Centre for Research Training in Artificial Intelligence (CRT-AI) and a Funded Investigator in the iForm Advanced Manufacturing Centre. Her expertise is in video analysis, semantic search and data integration and current research includes projects examining bias in deep learning models for computer vision, safety in micromobility and personal transportation, improved medical image analysis, biomedical data and water desalination.

Bookings for this year’s Portal Day open 7 October

See the round-up on last year’s Portal Day here

Listen to our podcast series from last year’s portal day here on ACAST, or here on Sporify