GAEILGE

NEWSLETTER SIGN UP


Find out about policy updates, current events, projects, funding and CPD opportunities, both locally and nationally.


Deirdre O’Reilly


Black and white photo of Deirdre O'Reilly Visual Artist with Creativity in the Classroom, arts in education programme

Deirdre O’Reilly is a Dublin‑based visual artist working across sculptural forms in clay and printing on porcelain. Alongside her studio practice, she has spent more than twenty‑five years deeply engaged in arts in education, working as a visiting artist with Creativity in the Classroom and as an arts facilitator with Draíocht Arts Centre. Her focus has consistently centred on children’s art, creative play, and accessible, hands‑on approaches to making. Collaboration, material exploration, and the belief that creative experience is essential to how young people learn underpin all of her work with schools and community groups.

O’Reilly has also completed several Per Cent for Art commissions for schools and community spaces, developing these projects in close collaboration with children. These commissions have allowed her to bring her studio practice and her educational ethos together, creating artworks that reflect collective authorship and the imaginative capacity of young makers.

Her artistic work has been exhibited widely and is held in public collections. She has shown at the Royal Ulster Academy Annual Exhibition at the Royal Ulster Museum in Belfast in both 2023 and 2024. In 2022 she received the Irish Ceramics Award, and in 2021 she was awarded an Agility Award from the Arts Council of Ireland. That same year, her large‑scale outdoor installation at Sculpture in Context at the National Botanic Gardens received a Distinction and won the Public Vote Award for Most Popular Outdoor Sculpture.

Her work is featured in the latest edition of Irish Ceramics. A graduate of NCAD, she is also a ceramics tutor at the National College of Art and Design.

Creativity in the Classroom is an artist – teacher collaborative programme involving five primary schools in Dublin 8 and 12. Established in 1997, this innovative school-based arts programme was set up in the belief that the arts could actively and positively support the emotional and social wellbeing of the children in the area. The programme was a recipient of a Portal Documentation Award in 2025.